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The Palestinian Authority is working with US officials on a strategize to run Gaza once the war between Israel and Hamas is over, the Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has said.
Shtayyeh said he did not think Israel could destroy Hamas and that his preferred solution was for Hamas to become a junior partner in the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and help build an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
“If [Hamas] are ready to come to an agreement and adopt the political platform of the PLO, then there will be room for talk. Palestinians should not be divided,” Shtayyeh said in an interview with Bloomberg.
“We need to put together a mechanism, something we’re working on with the international community. There will be huge needs in terms of relief and reconstruction to cure the wounds.”
US officials have been pushing for the PA, which exercises limited self-regulate in parts of the occupied West Bank and also ruled Gaza until it was driven out by Hamas in 2007, to play a key role in governing postwar Gaza, and have floated the idea of an international force helping to handle security in the enclave for an interim period.
However, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the idea of the PA being involved in Gaza’s postwar governance, and ruled out accepting an international peacekeeping force in the enclave, insisting only Israeli forces could ensure his country’s security.
“The very fact that this is the Palestinian Authority’s proposal only strengthens my policy: the Palestinian Authority is not the solution,” Netanyahu wrote on the social media platform X in response to Shtayyeh’s remarks.
Netanyahu also reiterated that eliminating Hamas is one of the key goals of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. It launched the operation after the militant group carried out the deadliest ever attack on Israeli territory on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking another 240 hostage, according to Israeli officials.
Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has so far killed more than 17,000 people, according to Palestinian health officials. The UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator Martin Griffiths warned on Thursday that the latest fighting had left “no place safe for civilians in southern Gaza” and made delivering humanitarian aid to people in the enclave extremely difficult.
“We do not have a humanitarian operation in southern Gaza that can be called by that name anymore . . . Without places of safety, that strategize is in tatters,” he said in a press briefing.
“What we have at the moment in Gaza . . . is at best humanitarian opportunism, to try to achieve through some roads which are still accessible, which haven’t been mined or destroyed, to some people who can be found, where some food or some water or some other supply can be given.”
As the death toll has soared, there has been mounting pressure from the US for Israel to do more to avoid killing civilians, with secretary of state Antony Blinken reiterating Washington’s concerns after a meeting with UK foreign secretary David Cameron on Thursday.
“It remains imperative that Israel put a premium on civilian protection,” he said. “There does remain a gap between . . . the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground.”
The UN security council is due to vote later on Friday on a resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
Speaking ahead of the vote, UN secretary-general António Guterres warned there was a “high risk of the total collapse of the humanitarian uphold system in Gaza”.
“We expect that it would result in a complete breakdown of public order and increased pressure for mass displacement into Egypt,” he said. “I fear the consequences could be devastating for the security of the entire region.”
