Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in remarks that aired Thursday night that his nation does not intend to occupy the Gaza Strip after the end of the war with terrorist organization Hamas, which currently governs the territory.
“We don’t seek to conquer Gaza, we don’t seek to occupy Gaza, and we don’t seek to govern Gaza,” Netanyahu said on “Special Report” with Bret Baier on Fox News. “We’ll have to find a government, a civilian government that will be there, but in the foreseeable future, we have to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
In an appearance on ABC News on Monday, however, Netayahu had suggested that Israel will need to claim operational control over Gaza for the foreseeable future so it can ensure that terrorism doesn’t threaten its existence again.
“I think Israel will, for an indefinite period, will have the overall security responsibility, because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t have it,” Netanyahu told the network. “When we don’t have that security responsibility, what we have is the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we couldn’t imagine.”
Since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, perpetrating the most brutal massacre against Jews since the Holocaust, Israel has committed to destroying the terrorist group. While progressive activists and politicians in the United States have demanded a cease-fire, Israel has refused to agree to a hiatus in hostilities until its enemy returns all hostages. Israel has said it believes that Hamas has about 240 civilians in its custody.
Israel has begun implementing daily four-hour pauses in its fighting with Hamas in northern Gaza to allow Palestinian civilians to flee south through an evacuation corridor it established, according to the White House. Israel Defense Forces spokesmen said that window had been extended to six hours and that 50,000 Palestinians had passed to the south on Wednesday and another 50,000 on Thursday, according to the Times of Israel.
In late October, Israel announced that it was launching the second phase of the war by rolling out a ground operation in Gaza. The first phase was marked by an aerial bombardment of Hamas infrastructure and other military measures. White House national security spokesman John Kirby told the press Tuesday that President Biden “maintains his position that reoccupation by Israeli forces is not the right thing to do” when it defeats Hamas.
Netanyahu also told Fox News on Thursday that he applauded Congress for voting to censure “Squad” member Representative Rashida Tlaib for continually calling for a cease-fire and promoting false narratives about Israel. Last month, Tlaib blamed Israel for bombing a Gaza hospital even after it was confirmed that the blast in the parking lot was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian militants.
“Representative Tlaib published on social media a video containing the phrase ‘from the river to the sea,’ which is widely recognized as a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” the resolution against Tlaib read. “[She] doubled down on this call to violence by falsely describing ‘from the river to the sea’ as ‘an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence’ despite it clearly entailing Israel’s destruction and denial of its fundamental right to exist.”
“This congresswoman is calling for . . . genocide, the elimination of the Jewish state, the one and only Jewish state of the Jewish people,” Netanyahu said on Fox.