KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel will assume “overall security responsibility” in Gaza indefinitely following its war with Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. This is the clearest indication yet that Israel plans to maintain control there even a month after the conflict began, claiming thousands of lives and leveling large swaths of territory.
In an interview with ABC News that aired late Monday, Netanyahu expressed willingness for “small pauses” in the fighting to facilitate the delivery of aid to Gaza or the release of some of the more than 240 hostages held by Hamas were seized in their attack on October 7th by Israel, which sparked the war.
However, he ruled out a general ceasefire without the release of all hostages. The White House said after a phone call between the leaders that there was no agreement on US President Joe Biden’s call for a broader humanitarian pause.
The war has already incurred enormous costs, and Israel unleashed another wave of attacks across the territory on Tuesday. Entire city blocks have been reduced to rubble and about 70% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes. Many followed Israeli orders and headed to the southern part of the besieged area, which is also being bombed.
MORE THAN 10,000 PALESTINIANS KILLED
Israeli troops have been fighting Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip for over a week and have managed to cut the area in half and encircle Gaza City. Food, medicine, fuel and water are running low, and United Nations-run schools-turned-emergency shelters are overcrowded.
According to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, the Palestinian death toll has exceeded 10,300, two-thirds of whom are women and minors. More than 2,300 people are missing and are believed to be buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings, the ministry said. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, and Israel says it has killed thousands of fighters.
Palestinians search for survivors among the rubble of a destroyed building after an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, Monday, November 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Mohammed Dahman)
About 1,400 people have died in Israel, most of them civilians killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion. Israelis observed a minute’s silence on Tuesday in memory of the victims. The 30th day is a milestone in Jewish mourning, with commemorative events planned in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. According to the military, 30 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the ground offensive began.
In the southern Gaza Strip, where Palestinians were expected to seek refuge, an Israeli airstrike early Tuesday destroyed several homes in the town of Khan Younis. An Associated Press journalist at the scene saw first responders pull five bodies – including three dead children – from the rubble. A man cried as he carried a young girl covered in blood until an emergency worker ripped her from his arms and took her to an ambulance with the words “Let her go, let her go.”
AP videos taken at a nearby hospital showed a woman frantically searching for her son and then crying and kissing him when she found him half-naked and bloody but apparently without serious injuries. A girl sobbed next to a baby on a stretcher who appeared to be dead.
“We were sleeping, babies, children, the elderly… I’m not sure about their fate,” said one survivor, Ahmad al-Najjar, the director general of the Education Ministry in Gaza.
In downtown Deir al-Balah, rescue workers raced to carry a number of injured, dust-covered children and young girls from the rubble of a flattened building. “My daughter,” a woman shouted as she ran after them. The number of victims of the strike was initially not known.
An airstrike destroyed a house in the southern city of Rafah, killing at least five people, including three children, according to the municipality and a local hospital.
ISRAEL TO KEEP CONTROL
Israel has vowed to remove Hamas from power and dismantle its military capabilities – but neither Israel nor its key ally the United States have said what would come next.
Palestinians mourn their relatives killed in the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip in Rafah, Tuesday, November 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)
Photos of Israeli hostages held by Hamas militants are projected onto the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City on Monday, November 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Netanyahu told ABC News that Gaza should be ruled by “those who do not want to continue the path of Hamas,” without elaborating.
“I think Israel will have overall responsibility for security indefinitely because we have seen what happens when we don’t have it. If we do not have this security responsibility, there will be an outbreak of Hamas terrorism on a scale that we cannot imagine,” he said.
Netanyahu did not make clear what that security check would look like. U.S. officials have indicated that Israel should not reoccupy Gaza. Israel withdrew troops and settlers in 2005 but retained control of Gaza’s airspace, coastline, population registry and border crossings, except for a border crossing with Egypt.
Hamas seized power in 2007 from forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas and limited its Palestinian Authority to parts of the occupied West Bank. Since then, Israel and Egypt have imposed varying degrees of blockade on Gaza.
In the 1967 Middle East war, Israel conquered Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – the three areas that the Palestinians want for a future state. It annexed East Jerusalem in a move that was not recognized by the majority of the international community.
Fierce fighting in the north
Israeli troops are currently focused on the northern Gaza Strip, including Gaza City, where about 650,000 people lived before the war. Israel claims Hamas has extensive militant infrastructure in residential areas, including a vast network of tunnels, and accuses it of using civilians as human shields.
A Palestinian looks at buildings destroyed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in Rafah, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)
Several hundred thousand people in the north are believed to remain in the path of the attack. Thousands have traveled south in recent days along a corridor that Israel has recommended residents evacuate. But many are afraid to use the route, which is partly held by Israeli troops.
Residents in the northern Gaza Strip reported heavy fighting overnight into Tuesday morning on the outskirts of Gaza City. The Shati refugee camp – a built-up district that housed refugees from the 1948 war over the creation of Israel and their descendants – has been heavily bombed in the past two days, residents said.
Marwan Abdullah, who is among thousands of people seeking shelter at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said they heard constant explosions overnight as ambulances brought the dead and wounded from Shati camp, about a mile (1.6 kilometers) away. “We could not sleep. “Things are getting worse every day,” he said.
The war has also fueled wider tensions as Israel and Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group engaged in a firefight along the border. More than 160 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the war began, mostly in violent protests and shootouts with Israeli forces during arrest raids.
Hamas and other militants have continued to fire rockets into Israel, disrupting daily life, although most of them are intercepted or crash-land in open areas. Tens of thousands of Israelis were evacuated from communities near the borders with Gaza and Lebanon.
Hundreds of trucks carrying relief supplies have been allowed to enter the Gaza Strip from Egypt since October 21st. But humanitarian workers say aid falls far short of growing needs. The Rafah border crossing in Egypt was also opened to allow hundreds of foreign passport holders and medical patients to leave Gaza.
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Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Amy Teibel in Jerusalem contributed.
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Complete AP coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war