Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that there can be no peace until Hamas authorities are eliminated and Palestinian society is “deradicalized.”
Shortly after Natanyahu made the remarks, Israeli forces bombed Gaza.
As intensive ground warfare continued, the army said it had struck more than 100 targets in 24 hours, including military structures and tunnel shafts in central Jabalia and Khan Yunis in the south.
Global alarm has grown, and international calls for a cease-fire have intensified, but Netanyahu promised to stick to his guns in an op-ed published late Monday in the Wall Street Journal.
“Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized,” he argued. “These are the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza.”
Once the fighting ends, he said, “for the foreseeable future, Israel will have to retain overriding security responsibility over Gaza” and build a “temporary security zone on the perimeter” of the territory.
Earlier, Netanyahu visited his troops inside Gaza, then reportedly told a meeting of his conservative Likud party that “we’re not stopping… We’re intensifying the fighting in the coming days.”.
The worst Gaza war in history started on October 7, when Hamas assaulted southern Israel, killing around 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP calculation based on Israeli numbers.
They terrorists kidnapped 250 people; 129 of them are still in Gaza.
