Netanyahu says Israel intends to take control of ‘all of Gaza’
The Israeli prime minister has been asked in an interview with Fox News if Israel will “take control of all of Gaza”.
“We intend to,” Netanyahu answered, “in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of [sic] Gaza and to pass it to civilian governance that is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel.
“That’s what we want to do. We want to liberate ourselves and liberate the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas.”
Netanyahu also said in the interview that Israel doesn’t want to be “a governing body” in Gaza.
“We don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We don’t want to govern it.”
Netanyahu trying to cover up real goal of ethnic cleansing
Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist at local newspaper Haaretz, says the Israeli prime minister’s remarks about another governing body taking over Gaza are “far-fetched” and not realistic.
“What does he mean, another force will take over Gaza? Who is going to get into Gaza, who will be willing to do so, except for the Israeli military, obviously?” Levy said to Al Jazeera.
“That’s another way of covering up the real intention – and I’m afraid that the intention is quite transparent: There is a goal for this war … to push all the people of Gaza to this ‘humanitarian’ concentration camp and then offer them to leave Gaza,” he said.
“Practically, [Israel is] aiming at an ethnic cleansing of Gaza.”
Israel is currently setting things in motion to carry out that plan, Levy added. “[Israel is] preparing an ethnic cleansing – we have to face it.”
Many questions remain after Netanyahu’s Fox News interview
That interview gives us a bit of an inkling into the thinking of the prime minister. He said something that we haven’t heard before, at least directly from him – which is that Israel is not interested in governing Gaza but rather, would hand it over to an Arab force that would not pose a threat to the security of Israel.
That is quite different from what we’ve been hearing from Israeli media about a full-blown occupation of Gaza. But again, this is an interview that he gave to one of the American networks.
The [Israeli] security cabinet is meeting, and I think we’ll have to wait until after that to know exactly in which direction Israel is heading when it comes to Gaza.
