Israel: Israel will remove Hamas from Gaza and implement an alternative governance system

Israel Jerusalem: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant has said that Israel is looking at an alternative governance arrangement in the Gaza Strip after removing Hamas. During a visit to the Israeli army’s Southern Command headquarters in the Negev desert city of Beer Sheba, Galant said on Sunday that Israel will not allow Hamas to continue to rule Gaza.

“We will eliminate Hamas and establish a separate governing body,” he said, reports Xinhua news agency. “The operation is ongoing in Rafah. We are destroying the ‘oxygen tube’ connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt,” the minister added.

He stressed that “we will wipe out the existence of Hamas”. On the other hand, Egypt has stressed the need for Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian part of the Rafah crossing. Delegations from Egypt, the US and Israel held a meeting in Cairo to discuss reopening the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip so that relief supplies could be delivered.

During the meeting, the Egyptian delegation said Israel was solely responsible for preventing the entry of relief supplies and humanitarian aid into Gaza. It said at least 350 aid trucks needed to be delivered daily.

The crossing, the main gateway for moving sick and injured people out of Gaza for treatment and for delivering humanitarian and relief aid into Gaza, was closed on May 7. Meanwhile, two people were killed and four others injured in an Israeli airstrike on the southeastern Lebanese village of Houla in northern Israel.

Israeli warplanes bombarded a house in Houla with four air-to-surface missiles on Sunday, wounding four civilians and killing two, Xinhua news agency reported.

The sources said Israel carried out 11 airstrikes on seven towns and villages in the eastern and central areas of the border region and fired 70 shells on 13 villages and towns in the southern border region. Meanwhile, Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said it attacked several Israeli sites, including al-Sammaka, al-Ramtha, Kiryat Shmona, al-Abad and al-Marj.