Israel will maintain military control over Gaza, Netanyahu says

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel will maintain military control over Gaza and would bar the Palestinian Authority (PA) from governing the territory.

“Hamas will not be there. We’re not going to put the PA there - why replace one regime which is sworn to our destruction with another regime that is sworn to our destruction? We won’t do that,” he told a conference hosted by the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) in Jerusalem.

“Israel will in any case control the area militarily. We’re not going to succumb to any pressure not to do that,” he said.

He also criticised what he described as US efforts to halt an Israeli ground invasion into Gaza, saying that the Biden administration had urged him at the beginning of the war “Don’t go in. Don’t do the ground invasion. Do it from the air”.

“Against their better advice, we went in,” he said, adding that, when Israel did invade, “the propaganda war began to work against us”.

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