October 7th Attacks - Two Years Later

Fox News Radio's Jonathan Savage joins us to discuss the second anniversary of the Israel/Hamas war and where we stand with peace negotiations. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And this is West Michigan's Morning News. It's Steve Kelly,
Brett Kitta, and Lawrence Smith on the anniversary and peace talks.
Jonathan Savage with Fox News Radio in London this morning. Jonathan,
thanks for doing this today.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, good morning.

Speaker 1 (00:12):
Before we get to where we are today, we've got
to look back. It's the two year anniversary of these
deadly attacks. Talk to us a little bit about what,
especially in Israel, folks will remember forever.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, they call it Black Sabbath in Israel. Six twenty
nine in the morning was when the attack started, with
hundreds of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel, and
then thousands of Palestinians broke through the highly secured border fence.
At least that's what we thought. It was, stormed into
southern Israel, massacred around twelve hundred people, mostly civilians, and

(00:47):
took two hundred and fifty one hostage. There are still
we believe twenty hostage is still alive, the bodies of
twenty eight others in Gaza, and of course after October seventh,
twenty twenty three, Israel those military response where have destroyed
almost all of Gaza and killed more than sixty thousand Palestinians.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
It's awful to look back and to spend a lot
of time on this part of you know, at least
where we are now finally maybe getting to a solution,
but the treatment of those hostages and especially women, my gosh,
it's just hard to fathom.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, And the pain for the families back in Israel,
of course continues with every moment that their loved ones
or the remains of their loved ones are still in Gaza.
We have seen in stages the release of various hostages,
the majority of hostages over the past two years, and
many of them have spoken in really brutal terms about

(01:42):
the conditions in which they were kept. And then we've
seen the in many people's minds on edifying site of
hostages being paraded in public before being released, that of
course stirring up greater anger in Israel and around the world.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
So we've seen neighboring countries kind of try to work
on these negotiations.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
How successful do we think some potential talks in Egypt
will be. This is being seen as a real opportunity,
but it's an opportunity that both the Israelis and Hamas
need to choose to seize. They need to make a
choice here, and that's going to be, in fact, a
series of difficult choices they have to make. They have

(02:22):
agreed so far both sides that the hostages will be
released in exchange of Palestinian prisoners. They're trying to hammer
out the details of that today. But that's probably the
easiest thing to agree on at the future of the conflict,
that the scale of Israeli true withdrawal, the future of
Hamas and for the Palestinian people, these are much harder,
and these could take even longer to try to hammer out.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Appears as if Israel is on board President Trump's twenty
point plan. What are we hearing from Hamas.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
What we heard from Hamas last Friday was that they
were willing to release the hostages and they were willing
to hand over power in Gaza in terms of day
to day running to other Palestinians. But the other things
in the twenty point plan were glossed over and they
weren't really mentioned. For example, the key is really demand
that Hamas should disarm. Hamas has a time said they'd

(03:14):
be willing to hand over most of their heavy weapons,
but say that they need some weapons to defend themselves,
partly against what they believe to be in Israeli threat,
but also partly against Palestinians who are fed up with
decades of misrule by Hamas and.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
As Spock's News Radios. Jonathan Savage in London, thanks for
your time this morning.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Thank you,