MADRID, 23 (EUROPA PRESSE)
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz assured Tuesday that Israel would not completely withdraw from the Gaza Strip and highlighted the existence of plans to restore the presence of settlements in the Palestinian enclave, contrary to the demands of United States President Donald Trump and his plan for the future of this territory.
“With God’s help, when the time comes, we will establish pioneer groups in northern Gaza, where the evacuated settlements – in the 2005 disengagement plan – were located,” he said at an event commemorating the creation of another 1,200 homes in the West Bank settlement of Beit El.
“We’ll do it the right way, at the right time,” Katz said. “We are in a period of practical sovereignty. There are opportunities that have not existed for a long time,” he maintained, before reiterating that the Israeli authorities will not completely abandon the Gaza Strip, despite the clauses of the American proposal.
“We are deep in Gaza and we will never leave Gaza. This will not happen. We are here to defend ourselves and prevent what happened from happening again,” he explained, as reported by the Israeli newspaper ‘The Times of Israel’, in reference to the attacks of October 7, 2023, which left around 1,200 dead and nearly 250 kidnapped.
However, Katz’s office later sent a statement emphasizing that the minister’s comments “were made only in a security context.” “The government has no intention of establishing a settlement in the Gaza Strip,” he said.
“The Minister of Defense emphasized the central principle of border protection in all contexts: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) constitute the first and last line of defense for Israeli citizens and the State of Israel depends on them and the security forces for its defense,” he concluded.
Katz’s remarks come just days after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the start of implementation of the second phase of the US proposal for the Gaza Strip “essential” and stressed that the first, launched in October after an agreement between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), must be “fully implemented.”
The agreement reached in October provided for a ceasefire, in force since October 10 – although marked by almost daily bombings by Israel, which claims to be acting against “terrorists” – and the delivery of living and dead hostages by Hamas, with the exception of one, whose body has not yet been found in the enclave.
The second phase, which has not yet been launched, envisages the creation of a temporary authority which will be led by Trump and will have the task of supervising the situation and an international security force in which several countries should participate, without for the moment having concrete details on its composition and on other points such as the process of military withdrawal from Israel.
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