Netanyahu: Israel will continue to push forward with Rafah attack

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defied international pressure on Sunday and vowed that Israel would continue its attacks on Hamas militants in Rafah near the Gaza-Egypt border, even as ceasefire talks were set to resume in Qatar in the coming days.

“No amount of international pressure can prevent us from achieving all the goals of the war” to eliminate Hamas’ control of Gaza, Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting in a video released by his office. “To do this, we will also carry out operations in Gaza,” Rafah said, although he did not indicate an attack was imminent.

He later told CNN’s “State of the Union” that Israel would “continue to work” on a six-week ceasefire in its war with Hamas, which is now six months old. But to achieve that goal, he said, “we will maintain military pressure.”

Netanyahu said it was “completely inappropriate” for U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish American official, to call for new elections in Israel last week because he believed Netanyahu was The country “lost its way” in the bombing of Gaza.

“I think the only government we should be working to overthrow right now is the terrorist tyranny in Gaza, the Hamas tyranny that has killed more than a thousand Israelis,” Netanyahu said.

Schumer, a long-time ally of the Jewish state, said Netanyahu risked making his country a “pariah” in world affairs as Israel has restricted the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza for months, leaving tens of thousands of The Palestinians starved and many died of malnutrition. – Consume security checkpoints.

Netanyahu said: “The majority of Israelis support what we are doing. If we do not win the war, the United States will lose.”

“The problem is not providing aid to Gaza,” he said. “The problem is it’s been robbed by Hamas, by gangs.”

Netanyahu told CNN that blaming Israel for the ongoing war is “both cynical and factually wrong.”

He earlier told the cabinet: “I want to say to my friends in the international community, is your memory so short? You so quickly forgot October 7, the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. ?”

“Are you so ready to deprive Israel of its right to defend itself against the Hamas monster?” he said.

The war began when Hamas launched a terrorist attack on Israel in October, killing 1,200 people and capturing about 250 hostages. Gaza health officials say Israel’s ongoing counteroffensive has killed more than 31,600 people, mostly women and children, displaced more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and leveled much of the area’s infrastructure and homes.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in Jordan ahead of a planned visit to Israel that the attack on Rafah would make peace in the region “very difficult” and that efforts were now “to ensure that we achieve a long-term ceasefire.”

Netanyahu said Israel plans to evacuate civilians from Rafah ahead of its ground offensive, but has not yet made plans for where they will go.

A source familiar with the Qatari truce talks told Reuters that the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency will join the delegation in talks with Qatari, Egyptian and U.S. mediators.

Hamas last week put forward a new cease-fire proposal that included the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for about 40 hostages. Israel’s security cabinet will meet to discuss the matter before the delegation leaves.

Netanyahu has said the proposal was based on Hamas’s “unrealistic demands,” but a Palestinian official familiar with the mediation effort said Hamas provided more details on the prisoner exchange proposal, which reached an agreement The chances of a deal look better.

“The mediators are positive about Hamas’s new proposal. Some in Israel see some improvement from the group’s previous position and now only Netanyahu can decide whether a deal is imminent,” the official said. Conditions of anonymity.

In an apparent reference to the negotiations, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant said the security agencies were “committed to exhausting all possibilities and are willing to exploit all possibilities, including the current possibilities, to return the hostages to their families.”

Some of the material in this report comes from Reuters, the Associated Press and AFP.