Israel will not withdraw completely from the Gaza Strip once the current war is over, according to an unnamed Israeli official. Instead, the Jewish state will reportedly maintain security control of the Gaza Strip to avoid a repeat of the heinous Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists.
"I don't see any situation in which Israel doesn't have ultimate security responsibility in Gaza," said the official in a local briefing with Israeli reporters in Tel Aviv.
Israeli officials have said that the Jewish state has no interest in occupying Gaza, after U.S. President Joe Biden said it would be a "big mistake" to do so. However, according to the unnamed official, "it won't be enough to do just a rehabilitation of Gaza" once Hamas is defeated.
"It must go through a process of 'de-Nazification,'" the official said. "This culture [of seeking to kill Jews] still exists in the Palestinian Authority."
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to Adolf Hitler, saying that he was hiding in a bunker, just as Hitler did toward the end of the World War II.
"Sinwar doesn't care about his people and acts like a little Hitler in a bunker," Netanyahu told the press in Tel Aviv, adding that Sinwar "cares about his people as much as he does about a speck of dust."
Netanyahu's comments came after Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated on Saturday that the IDF would eliminate Sinwar as part of its ground offensive in Gaza.
"The Hamas [terrorist] organization has no boundaries – Israel's citizens witnessed this first hand on October 7 when they saw the murders, the abuse, the brutality, rape, kidnapping, and other atrocities conducted by the terrorists. Hamas leadership is responsible for this, and we will get to them. We will get to Yahya Sinwar, and we will eliminate him," Gallant said.
The unnamed Israeli official also said after the war, the IDF would become bigger and things would change on the northern border.
"The IDF will deploy against a [massive] breach of the border, and not just a penetration of a few terrorist cells into communities. The IDF will be bigger. We will invest in the army," adding that Hezbollah "cannot breach the border because of our deployment and the readiness of our forces. The issue of 'capturing the north' is no longer relevant."
He added that measures were being put in place to prevent the kind of terrorist attack that Hamas perpetrated on Oct. 7 – in which several thousand Hamas terrorists invaded the south of Israel, murdered over 1,400 people and took more than 240 hostages to Gaza, while bombarding Israeli cities with missiles – from happening in the West Bank.
The official also mentioned the process of Israel normalizing with Saudi Arabia, saying that it will be possible to continue the efforts towards normalization after the war.
"Wise people are sitting in Saudi Arabia and in Israel," said the official. "It will be possible to continue the process we started before the war afterwards — with the condition that we win."
Republished with permission from Jewish News Syndicate.