Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that Israel intends to take military control of all of Gaza, despite intensifying criticism at home and abroad over the devastating, almost two-year-old war in the Palestinian enclave.
“We intend to,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News when asked if Israel would take over the entire coastal territory. “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 said that Israel wanted to hand over the territory to Arab forces that would govern it.
Netanyahu made his comments to Fox News before the outcome of a meeting he was due to have on Thursday with a small group of senior ministers to discuss plans for the military to take control of more territory in Gaza.
The security cabinet session follows a meeting this week with the head of the military, which Israeli officials have described as tense, saying the military chief had pushed back on expanding the campaign.
Opinion polls show that most Israelis want the war to end in a deal that would see the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas-led Palestinian militants.
Netanyahu’s government has insisted on total victory over Hamas, which ignited the war with its deadly October 2023 attack on Israel from Gaza.
The idea, pushed especially by far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition, of Israeli forces thrusting into areas they do not already hold in the enclave has generated alarm in Israel.
The UN has called reports about a possible expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza “deeply alarming” if true.
There are 50 hostages still held in Gaza, of whom Israeli officials believe 20 are alive. Most of those freed so far emerged as a result of diplomatic negotiations. Talks towards a ceasefire that could have seen some more hostages released collapsed in July.
The World Health Organization said on Thursday that 99 people were now known to have died from malnutrition in the Gaza Strip so far this year, with the figure likely an underestimate.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for scaled-up, sustained and unimpeded aid to be allowed to flow into Gaza, via all possible routes.
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