Italy presses Israel to consider aftermath of Gaza offensive

Italy’s foreign minister has urged Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to use the upcoming four-day pause in hostilities in Gaza to carefully consider the region’s political future, once the active phase of the conflict is over.

Antonio Tajani said the Israeli government needed to talk with its closest allies on the next steps for the densely populated strip after it ended its military offensive in Gaza.

“Israel must dismantle the military and terror structures, but it must already think about the aftermath,” Mr Tajani told the Financial Times. “Who will rule Gaza? Who will take care of two million Palestinian citizens? How can Israel resume its political engagement with the Arab countries of the region?”

He added that Italy was working with friendly Arab countries, starting with Egypt, to find “a possible political and diplomatic exit route from this military phase”.

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The Israel Defense Forces’ military operation in Gaza was prompted by the Hamas militant group’s attack on October 7th, in which about 1,200 Israeli nationals were killed and about 240 taken hostage, according to Israeli officials. Israel’s assault on Gaza in response has laid waste to swaths of the strip and left close to 13,000 people dead, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry.

Mr Tajani proposed that a “UN administration”, backed by international peacekeepers, could run Gaza for several years after the war ended, while giving time to work towards a long-term political solution to the decades-old conflict.

“Hamas wants all the Arab countries against Israel,” he said. “We need to achieve a solution for the Palestinians to have all the Arab countries against Hamas.”

“The final goal is two peoples, two states but we need to pave the way for reaching this agreement,” Mr Tajani added. “We are ready to do what we need to do for peace. Our goal is peace but for this we need time. First, we need to stop the war.”

He also urged Israel to respect international law, better differentiate between the Hamas militant group and ordinary Palestinian civilians and better safeguard civilian lives, which he said would be in Israel’s long-term security interests.

“We need to be very serious when we talk about the civilian population,” he said. “The message to Israel is please, it’s crucial to respect international law. But, at the same time, the message to the others is that it is a crime also to use the hospitals [for militant activities].”

Israel has accused Hamas of using tunnels beneath Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital for its operations and says it has unearthed some of these tunnels during the latest war. Hamas denies the claim.

The minister said Israel needed to consider the international perception of its offensive against Hamas in response to the group’s devastating October attack, and the methods chosen in fulfilling what he said were legitimate security goals.

“I am a friend of Israel – I believe in Israel. After the Holocaust, it is the right of the Jewish people to have a state free and sure,” he said. “But if you want to also have public opinion with Israel, [you] need to have a proportionate reaction. This is important for Israel.”

“The Palestinians aren’t criminals... Hamas is using the Palestinians,” Mr Tajani said. “We need to attack only Hamas. It’s not easy but we need to do it. We need to be sophisticated... We need to be prudent.”

Mr Tajani said he believed there were “too many extremists also in Israel”, specifically settlers in the occupied West Bank, where violence has escalated. Eight Palestinians were killed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank between the Hamas attack and November 18th, according to the UN’s humanitarian agency, in what the European Commission has called “settler terrorism”.

Almost 200 people were killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces between October 7th and November 18th.

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government has had warm ties with Mr Netanyahu, who visited Rome earlier this year, and Israel is home to about 18,000 Italian-Israeli dual nationals. Ms Meloni endorsed “Israel’s right to defend itself” within hours of the Hamas attack and Mr Tajani visited the country a week later.

But Rome has become increasingly concerned that the casualties and destruction in Gaza will affect the stability of the wider Mediterranean region, already reeling from other political and economic crises that have propelled a surge of migrants to Europe the year. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023