The existing Palestinian Authority lacks the credibility to govern Gaza once Israel’s military campaign to oust Hamas from the enclave is over, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told ABC’s This Week.
“Whatever governance looks like in Gaza, it has to be responsive to the aspirations of the Palestinian people and right now the Palestinian Authority doesn’t have that credibly,” he said.
Kirby spoke one day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that he does not plan to allow the PA to return to Gaza when the war ends. The US has supported Israel’s goal of removing Hamas from governance in Gaza.
Kirby clarified that the existing PA in Gaza is also problematic. The issue, he explained, was not Palestinian governance of Gaza, but the nature of the current PA.
“What [Netanyahu] said is that right now you have an unreformed PA and that is unacceptable to him and that is unacceptable to us too.
“We don’t believe the PA is in a position right now to be in credible control of governance in Gaza, whatever it looks like,” he stated as he issued an unusually candid Biden administration assessment of the PA.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week visited PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah while he was in Israel and the region, pleading support to “advance tangible steps for a Palestinian state.”
Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer told ABC’s This Week. “I know that everyone is racing forward to try and establish a Palestinian state. The people of Israel do not even understand that.”
The renewed talk of Palestinian statehood comes in the aftermath of Hamas's October 7 infiltration of southern Israel in which it killed over 1,200 people and seized some 240 hostages.
“The last thing you want to do is send a message to any terror group that the way you are going to achieve some sort of aim is to perpetrate some sort of massive terror attack. Right now what we have to focus on is destroying Hama,” he said.
The destruction of Hamas will open the door to a regional peace, Dermer said. “In the context of that regional peace, we will have to figure out we can put ourselves on a path to an ultimate political settlement with the Palestinians...I think we can get there.”
Netanyahu won't allow PA to run Gaza
At a press conference in Jerusalem on Saturday night Netanyahu focused on the day after the war. Returning the PA to Gaza, he said was akin to repeating the mistakes of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which created the PA and allowed it to govern portions of the West Bank and Gaza.
“One thing for sure I am not doing. I am not ready to delude myself to say that the defective act that took place under Oslo through a terrible error” must now take place a second time with the return of a “hostile entity” to Gaza and the West Bank, he told reporters.
Netanyahu referenced the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s initial exit to Tunisia. He noted that this was a correct decision, adding that the error that had been made was to allow it to return in 1994 with governing power through the Palestinian Authority under the auspices of the 1993 Oslo Accords.
“I won’t repeat this mistake and return this body to Gaza, because the same thing will happen,” he said. He referenced the 2007 coup in which Hamas ousted the PA’s Fatah party from Gaza and forcibly seized control of the enclave.
The Palestinian leadership has split into two, Netanyahu said, but the ideology that denies Israel’s right to exist is common to both those who rule in the West Bank and in Gaza.
Instead of seeing the kind of governmental reform that took place in Germany and Japan after defeat in World War II, the opposite will occur if “we will return the same entity - that has not undergone any reform or transformation — into Gaza,” Netanyahu said.
“This is what even our good friends are proposing,” he
“I think differently and I oppose this. We have to build something different” once the war is over, he said. He emphasized that Israel must have general control over the territory, including security, but that the internal governance would be Palestinian,” Netanyahu said. He clarified that this reference newly created government entity and not the PA.
“The PA doesn’t fight terror it supports it. It doesn’t educate for peace, it educates for the destruction of Israel,” he said.
“This isn’t the entity that needs to enter there [Gaza],” he said.
The international community and the United States have pushed Israel on the issue of what happens to Gaza after Israel completes its military campaign to destroy Hamas.
US supports Israel but concerned about high number of casualties in Gaza
The United States supports Israel’s military campaign in Gaza but is concerned about the high number of displaced people due to aerial bombings, some 1.9 million out of the 2.7 million that live there, as well as by the high death toll. Hamas has asserted that some 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza war-related violence, without specifying how many of those are combatants.
The United States and the international community have called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties and ensure a flow of humanitarian. But they have also looked to the day after and stressed that the PA should govern Gaza, even though they have not offered a viable security alternative for that option. Israel has insisted that the IDF must maintain military control of the enclave.
US Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday addressed the Biden administration’s day-after vision for Gaza, when she spoke with reporters on the sidelines of the United Nations COP28 Climate Conference in the United Arab Emirates.
“Hamas can not control Gaza and Israel must be secure,” while the Palestinians have a political horizon, she said, explaining that this included the return of a revitalized PA to Gaza and the creation of a two-state resolution to the conflict.
“The PA security forces must be strengthened to eventually assume security responsibilities in Gaza,” Harris said.
“Until then there must be security arrangements that are acceptable to Israel, the people of Gaza, the PA, and the international partners,” Harris said
“The PA must be revitalized driven by the will of the Palestinian people,” she said, adding that this revitalized PA must be able to govern Gaza as well as the West Bank.
Moving forward, she said, “we can not conflate Hamas with the Palestinian people.”
Harris clarified that “Hamas is a brutal terror organization that has vowed to repeat October 7 until Israeli is annihilated. No nation could live with such danger.”
But how Israel conducts its military operations against Hamas, “it matters how” and international law must be respected.
“To many innocent Palestinians have been killed. The scale of humanitarian suffering and the images coming from Gaza have been devastating,” she said.
“Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians,” she said.
Abbas: Gaza is 'integral part of Palestinian state'
On Saturday night in Ramallah PA President Mahmoud Abbas said that Gaza was “an integral part of the Palestinian state and that “any political solution” must include that enclave as well as the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
According to his statement posed on the Palestinian news agency, WAFA, the only solution to the bloodshed, he told PA leaders, is recognition of a Palestinian state on that territory, including UN membership.
Abbas called for an international conference to discuss and set a timetable for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines.
“We continue with our people to remain steadfast in the battle for survival, freedom, and independence. We will not kneel. We will not surrender to the fait accomplice. We will not allow the Nakba of Palestine in 1948 to be repeated, whatever the circumstances, and no matter how costly the sacrifice.”