hebrew → English transcript

We did not say we are stopping all entry of humanitarian aid.

We said we are focused only on stopping the trucks that Hamas seizes and basically takes the lion's share for itself,

takes for themselves, and then the leftovers, the leftovers, they sell at exorbitant prices to the Palestinian population.

And by doing so they recruit new terrorists, militants and say to a Palestinian woman,

You want this flour? Give me your son, age 15.

And that is how they sustain their war machine, and that is why we wanted to prevent it.

And we said we will prevent this and, at the same time, we will build the distribution points via the GHF,

the Gaza Humanitarian Fund of the Americans, who will distribute the food.

So we did not want to do a lot here; on the contrary, we wanted to bypass Hamas's looting and robbery.

Only it did not work as we wanted; it did not succeed because there were not enough points, etc.

Therefore we learned the lesson, we stopped it, and now we are operating in a different way,

Aid is coming in; we are doing our utmost to ensure that most of it does not end up in Hamas's hands.

And at the same time, we truly are increasing the number of distribution points and the secured routes.

And also the airdrops, airdrops that usually do not reach Hamas.

There is no starvation, there is no starvation. There was no starvation, and there wasn't--there was a shortage, and certainly there was no policy of starvation.

I just said at the press conference, if we had wanted starvation, if that had been our policy,

after these 2 million, they would not be alive today, after 20 months.

Same with genocide: if we had wanted to commit genocide, it would have taken exactly one afternoon.

There is no starvation, no policy of starvation; there was a shortage, and we need to stop that and we are doing it--that is exactly what we are doing.