Tel Aviv /GAZA - Israel’s deadliest ever war in Gaza, sparked by the October 7 Hamas attacks, entered its second month Tuesday as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed there would be no ceasefire until the group releases its 240 hostages.
Netanyahu also said Israel would assume “overall security” in Gaza after the war ends, while allowing for possible “tactical pauses” before then to free captives and deliver aid to the besieged territory of 2.4 million people.
The Gaza death toll has soared above 10,000, mostly civilians, said the Hamasrun health ministry, as UN rights chief Volker Turk decried a month of “carnage, of incessant suffering, bloodshed, destruction, outrage and despair.” The United States says it opposes Israel resuming long-term control of the Gaza Strip.
“Our viewpoint is that Palestinians must be at the forefront of these decisions and Gaza is Palestinian land and it will remain Palestinian land,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel tells reporters. “Generally speaking, we do not support the reoccupation of Gaza and neither does Israel,” he says. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, which it captured from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War, in 2005. It later imposed a blockade after the Hamas terror group seized control of the territory and used it to fire rockets at Israeli population centers. Patel says that the United States agrees “there is no returning to the October 6 status quo,” referring to the day before Hamas’s massive onslaught. “Israel and the region must be secure and Gaza should and can no longer be a base from which to launch terror attacks against the people of Israel or anyone else,” Patel says. Netanyahu, in an interview yesterday with ABC News, said that Israel would assume “overall security” over Gaza “for an indefinite period” after the war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the IDF has been reaching deeper into Gaza than Hamas ever imagined, and warns Lebanon’s Hezbollah that it would be making the “greatest mistake of its life” if it opens a new fullon war front. Speaking from the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu says he is addressing the nation in order to update Israelis on the war. “In the south, the war is moving forward with force that Hamas has never seen,” he says. “Gaza City is surrounded. We are operating within it, we are deepening the pressure on Hamas every hour, every day.” He says that thousands of terrorists have been eliminated, both above ground and in tunnels, including many of those who planned and carried out the slaughter of 1,400 people in Israel on October 7. Netanyahu also says that the ground operation has destroyed “countless” Hamas command centers, positions and tunnels.
“Hamas is discovering that we are reaching places they thought we would never reach,” he says. One month since the war began, the Hamas-run health ministry said the death toll in Gaza had surpassed 10,000 people -- more than 4,000 of them children. With international criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war mounting, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children”.