Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday visited Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, where he vowed not to pull back troops despite a recent push by mediators to advance a US-backed ceasefire plan calling for their withdrawal.
“We control the area. We are not retreating.
We are staying on this line,” Netanyahu said near the so-called Yellow Line, which demarcates the areas under Hamas and Israeli military control.
Israeli operations in Gaza have killed at least 1,334 people since the ceasefire came into effect, according to the Palestinian territory’s health ministry, which also operates under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.
The Israeli government “is organised and prepared to get them out — by sea, by air, by every way possible”, he said.
Netanyahu, facing tight elections in October, last month rejected a proposal for advancing to the next stage of the plan after Hamas said it had agreed to hand over its weapons. Hamas’s Interior Ministry identified the man as Muein al-Arabid, and said he was an “officer in the internal security service”, but did not mention whether he was its chief. On Tuesday, Israel said its forces and a Palestinian anti-Hamas militia captured the head of Hamas’s internal security apparatus during a ground operation in Gaza City that Palestinian health officials said killed four people. Israel’s defence minister on Wednesday said the country had plans to remove Palestinians from the Gaza Strip but was waiting for the United States to figure out where to take them.
