“We are trying very hard to get the hostages out,” U.S. President Donald Trump told the press during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday.
“We’re looking at another ceasefire. We’ll see what happens. But we ... want to get the hostages out. Israeli people want the hostages out more than anything,” Trump said, adding that Netanyahu was working “very hard” toward that goal.
Referring to a meeting he held with former hostages in the Oval Office on March 5, Trump said he’d asked them if Hamas had shown any sign of human kindness, if they offered them extra food or told them that they would be OK.
“They said, “No, they didn’t do that. They’d slap us.’ The hatred is unbelievable,” he said.
“They lived in a pipe, not really a tunnel. It was a pipe. And they always thought they were suffocating. They were going to suffocate. And then they’d open up the pipe, and it was like three-and-a-half feet high. You know, we hear tunnels—bad—but pipes are worse,” the president said.
“They were amazing to me because they seemed to be pretty normal, not scarred. But I guarantee underneath, they have to be scarred,” Trump said.
“One was there for 356 days. Another was there for 180 days. ... These are people that have been really, really, horribly treated. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
Trump also expressed his surprise at how the parents of hostages who had died in captivity still talked about their children as if they were alive. “They said, ‘Sir, my son is dead. It is just as important to bring that body back home.’”
He noted that most of those in captivity are young, and yet only 24 of the 59 hostages are estimated to remain alive. He referred back to the three hostages, who emerged from captivity looking “exactly like the pictures that I saw from the 1940s, the concentration camps.”
“This is unbelievable. We’re going back into a chapter in history that is one of the worst ever,” he said.
Trump expressed shock at the time at the condition of Israeli hostages Or Levy, 34, Eli Sharabi, 52, and Ohad Ben Ami, 56, who were released after 491 days following their abduction during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Speaking aboard Air Force One on Feb. 9, Trump said of the three men, who were released a day earlier, that they “look like Holocaust survivors. They were in horrible condition—emaciated. It looked like something from many years ago.”
At some point, we are going to lose our patience with Hamas, he warned. “They [the hostages] look like they haven’t had a meal in a month. There’s no reason for that. I don’t know how much longer we can take it.”
