But opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Michaelia Cash countered Wong’s statement and declared the operational tactics were a matter for the Israeli government.
“What disturbs me more than anything is that so many now – but in particular Penny Wong – skip over this important detail: this war could end tomorrow if Hamas released the hostages and laid down their arms,” Cash said.
Most of the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza are currently in areas outside direct control by Israel, with many in Gaza City – highlighting the risks to civilians in any military operation to take over the city. Israel says it controls 75 per cent of the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli cabinet canvassed several other options on the best way to conduct the war when it met in the early hours of Friday, AEST, but rejected them.
“A decisive majority of security cabinet ministers believed that the alternative plan … would neither achieve the defeat of Hamas nor the return of the hostages,” the prime minister’s office said, acknowledging the divisions.
The first four principles agreed to end the war were the disarming of Hamas, the return of all hostages living and dead, the demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip and Israeli security control in the Gaza Strip.
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The fifth principle was the establishment of an alternative civil administration over the territory that would be neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has joined other leaders in speaking to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas in recent weeks, highlighting a global push to make the governing body in the West Bank a key part of a two-state solution that would include Gaza.
Speaking before the security cabinet meeting, which ran for 10 hours through the night, Netanyahu had said Israel planned to take control over all of Gaza and eventually hand it off to Arab forces opposed to Hamas.
Israel’s top general, Eyal Zamir, reportedly warned that it would endanger the remaining 20 or so living hostages held by Hamas and further strain Israel’s army after nearly two years of war. Many families of hostages are also opposed, fearing further escalation will doom their loved ones.
Israel’s centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid blasted the security cabinet’s decision as “a disaster that will lead to many more disasters”.
“This is exactly what Hamas wanted: for Israel to be trapped in the field without a goal, without defining the picture of the day after, in a useless occupation that no one understands where it is leading,” he said on social media.
Yair Golan, the leader of the centre-left Democrats party, said the move was “a death sentence for the hostages” and would prove to be a “disaster for generations”.
Israel has repeatedly bombarded Gaza City and carried out numerous raids there, only to return to different neighbourhoods as Hamas fighters regrouped.
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Hundreds of thousands fled Gaza City under evacuation orders in the opening weeks of the war, but many returned during a limited ceasefire at the start of this year.
Asked on Fox News whether Israel would take control of all of Gaza, Netanyahu had said the government intended to: “Remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of [Hamas] and to pass it to civilian governance that is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel.
“That’s what we want to do,” he said. “We want to liberate ourselves and liberate the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas.”
Netanyahu made no comment on a two-state solution with Palestine – named by many countries, including Australia, as the preferred resolution to the conflict – but set out a sharply different future in which Gaza was managed by Arab states. He did not say which countries would participate.
Asked if Israel wanted to keep control of Gaza, he said that was not Israel’s ambition.
“We don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter,” he said in his earlier comments.
“We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us, and giving Gazans a good life. That’s not possible with Hamas.”
Hamas said in a statement that Netanyahu’s remarks that Israel intended to take military control of all of Gaza constituted “a coup” during ceasefire negotiations.
Australia Palestine Advocacy Network President Nasser Mashni said: “There can surely be no remaining pretence that Israel is doing anything other than permanently erasing Gaza in order to occupy and annex it … What is happening now is the final stage of ethnic cleansing, and the world is enabling it.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said he wanted to see an end to the war, but “the diplomatic route seems to have reached a dead end”.
Blaming Hamas for rebuffing offers of a 60-day pause in fighting in exchange for the release of 10 living hostages, Ryvchin told the ABC that Israeli soldiers would “have to brace themselves for horrible fighting in tunnels and booby-trapped alleys and buildings, and there will no doubt be more military losses”.
Hamas terrorists killed 1195 people in the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, while launching more than 4000 rockets into Israeli territory and sending thousands of fighters across the border. Hamas returned to Gaza with 251 hostages. Israel estimates 50 have not been returned, with around 20 believed to be alive.
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Israel’s military offensive has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is linked to Hamas. It does not say how many were fighters or civilians.
World leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, have urged Netanyahu to stop the war and allow more food to be distributed to civilians in Gaza, while also condemning Hamas and saying it should not have any role in the future of the Palestinian territory.
With AP, Reuters
