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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“We were facing pressure to mitigate the fight and very soon stop the fight”.
He further noted that when the Biden administration threatened to impose an arms embargo on Israel over its incursion into Rafah in May 2024, he told former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “Tony, we will fight with our fingernails if we have to”.
He added that “assumptions that were broadcast around the world” that the offensive would result in a high civilian death toll were “proved to be wrong,” claiming falsely that almost no civilians were killed during the operation.
“We kept moving them out of harm’s way,” he said, alluding to the so-called “humanitarian zone” in al-Mawasi where Rafah residents were instructed to flee and that Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted throughout the war.
On 27 May 2024, Israeli forces launched a deadly attack on the Tel al-Sultan neighbourhood in northwestern Rafah, killing at least 45 people, including women, children and elderly people.
Thousands of people had been taking shelter in the targeted area after many fled other parts of Gaza, including eastern Rafah.
More than 52,314 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since October 2023, while at least 10,000 are missing and presumed dead under the rubble of destroyed buildings.
‘Deep state’
Netanyahu applauded US President Donald Trump’s calls to “just clean out Gaza” and to forcibly expel Palestinians from the enclave.
“Believe me, many of them want to leave,” he said.
Turning to the US-Iran nuclear talks, Netanyahu called for the total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, “anything short of that, could bring you the opposite results”.
He said he told Trump that “one way or the other, Iran will not have nuclear weapons”.
“We appreciate the help we’re getting from the United States, arms are flowing in, we share the same goals, but Iran will not have nuclear weapons”.
In his concluding comments, he said that Israel is facing “another front”, the “deep state,” claiming that in Israel it is “ocean deep” and “threatens democracy”.
“It abrogates the rights of citizens to choose their government that will make its own decisions, its own appointments,” he said, adding that it has to “obviously be resolved”.
He referred to a “systemic campaign” in the US, which “disseminates lies” about Israel and is “funded, organised by governments, by NGOs, that are also funded by very wealthy individuals”.
He also alleged that wealthy Americans “pay influencers to use social media in a very systemic way to attack the supporters of Israel”.
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