US President Joe Biden does not support an Israeli military “reoccupation” of the Gaza Strip after the end of the war between Israel and Hamas, a White House spokesperson said.
Biden believes that “a reoccupation of Gaza by Israeli forces is not the right thing to do,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.
The comments come a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Israel would take control of security in Gaza after the war.
Israel would assume responsibility for security for an “indefinite period,” he told ABC News on Monday.
“When we fail to assume this responsibility for security, we find ourselves faced with an eruption of terror from Hamas on a scale we could not imagine,” he said.
Kirby said Tuesday that “there needs to be a healthy set of discussions about what post-conflict Gaza looks like and what governance looks like.”
“What we absolutely agree on with our Israeli counterparts is what it cannot look like, and it cannot look like it did on October 6,” Kirby added.
Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanou categorically rejected the proposal to exclude Hamas.
“What Kirby said about the future of Gaza after Hamas is a fantasy,” he said in a Telegram message. “Our people are in symbiosis with the resistance, and they alone will decide their future. »
US President Joe Biden previously said it would be a “mistake” for Israel to occupy Gaza.
Gaza is already considered occupied territory because Israel fully controls its borders, airspace and territorial waters, although it officially withdrew its forces and settlers from the enclave in 2005. In 2007, Israel began imposing a stifling blockade on the territory he had captured. as well as other Palestinian territories – occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank – during the 1967 war.
Last month, Israel launched an air and ground offensive against Hamas after the armed group carried out a deadly rampage in southern Israel, killing 1,400 people, according to Israeli officials, and capturing more than 230 others. hostages.
Israeli bombardment of Gaza has killed at least 10,328 people, including 4,237 children, according to Palestinian health authorities.
Israel and Hamas have pushed back against growing international pressure for a ceasefire. Israel says Hamas should first release the hostages. Hamas says it will not release them or stop the fighting as long as Gaza is under attack.
Israeli ground troops have been battling Palestinian fighters inside Gaza for more than a week, cutting the territory in two and encircling Gaza City.
Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said the country’s ground forces “are currently in a ground operation in the heart of Gaza City and exerting strong pressure on Hamas.”
Israel launched a new wave of strikes in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday as hundreds of more Palestinians fled Gaza City to the south.
Some traveled on donkey carts, most on foot, some pushing elderly relatives in wheelchairs, all visibly exhausted. Many had nothing other than the clothes they wore.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians obeyed Israeli orders to move towards the southern part of Gaza, out of the path of the ground attack. Many others are afraid to do so since Israeli troops control part of the north-south route.
But the bombing of the south also continued.
In the town of Deir el-Balah, rescuers pulled at least four dead and several injured children from the rubble of a razed building, witnesses said. “My daughter,” a woman shouted as she ran behind them.
An Israeli airstrike destroyed several houses Tuesday morning in Khan Younis. At least five bodies – including three dead children – were pulled from the rubble, the Associated Press news agency reported.
Alongside the bombings, Israel imposed a siege on Gaza, severely limiting access to food, water and electricity and cutting off fuel supplies to the more than 2.3 million people trapped in the cordoned off enclave.
A small amount of aid has entered through the Rafah crossing with Egypt, but UN chief Antonio Guterres called it a “trickle of aid” against an “ocean” of need.
On Tuesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said a humanitarian convoy carrying medical supplies to Al-Shifa Hospital came under fire in Gaza City, and a driver was lightly injured .
The ICRC has not identified the source of the fire.
The Rafah crossing was closed over the weekend after Israeli forces bombed an ambulance heading towards the crossing.
