JERUSALEM.- The prime minister of israel, Benjamin Netanyahuassured this Saturday that he will not allow the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which governs small parts of Occupied West Bankcontrol the Gaza Strip once Israeli troops eliminate the Hamas militant group.
“I will not make the mistake of allowing the PA to rule in Gazait’s going to be the same” as Hamas, the president said in a televised press conference, in which he advocated for “a new vision, a change” in the Palestinian enclave, which involves “Israeli security and control.”
“Are we going to reinstate the same entity in Gaza that has not been reformed? Is that what our best friends are advising us? I think differently,” he added.
The United States, Israel’s main partner and defender of the creation of a palestinian statehas advocated for unification of Gaza and the West Bank under PA government once the war ends, but Netanyahu rejects that possibility, arguing that the ANP and Hamas have in common “the ideology that denies the existence of Israel.”
The United States also joins an increasingly stronger international pressure for a ceasefire in the war against Hamas, which began on October 7. Since then, Israeli bombings have left thousands of Palestinians dead, injured and displaced in the Gaza Strip.
“We are certainly feeling international pressure, I won’t deny it, but since the war started I have created international space against this pressure, I talk to dozens of leaders every day (…) We don’t always agree, but at the end of the day “It is our war, we are the ones who decide,” Netanyahu stressed.
For the prime minister, the war waged by his troops “is justified” and should not stop until it achieves its three objectives: recovering all the hostages, destroying Hamas and ensuring that the Islamist group will not again be a threat to Israel.
“There is no way to achieve these objectives without winning and there is no way to win without a ground (military) presence,” he said.
The war broke out on October 7 after a Hamas attack that included the launching of thousands of rockets towards Israel and the infiltration of some 3,000 militiamen who killed some 1,200 people, according to Israel’s count, and kidnapped another 240 in Israeli villages (kibbutz) near the Strip.
Since then, Israeli forces maintained a relentless offensive by air, land and sea about the Palestinian enclave that has left more than 15 thousand dead, some 6 thousand people under the rubble and almost two million displaced people living in the middle of a serious humanitarian crisis
On Friday, Israel and Hamas broke a seven-day truce that had been negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, which included the release of 105 hostages kidnapped by the Islamist group in exchange for 240 Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails.
