Netanyahu warns PA against supporting terrorism after Hamas elimination

Benjamin Netanyahu stood before a camera and delivered a message meant for the Palestinian Authority: once Hamas is gone, he said, there will be rules. No denial of what happened. No support for terrorism. No teaching children to hate Israel. The warning came after weeks of escalating rhetoric between Israeli and Palestinian leadership, with the Prime Minister now drawing a line in the sand about what comes next.

The immediate provocation was a statement from the Palestinian Foreign Ministry denying that Hamas carried out the October 7 massacre. Instead, the ministry claimed Israel had fabricated evidence and bombed its own citizens at the Supernova music festival to justify the war on Gaza. Netanyahu seized on this denial as evidence of bad faith. He called Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a "Holocaust denier" for refusing to condemn the attack and for now, through his government's statements, appearing to deny the massacre itself. The language was harsh and deliberate—Netanyahu was not interested in diplomatic subtlety.

The numbers behind the conflict had grown grimmer by the 46th day of fighting. The October 7 attack had killed roughly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and resulted in the abduction of 240 hostages—men, women, and children taken into Gaza. Fifty-two Israeli soldiers had been killed in the subsequent fighting. On the Palestinian side, the health ministry reported at least 13,000 dead, more than 5,500 of them children. Another 6,000 or more were missing or trapped beneath collapsed buildings. Injuries exceeded 30,000. The scale of civilian suffering was immense and undeniable, even as Netanyahu and Abbas traded accusations about who was responsible for what.

On the question of the hostages, Netanyahu denied media reports suggesting a deal was imminent. He called such reports "incorrect" and said the public would be told if negotiations bore fruit. Families of the captives had spent five days marching from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a physical expression of their anguish and their demand for action. Netanyahu addressed them directly: "We are marching with you," he said. "All of the people of Israel are marching with you." It was a gesture toward solidarity, though it did not resolve the fundamental question of how or when the hostages might come home.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza was deepening in real time. On November 19, 31 premature infants in critical condition were transferred from Gaza's main hospital to Egypt—a small mercy in a landscape of suffering. But more than 250 patients with severe infections remained stranded at the hospital after Israeli forces had entered the compound searching for Hamas operations. The war had created conditions where even basic medical care had become a matter of survival and chance.

Netanyahu's warning about the future governance of Gaza was, in effect, a statement of intent about the terms of any eventual settlement. The Palestinian Authority, or whoever administered Gaza after Hamas was eliminated, would have to meet Israeli conditions: renounce terrorism, stop paying stipends to families of militants, end anti-Israel education in schools. Whether such conditions could be negotiated, accepted, or enforced remained an open question. For now, the war continued, the hostages remained captive, and the casualties mounted.