Hamas must be part of the ‘day after’ plan for Gaza, West Bank, and east Jerusalem, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh told the Doha Forum in Qatar on Sunday.
“Hamas is an integral part of the Palestinian mosaic,” Shtayyeh said as he addressed the question of whether there was a role for a reformed Hamas within the Palestinian Authority once the Gaza war was over.
It was an idea he raised during an interview with Bloomberg published on Friday. “If they [Hamas] are ready to come to an agreement [with the Palestine Liberation Organization], then there will be room for talk,” Shtayyeh said as he discussed PA rule of Gaza after the war.
Shtayyeh spoke while the IDF was in the midst of a military campaign to oust Hamas from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army entered Gaza after Hamas infiltrated southern Israel on October 7, killing over 1,200 people and seizing 250 hostages.
Netanyahu: There will be no Hamas
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that the PA cannot rule Gaza and that the IDF must retain control of the enclave’s security.
“There will be no Hamas, we will eliminate it,” Netanyahu said in a post on X Friday as he directly rebutted Shtayyeh’s statement.
“The very fact that this is the Palestinian Authority's proposal only strengthens my policy: the Palestinian Authority is not the solution,” Netanyahu wrote. He has spoken in support of placing Gaza under the government control of a newly created Palestinian entity but has not provided any details of what that might look like.
The US and the international community have focused on day-after plans, expressing support for PA control of Gaza and the advancement of a two-state solution to the conflict based on the pre-1967 lines. Vice President Kamala Harris’ national security advisor Philip Gordon visited the region last week and met with the Palestinians in Ramallah to discuss such plans. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with PA officials in that West Bank city at the end of November.
In Doha on Sunday, Shtayyeh said that “for Israel to claim that they are going to eradicate Hamas, is not going to happen and is not acceptable to us.”
“But our main concern as Palestinians is not the day after. Our main concern is today,” he said as he called for an end to the Gaza war. Hamas has asserted that close to 17,000 Palestinians have been killed in war-related violence. Israel has said that some 7,000 of those fatalities were Hamas terrorists.
Shtayyeh called for an end to the Gaza war as he accused Israel of “genocide” in that enclave. A “day after” plan must include all the Palestinian territories that would be included within the boundaries of a Palestinian state: Gaza, West Bank, and east Jerusalem, he said.
“The day after needs a Palestinian national consensus,” Shtayyeh said. The issue is not about putting “Gaza under custodianship, the issue is not a day after for Gaza and leaving the West Bank. We need a comprehensive solution that puts an end to the Palestinian's suffering that started 75 years ago,” he said as he referred to Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
The issue is that there is no peace partner in Israel and the United States is already focused on the 2024 election for the White House, Shtayyeh said.
“We were discussing with Washington that the day after should .. be for all Palestinian territories,” he said, as he outlined a two-state plan based on the pre-1967 borders.
The US and Israeli approach of regional peace first or a security or economic solution has failed, Shtayyeh said, adding that “all that is needed is a political solution that ends the occupation.”
Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani said his country believed that the governance of Gaza must be united with that of the West Bank and east Jerusalem and that the Palestinian people must solely decide who should be tasked with that governance.
He also dismissed the possibility of an international security force to protect Gaza with regional participation. "No one from the region will agree to put boots on the ground coming after an Israeli tank," he said.
None of the speakers addressed the complex situation in which Israel had withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and handed the enclave to the PA, only to watch Hamas forcibly seize control of that coastal region in 2007.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi accused Israel of going far beyond its military goals of just eliminating Hamas. “We are seeing a systematic effort to empty Gaza of its people,” he claimed, explaining that Israel seems to be systemically determined to push Palestinians out of Gaza.
These actions go hand-in-hand with Israeli politicians who have called to wipe Palestinians off the face of the earth Safadi said. Israel’s actions in Gaza, he said, meet the legal definition of genocide.
It is premature, he said, to talk about the day after the war.
“How could anyone talk about what kind of structure you will have in Gaza when no one knows what kind of Gaza will be left,” he said.
But it's clear to him, Safadi said, that “There can not be a Gaza alone approach.”
Israel is asking the world to accept an isolated Gaza, in which it looks at the issue from a security perspective only acting as if “it can parachute over the Palestinian people and their rights and have regional peace,” Safadi said. “This is something we always stood against… Israel can not have security unless Palestinians have security.”
“We need a plan with a clear end game and an implementation mechanism to get to the two-state solution,” Safadi stated.
Government spokesman Eylon Levy called Safadi’s accusations against Israel “outrageous and false accusations.”
“Israel is fighting to defend itself from the monsters who perpetrated the October 7 massacre,” he said. In Gaza, Israel is “urging civilians to get out of harm's way to the designated safe zones. And we think that people who are concerned for the safety of civilians in Gaza should be urging evacuations to the safe zones instead of areas of Hamas operations, and condemn Hamas for its exploitation of that humanitarian zone, shooting rockets out of it, into our cities.”