Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country intends to conquer all of the Gaza Strip in order to oust Hamas from the territory in a Thursday Fox News interview.
Netanyahu told Fox News’ Bill Hemmer that Israel will aim to temporarily occupy the Gaza Strip in order to “liberate” the residents from Hamas. Israel aims to hand the governance over to an Arab force after its operation, stopping short of permanent Israeli occupation and governance of the strip.
“We intend to,” Netanyahu said in the interview in response to a question about whether Israel will take over Gaza. “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.”
Earlier reports suggested that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) objected to a full-scale occupation of the Gaza Strip, and that some members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, such as Defense Minister Israel Katz, remained skeptical about further advances into the territory. The last Israeli occupation of Gaza lasted from 1967 until 2005, when it withdrew 21 settlements before Hamas gained control of the area.
The IDF has warned that rooting out Hamas could take years, and that Israeli forces are currently exhausted from nearly two years of fighting.
As of June, there are 50 hostages remaining in the Gaza Strip, with 27 believed to be dead. A senior official close to Netanyahu reportedly said on August 4 that Israeli operations could occur in areas where hostages are known to be detained, according to The Times of Israel.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s office did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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