Israeli president demands return of hostages, safety guarantees to end war in Gaza

By Beyza Binnur Donmez

GENEVA (AA) — Israel's president on Thursday demanded the return of hostages held in the Gaza Strip and guarantees for the safety of Israelis to end Tel Aviv's attacks on the Palestinian enclave.

"In order to change the atmosphere, we need to get the hostages back. We need to prevent terror from re-occurring, and we should move on a trajectory of normalization in the region," Isaac Herzog said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"Israelis lost trust in the peace processes, because they could see that terror is glorified by our neighbors," Herzog said, adding that people in Israel want to know an attack similar to the Oct. 7 cross-border incursion by Palestinian group Hamas would not happen again.

He said Israel is not only fighting Hamas, and said this showed Iran is the source of "all evil."

"There is an empire of evil emanating out of Tehran that is spending billions of dollars on arms ... to derail the stability of the region and the world," he said. "And this needs to be addressed by a very strong coalition."

The president said Hamas needs to be uprooted to "enable a better future for the Palestinians."

Herzog claimed Israel is fighting a war for "whole world," and asserted that Europe and the US "would be the next target" if it were not for Tel Aviv.

He also lashed out against the ongoing genocide case brought against his country by South Africa at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, calling the lawsuit "outrageous."

On a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said Israelis' safety concerns must be dealt with first.

Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Oct. 7, killing at least 24,448 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 61,504 others, according to local health authorities.

Around 1,200 Israelis are believed to have been killed in the Hamas attack.

According to the UN, 85% of the population of Gaza is already internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure is damaged or destroyed.