National security adviser Jake Sullivan on Sunday shared the United States’ vision for the future in Gaza: “no reoccupation of Gaza” and “no forcible displacement of the Palestinian people.”
Sullivan reiterated Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s “basic principles of the way forward” during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation when anchor Margaret Brennan asked about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to a Palestinian Authority–led government in Gaza.
“Secretary Blinken has been clear that it’s the West Bank and Gaza that needs to be under unified control, and the Palestinian Authority likely to govern that,” Brennan said. “It doesn’t sound like the Netanyahu government is on the same page as the Biden administration because the prime minister said something very different just yesterday.”
“Well, from our perspective, the way forward — the basic principles of the way forward are straightforward, and this is something that Secretary Blinken laid out publicly this past week,” Sullivan said. “No reoccupation of Gaza, no forcible displacement of the Palestinian people. Gaza can never be used as a base for terrorism in the future and Gaza’s territory should not be reduced.”
He noted that part of that vision is the reunification of control over the West Bank and Gaza under Palestinian leadership.
“But ultimately, it’s gonna be up to the Palestinian people to decide their future, who governs them and the United States will support a process —” Sullivan said, before Brennan interrupted to note there hasn’t been an election held “in ages.”
“Well, that’s right, Margaret, there haven’t been elections held since the early 2000s. But post October 7, we can’t go back to the way things were on October 6. And that goes for ensuring that Hamas cannot represent a continuing threat to Israel . . . But we also can’t go back to October 6 when it comes to governance, and it will ultimately be up to or should be up to the Palestinian people to decide what their future governance looks like, ” he said.
Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel does not intend to occupy the Gaza Strip after the end of the war with Hamas.
“We don’t seek to conquer Gaza, we don’t seek to occupy Gaza, and we don’t seek to govern Gaza,” Netanyahu said on Fox News. “We’ll have to find a government, a civilian government that will be there, but in the foreseeable future, we have to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
Netanyahu said Saturday that Israel will not support a Palestinian Authority-led government in Gaza at the conclusion of the war and that the country will maintain “overall security control” in Gaza “including the capacity to go in whenever we want to eliminate terrorists who may pop up again.”
“I will tell you what there will not be. There will not be Hamas,” he said. “There will also not be a civil authority that educates its children to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to eliminate the State of Israel. There cannot be an authority that pays the families of murderers [amounts] based on the number they murdered.”
“There cannot be an authority whose leader still has not condemned the terrible massacre 30 days later,” he added, referring to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “That cannot be.”