 "Netanyahu wants control of 'all of Gaza' but doesn’t want to ‘keep it', receives backlash from all sides")
As the Gaza crisis continues to escalate, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stirred a storm after he said on Thursday that he wants to take control of “all of Gaza” but does not want to “keep it”. The premier maintained that while the Israelis intend to take military control of all of Gaza, it will eventually hand over the coastal enclave to Arab forces, who he claimed would be able to “govern properly”.
“We intend to,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News when asked if Israel would take control of the entire 26-mile strip. “We don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We don’t want to govern it. We don’t want to be there as a governing body," he clarified. The Israeli prime minister’s public remarks on the matter came as he prepares to sit down with the country’s security cabinet to discuss plans to expand Israeli military control in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir , has already rejected Netanyahu’s plans, insisting that such expansion would put the lives of hostages in Gaza in jeopardy.
‘Only way to ensure security’: Netanyahu
While pushing forth his argument, Netanyahu insisted that ordering troops into the remaining 25 per cent of the enclave not currently controlled by the IDF was the only way to ensure Israel’s security and finally wipe out Hamas . Meanwhile, the families of the hostages are also rejecting Netanyahu’s plan since the operation would involve fighting in a region where their loved ones are thought to be held captive.
A military source close to the matter told The Telegraph that if the scheme is accepted by Israel’s security cabinet on Thursday evening, it would ultimately extend the war in Gaza for at least five months. With this, the hopes for a ceasefire between the two nations die down once again.
Interestingly, Netanyahu’s plans for a future government in the coastal enclave might also receive opposition from ultra-nationalists in Israel, who favour removing Gazan civilians from the Strip and repopulating it with Jewish settlements. It is pertinent to note that with Operation Gideon’s Chariot, the IDF already controls 75 per cent of the Gaza Strip. However, the operation failed to eliminate Hamas.
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Meanwhile, a Hamas official said that the Palestinian militant group will treat any force formed to govern Gaza, per Benjamin Netanyahu’s suggestion, as an “occupying” force linked to Israel. While speaking to Al Jazeera Mubasher, Hamas operatives outrightly rejected Netanyahu’s plan.
A Jordanian official, meanwhile, has said Arabs “will only support what Palestinians agree and decide on” after the Israeli prime minister said he wanted to hand over Gaza to Arab forces that would govern the territory. “Security in Gaza must be done through legitimate Palestinian institutions,” a Jordanian official who asked to remain anonymous told Al Jazeera. “Arabs will not agree to Netanyahu’s policies nor clean his mess,” he added.
Apart from the army and the families of hostages, Netanyahu’s idea is facing challenges within Israel. The Israeli Kibbutz Nir Oz , which was ravaged during Hamas’s October 2023 attacks, has suspended a cornerstone-laying event in protest against the Israeli security cabinet meeting over Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to take control of all of Gaza.
The chairman of Kibbutz Nir Oz, near the Gaza border, urged the government to return the hostages as part of an agreement “even if the price is high”, and said the kibbutz understood the dangers of Hamas better than cabinet members, The Times of Israel reported.
Meanwhile, a latest poll in the country suggests most Israelis would prefer Netanyahu to sign a deal to release the hostages, even if it meant ending the war with Hamas without eliminating the group.
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