Israel-Gaza war: Netanyahu hints at takeover of Gaza as Israel's assault hits one month mark
Gaza City, Gaza - Israel's deadliest ever war on Gaza, sparked by the October 7 Hamas attacks, entered its second month Tuesday as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again rejected calls for a ceasefire.
Netanyahu also said Israel would assume "overall security" in Gaza after the war ends, while allowing for undefined possible "tactical pauses" before then to free captives and deliver aid to the besieged territory of 2.3 million people.
The Gaza death toll has soared above 10,000 – mostly children and women – as UN rights chief Volker Turk decried a month of "carnage, of incessant suffering, bloodshed, destruction, outrage, and despair."
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas over its attack which claimed 1,400 lives in Israel, according to Israeli officials.
The suffering in Gaza has been immense, with entire city blocks levelled and bodies in white shrouds piling up outside hospitals where surgeons have had to operate on bloodied floors by the light of their phones.
"These are massacres," said one bereaved Gaza resident, Mahmud Meshmesh, in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, looking at the devastation of yet another strike that left bodies buried under rubble and debris.
"They destroyed three houses over the heads of their inhabitants – women and children."
Israel has air-dropped leaflets and sent text messages ordering Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to head south, only to consistently bomb that area too, as well as escape routes.
Netanyahu rejects calls for ceasefire
Netanyahu, speaking to ABC News on Monday, stressed that the war would continue until Israel had restored overall control of Gaza.
"Israel will, for an indefinite period... have the overall security responsibility," he said. "When we don't have that security responsibility, what we have is the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we couldn't imagine."
He stressed that "there will be no ceasefire – general ceasefire – in Gaza, without the release of our hostages."
Hamas has offered to release all hostages in exchange for Israel fleeing the thousands of Palestinian prisoners it is holding – many arrested in brutal crackdowns in the West Bank since the war began.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken – now in Japan for a meeting of G7 foreign ministers – has insisted that the US is pushing "very aggressively" for more aid to be delivered to Gaza.
The Biden administration remains categorically opposed to a ceasefire, despite growing domestic and global outrage at the brutality of Israel's actions.
Cover photo: REUTERS