Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured Monday night that his country will have “overall responsibility for security” in Gaza “for an indefinite period” once the fighting ends.
“We have seen what happens when we don’t have it,” added the president in an interview with the American news channel ABC News.
This is the first time Netanyahu has publicly shared his plans for the future of the Palestinian enclave following the war between Israel and Hamas.
“When we do not have that responsibility in terms of security, we have the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we cannot imagine,” the prime minister justified.
Netanyahu’s speech appears to contradict statements issued a month ago by his Defense Minister.
In mid-October, Yoav Gallant asserted that a key objective of the military campaign was to eliminate “Israel’s responsibility for life in the Gaza Strip” and establish a “new security reality for Israeli citizens.”
The United States has previously suggested that the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank, could take over Gaza.
But last week, a group of Arab officials dismissed US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s efforts to drum up regional support for the Palestinian Authority as premature.
Israel declared war on Hamas on October 7, after the group killed more than 1,400 people in an attack on Israeli territory.
Israel’s response has already killed more than 10,000 people in Gaza, through bombings and ground raids.
“People have hardened their hearts.”
Netanyahu also told ABC he would favor tactical pauses, especially to help free some of the 242 hostages held by Hamas, but rejected a broader ceasefire, which has been demanded by Arab leaders, the U.N. and other international organizations.
“Small tactical breaksan hour here, an hour there, we have had them before,” he explained.
“We will check the circumstances to allow goods, humanitarian aid to enter, or for our hostages to leave,” he added.
Israel has restricted the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Before the war, more than 400 trucks per day entered Gaza, now only a few dozen trucks manage to enter daily, which, according to international organizations, is worsening the humanitarian crisis.
At the same time, Israel has urged more than 1 million Gazans to leave the northern part of the enclave and seek refuge in the south.
But now even areas considered “safer” are being bombed, according to Jeremy Bowen, BBC international editor.
“Israel is using heavy bombs to destroy what it says are military targets, without worrying much about the fact that sometimes large numbers of civilians are killed at the same time,” Bowen says.
“In the area that the military has said is safest, which is the southern half of the Gaza Strip, they also do raids“he continues.
“There is now an environment in Israel in which people have considerably hardened their hearts to what is happening in Gaza.”
Israel withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2005 after 38 years there.
Palestinian municipal control and Israeli security?
Jeremy Bowen
International editor, reporting from southern Israel
It is difficult to define what exactly Netanyahu means when he says that Israel will have “responsibility for security” in Gaza for an “indefinite period.”
But it could be a type of occupation which does not include municipal responsibilities.
Responsibility for security is a phrase that Israel also uses in part of the West Bank, the other Palestinian territory.
Under the Oslo Accords – the first Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement of the 1990s – one of the areas agreed upon was that parts of the West Bank would come under Palestinian municipal control and Israeli security responsibility.
In other words, the Israelis would come and go as they pleased to enforce the law and maintain order, but the more mundane, everyday tasks such as collecting trash and running schools would be carried out by the Palestinians.
However, to achieve this, there must be an organization Palestinian who is willing to work with the Israelis.
After everything that has been happening, I think it is most likely that any Palestinian who tried to do that would be considered a collaborationist.
I think that while this might be a kind of vague aspiration for Israel, the fact is that they will find themselves in a very difficult position.
Now they are trapped in Gaza, they will have to deal with it and it will probably involve some kind of occupation.
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