Netanyahu promises to take back control of Gaza-egypt corridor
BENJAMIN Netanyahu has vowed to take control of the Egypt-gaza border as he said the war against Hamas would continue for “many more months”.
The Israeli prime minister said the 8.7-mile stretch of land “must be in our hands” to meet the goal of eradicating the military threat from Hamas.
“It must be shut,” Mr Netanyahu said in a press conference late on Saturday. “It is clear that any other arrangement would not ensure the demilitarisation that we seek.”
In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip under international pressure and left control to Egypt. It is the only crossing into Gaza not currently under Israeli management. Returning the Israeli military to the Philadelphi Corridor – the border between Gaza and Egypt – is necessary to prevent arms smuggling, analysts have argued.
But it would also amount to a de facto re-occupation of the Gaza Strip, something the US firmly opposes. Egypt is also likely to oppose handing control of the crossing back to Israel.
Mr Netanyahu has so far been reticent to publicly lay out ideas for management of Gaza after the war is over.
Yesterday, Israeli media reported the war cabinet has been barred from discussions of the subject, amid fears it could split the fragile government.
Bezalel Smotrich, the hard-right finance minister from a religious Zionist party, urged Jewish settlers to return to the Gaza Strip.
“In order to control the territory militarily for a long time, we need a civilian presence,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.
“If we act in a strategically correct way and encourage emigration, if there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million, the whole discourse of the day after [the war] will be completely different,” Mr Smotrich said.
His remarks prompted an angry response from Israeli human rights monitors.
Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group, said Mr Smotrich’s remarks indicated a wish to carry out a similar policy of settlement building in Gaza as in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “No surprise there, he laid this out in his political vision,” she wrote. All settlements on occupied Palestinian land are regarded as illegal under international law.
With little appetite to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees, Arab nations are unlikely to cooperate with Mr Smotrich’s suggestion.
Yesterday, Mr Netanyahu hit back at South Africa for filing proceedings in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, accusing Israel of violating obligations under the UN’S Genocide Convention in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. “No, South Africa, it is not we who have come to perpetrate genocide, it is Hamas,” Mr Netanyahu said.