Tel Aviv — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil late Tuesday at the Rabin Medical Center, just outside Tel Aviv, where the Israeli leader and his wife Sara visited newly-returned hostages and their families on their first full day back together.
Each of the former hostages described their experience in captivity to the prime minister, detailing long hours held underground with limited access to sunlight and scarce food.
Avinatan Or, who lost at least 60 pounds in Hamas captivity, was still relishing the embrace of his partner, another former hostage, Noa Argamani.
Netanyahu said he learned that, like many of the other former detainees, Or never lost hope.
“They believed that one way or the other, we’d get them out,” the Israeli leader told CBS News.
Now, the overriding question is whether this moment of hope for Israel and the region can last.
Israel is giving “peace a chance,” but the war is not over
President Trump has asserted repeatedly since helping to broker the ceasefire and hostage release agreement that took effect on Friday that the war is over. But it clearly is not.
Israeli troops are still deployed in more than half of Gaza, and in the rest of the decimated Palestinian territory, CBS News’ team in Gaza has seen Hamas back on the streets, still armed, and reportedly confronting rival groups — once again exerting its power.
Asked about those realities, Netanyahu told CBS News that his government had agreed “to give peace a chance.”
He noted that the conditions of President Trump’s 20-point peace plan “are very clear — it’s not only that we get the hostages out without getting our military out, but that we would subsequently have both demilitarization and disarmament. They’re not the same thing. First Hamas has to give up its arms. And second, you want to make sure that there are no weapons factories inside Gaza. There’s no smuggling of weapons into Gaza.
“We also agreed: Okay, let’s get the first part done. Now let’s give a chance to do the second part peacefully, which is my hope.”
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Netanyahu, in his wide-ranging interview with Dokoupil, said it was “always the responsibility of the leader of the Jewish state to make sure that the Jewish state is never imperiled with its very existence.”
In a U.S. poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in late September, only 35% of the respondents voiced a positive opinion of Israel’s government, down from 47% in 2022, before the war started. The survey also revealed a significant age gap in American support for the Trump administration’s provision of robust military aid to Israel amid the war, with those 65 and older being more than twice as likely as those under 30 (34% vs. 13%) to say the U.S. was providing “about the right amount of aid to Israel.”
Dokoupil asked Netanyahu whether it would be possible to fix such perceptions, and how.
“I think so,” the Israeli leader said. “I think the first fix is to finish the war as speedily as possible — something that I have sought to do against all this contrarian propaganda. Of course I want to end the war. Who wants it to continue? You know, I’ve been to war myself, I’ve been in battles … you have to be crazy to want wars to prolong.”
There are many challenges to meeting even that initial goal, as Hamas has thus far refused to completely disarm, the remains of at least 20 deceased Israeli hostages have yet to be returned, and Israel said Wednesday that it would limit the amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza — holding up key aspects of the first phase of Mr. Trump’s peace deal.
But what comes next is just as unclear.
Who will govern Gaza?
Dokoupil asked Netanyahu a question that Mr. Trump’s peace plan answered only vaguely: Who is going to govern Gaza if and when the war does end?
“The only names mentioned are Donald Trump and Tony Blair. Is Tony Blair going to be the president of Gaza?” asked Dokoupil, referring to the former British leader tapped by Mr. Trump to sit on a transitional “peace board” to help administer the enclave and its roughly 2 million inhabitants.
“I doubt it,” replied Netanyahu. “But I think that this is a transitional period and we want to fashion, you know, a governance that works — that is not made of people who are committed to our destruction. Because if we … if we put them there, then we just repeat it again and again and again. And we don’t want to have the October 7th massacre repeated.”
Netanyahu acknowledged that while many Gazans, including young men who’ve endured two years of brutal warfare, may want to continue fighting against Israel, “Gaza is not uniform.”
“There are Gazans who are fighting Hamas and are saying, ‘we don’t want this anymore … a lot of people in Gaza now know that Hamas has brought catastrophic consequences to them because of its fanaticism.”
“The most important thing in destroying fanaticism is to destroy a certain hope,” said Netanyahu. “The hope that the fanaticism will achieve its results. When people know Israel is here to stay, they’re not going to destroy the Jewish state.”
How best to achieve that ambition remains a topic of intense debate, however.
Netanyahu on the prospect of a two-state solution
The United Nations and many world leaders have long insisted that the only way to secure a lasting peace in the Middle East is to give the Palestinian people something they have not had since the creation of the modern state of Israel almost eight decades ago: An independent state of their own.
Global pressure has been building on Israel to accept the creation of a Palestinian state along its borders, a concept long referred to as the two-state solution.
But in recent years, Netanyahu’s government has rejected the notion — and the Trump administration has decisively dropped the U.S. government’s longstanding calls for Palestinian statehood.
“When I talked about it, it wasn’t the proposition that people give now,” Netanyahu told Dokoupil on Tuesday. “I assume, okay, they’re two sovereign states and a sovereign state has, for example, military power, it can make covenants … The Palestinians should have all the powers in a peaceful day to govern themselves, but they can’t have the powers to threaten our survival. That sovereign power of security must remain with Israel.”
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“Otherwise, the jihadists take over,” said Netanyahu. “Iran takes over immediately. And that’s what happened every time we vacated territory — the most extreme fanatics came in.”
He accepted that ceding some territory to Palestinian authorities, as Israel did in Gaza, did not equate to creating an independent state, but he said it was “perfectly aligned with the reality” of circumstances on the ground.
“It’s a reality that if you had Palestinian governance that stopped teaching their kids to destroy the state of Israel … obviously, if you have that, and they educate them for peace, then I think you can have a different reality,” said the Israeli leader, adding that it “could take generations” to get to that point.
And even if Israel does eventually deem Gaza’s leadership and population to be deradicalized, Netanyahu said it would still need to remain “in control of the military power to prevent our destruction.”
