Israel: ministers reject Palestinian statehood as part of post-war plan

Ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government rejected Palestinian statehood on Thursday following a Washington Post report that Israel’s main ally the United States was advancing plans to establish a Palestinian state when the offensive in Gaza comes to an end, Reuters has reported.

“We will in no way agree to this plan, which says Palestinians deserve a prize for the terrible massacre they carried out against us: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said. “A Palestinian state is an existential threat to the State of Israel as was proven on 7 October.” He added that he will demand the security cabinet, set to meet later today, Thursday, to take a clear position against Palestinian statehood.

The Washington Post reported today that the US was working with some Arab countries, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia — with which Israel has long sought to establish diplomatic ties — on a post-war plan for the region that would include a firm timeline for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that any political initiative that did not begin with a Palestinian state as a full member of the UN was “doomed to failure”.

Echoing Smotrich in separate remarks were extreme far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, Education Minister Yoav Kisch and lawmaker Matan Kahana, a member of the National Unity Party headed by main Netanyahu challenger Benny Gantz.

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“This is a catastrophe,” Chikli of Netanyahu’s Likud Party told Army Radio, “to reward the Palestinians after 7 October by establishing a state.”

The latest Israeli military offensive erupted after Hamas led a cross-border attack on southern Israeli towns in which the authorities say 1,200 people were killed and 253 were taken hostage. Later reports in the local media, notably Haaretz, pointed out that hundreds of the victims were actually killed by the Israel Occupation Forces when tanks and a helicopter gunshot confronted the Hamas resistance fighters.

In more than 130 days since, Israel has killed at least 28,600 Palestinians, mainly children and women, and wounded almost 70,000 more in an unrelenting air, land and sea offensive that has laid much of Gaza to waste and displaced most of its 2.3 million population.

Millions of Palestinians live under a brutal Israeli military occupation; only a fraction are citizens of the self-declared Jewish state. The Palestinian Authority has for years called for an end to Israel’s occupation and settlement expansion in the West Bank on land that the apartheid state occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

All of Israel’s settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories violate Article 49, paragraph 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, making them illegal under international law. Moreover, they are built on land that was earmarked for a Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and including the Gaza Strip.

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