00:00Thank you, Prime Minister. Given what the IPC says is the unfolding specter of famine in the Gaza Strip, would you accept that your 11-week blockade, complete blockade on Gaza, played a role in that?
00:13And also, given the killings that we have seen at the GHF aid sites, how will you guarantee that that kind of disaster will not happen when you have a million more people displaced?
00:24Well, number one, the problem that we had was trying to stop Hamas looting. There's no question there was Hamas looting. Everybody saw it. You could see Hamas terrorists taking over trucks and so on.
00:41We tried to do two things simultaneously. Stop the trucks and bring in the trucks through the GHF distribution points.
00:49Okay. It wasn't successful. And it wasn't successful, among other things, because Hamas interdicted also the GHF program, the distribution points.
00:59So, Hamas created this problem and it was directed against us. Immediately, we have a starvation policy, which is completely false, any more than we have a genocide policy, which is equally false.
01:11We don't. We don't. Not this, not that. I don't know of a country that texts millions of messages to civilians to get out of harm's way, giving up the element of surprise or calling them individually on cell phones.
01:25Yet Israel is accused of genocide. It's absurd. Or starvation policy. But there was a problem of deprivation. No question about it.
01:32And so we had to solve it. And the way we solve it is the way I described it to you.
01:36And there are now not zero trucks, but at least in, I think last time I checked, hundreds of trucks that went into Gaza, that's alleviating the situation.
01:45Now we have to, we want to increase the number, the number of distribution sites.
01:50So there is not, basically, you answer this problem or you solve this problem by the law of supply and demand.
01:57If you have a lot of supply, if you flood Gaza with food, which some of it will be filtered, there's no way to get around that, will be looted by Hamas.
02:09But you'll have, if enough food reaches the marketplace, so to speak, then you'll see a difference.
02:15And you know what the difference is? How do we know for sure there's a difference?
02:20Because we monitor, as any one of you could, the price of food in Gaza. It's plummeted.
02:27It's plummeted ever, ever since that we decided to take the, to do the humanitarian surge.
02:33And it'll plummet more if other countries join us.
02:37So I called on other countries to join in the airdrops. I actually called them to help persuade the UN to move those trucks.
02:43Because every truck that goes in brings down the price of food. That's what happens.
02:49And when you have no, no shortage like that, then you don't have also the crowding around distribution points.
02:58And by the way, a lot of the firing was done by Hamas seeking to have response by our forces.
03:04And very often, they didn't. They held back. They stayed their fire. Even though their own lives were on the line.
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