Palestinian Authority “is not capable”

O Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this Saturday that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is “not capable” of controlling the Gaza Strip. The Israeli’s statements come after United States President Joe Biden argued that Gaza and the West Bank “must” be controlled by the Palestinians.

“I think that the Palestinian Authority, in its current form, is not capable of accepting responsibility for Gaza, after we have fought and done all this, to pass it on to them”said Netanyahu, at a press conference in Tel Aviv, cited by the Reuters news agency.

It should be noted that the Palestinian Authority lost control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, after the Islamist group Hamas won the last Palestinian legislative elections, held in 2006. It currently only controls the occupied West Bank.

Joe Biden defended, this Saturday, in an opinion article published in The Washington Post, that “two-state solution is the only way to guarantee long-term security both the Israeli people and the Palestinian people”.

The democratic leader once again distanced himself from the Israeli prime minister’s plan, which raised the possibility of taking control of the Gaza Strip for an indefinite period of time.

For Biden, there must be no “forced displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza, nor “reoccupation, siege, blockade or reduction of territory” of the Strip by Israel and Gaza and the West Bank “must be brought together under a single governing structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian National Authority”.

The war between Israel and Hamas has so far left 12,000 people dead in the Gaza Strip, most of them civilians, 30,000 injured, 3,250 missing under the rubble and more than 1.6 million people displaced, according to the most recent report from local authorities.

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