The remarks, which constitute an explicit call to occupy Gaza, were made by Katz during his visit to the military recruitment office in the Tel Hashomer area near Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening, according to a statement from his office published by the Hebrew website Walla.
Katz said: "We need the IDF to be inside Gaza and its environs to protect Israeli towns, and to have the ability, as in Judea and Samaria (the biblical name for the West Bank), to operate security operations anywhere inside Gaza. We ourselves must be responsible for security in Gaza."
Katz's remarks about the Gaza occupation came hours after Haaretz reported on Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had presented the security cabinet with a US-approved plan to occupy parts of the Gaza Strip. It also followed statements by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Tuesday that Tel Aviv is "closer than ever" to reoccupying the Gaza Strip and settling there.
The proposal to occupy parts of Gaza comes after controversial statements by US President Donald Trump, in which he said that "Israel's decision to abandon Gaza twenty years ago was unwise," referring to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
Katz claimed that: "The goal is to defeat Hamas. Neither its military nor its civilian wing should determine what happens in Gaza." He claimed that "the issue of the kidnapped soldiers lies at the heart of the decision-making process... There are kidnapped soldiers, and all our activity is also linked to the need to rescue them."
The Israeli opposition and former military leaders accuse Netanyahu of sabotaging the prisoner exchange deal with Hamas in the Gaza Strip for political reasons.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been waging a war of genocide in Gaza, including killing, starvation, destruction, and forced displacement, ignoring all international calls and orders from the International Court of Justice to halt it.
The US-backed genocide left approximately 206,000 Palestinians dead or wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 9,000 missing, in addition to hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and a famine that claimed the lives of many.
