Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel will have overall security responsibility over the Gaza Strip indefinitely after the end of the war against Hamas.
“I think Israel will have overall security responsibility indefinitely because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t have it. When we don’t have that security responsibility, what we have is an eruption of Hamas terror on a scale we couldn’t have imagined,” Netanyahu told ABC News.
It is not clear what Netanyahu has in mind regarding the degree of security responsibility.
His comments, in an interview with American media offered the clearest indication yet that Israel plans to maintain control over the territory that is home to some 2.3 million Palestinians.
Biden expressed his opposition to that scenario as well, warning that Israel is more likely to be stuck in Gaza if it does not begin to develop a plan to cede the Gaza Strip if it succeeds in defeating Hamas.
The statement followed comments by some Israeli officials who said that Israel must maintain a military presence inside Gaza to protect Israeli civilians.
“Well, there’ll be no cease-fire, general cease-fire, in Gaza without the release of our hostages,” Netanyahu responded. “As far as tactical little pauses, an hour here, an hour there. We’ve had them before, I suppose, will check the circumstances in order to enable goods, humanitarian goods to come in, or our hostages, individual hostages to leave. But I don’t think there’s going to be a general cease-fire.”
“For that purpose there would be a ceasefire, and we are waiting for that to happen. It has not happened so far,” he said.
The month-long conflict has killed more than 10,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. That number includes 4,104 children. In Israel, more than 1,400 people have died and 6,900 have been injured, the prime minister’s office has said.
