The Israeli parliament voted on Thursday to oppose a Palestinian state as an “existential threat”, a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers the army had “grabbed Hamas by the throat”.
The vote, which drew swift criticism from the Palestinian leadership and the international community, was largely symbolic but marked an important milestone ahead of Netanyahu’s planned address to the US Congress next Wednesday.
The veteran hardliner has shown little interest in U.S. administration efforts to broker a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages, saying “absolute victory” against Hamas is within reach and vowing to step up military pressure.
But the Palestinian Authority president, who visited Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, rejected criticism from hostage families that his policies were preventing an agreement to return them, insisting that pressure on Hamas was “moving the agreement forward, not delaying it.”
In Gaza, the health ministry in the Hamas-controlled strip reported 54 deaths in 24 hours amid heavy Israeli bombardment in recent days.
The resolution passed by Israeli lawmakers in the early hours of the morning said the establishment of a Palestinian state on land occupied by Israeli forces “would perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.”
Following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war, the report said the “promotion” of a Palestinian statehood “will only embolden Hamas and its supporters.”
The resolution passed the 120-seat parliament by a vote of 68 in favor and 9 against.
The Palestinian Authority has accused Israel’s far-right ruling coalition of “plunging the region into the abyss.”
Neighbouring Jordan said the vote was “a flagrant violation of international law and a challenge to the international community.”
France expressed its “perplexity” and said the language was “in contradiction” with several UN Security Council resolutions.
– “Moral stain” –
The establishment of a Palestinian state on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War has been a cornerstone of international efforts to resolve the conflict for decades.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply disappointed” by the Israeli parliament’s move. His spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said “a two-state solution cannot be rejected.”
Guterres has repeatedly called for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza war, saying on Wednesday that “the humanitarian situation is a moral stain for all of us.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross said all medical facilities in southern Gaza were “at breaking point” due to the influx of casualties.
AFPTV footage showed mourners at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central town of Deir el-Baraf, where several bodies wrapped in white cloth lay on the ground and a man was holding the body of a child, also wrapped in a white cloth.
– “At my throat.” –
Throughout the more than nine months of war, Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to eradicate Hamas and bring all hostages home.
“We’re strangling them,” he told Parliament on Wednesday.
Far-right members of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition are opposed to the ceasefire, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who said on Thursday that Netanyahu should not sign a “surrender” deal with Hamas.
In another sign of tensions within the government over how to respond to the war, Netanyahu overruled an order from his longtime rival, Defense Minister Yoav Galant, to build temporary field hospitals in Israel to treat sick children in Gaza.
“The hospital will not be established because the prime minister has not approved the establishment of a hospital for Gaza residents on Israeli territory,” the prime minister’s office said.
The war began with a Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 that resulted in 1,195 deaths, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
The militants also took 251 hostages, 116 of whom are still in the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli military said 42 were killed.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry statistics, Israeli retaliatory attacks have killed at least 38,848 people, the majority of them civilians.
– Poliovirus detected –
The war has destroyed much of the Gaza Strip’s homes and other infrastructure, forcing almost the entire population to flee and leaving them without food and drinking water.
“Continued bombardment and an Israeli fuel blockade have devastated Gaza’s outdated waste collection system,” threatening water supplies and farmland, Dutch activist group Pax said in a research report published on Thursday.
Health ministries in Israel and Gaza reported Thursday that the poliovirus had been detected in sewage samples from war-hit areas.
The Israeli Health Ministry said poliovirus type 2 had been detected in sewage samples from the Gaza Strip tested in an Israeli laboratory, adding that the World Health Organisation had received similar results.
Um Nahed Abu Shaar, 45, who lives in a tent with her family in Deir el-Bala, has endured flies, the stench of sewage and constant disease.
“We’re not alive,” she said.
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