Netanyahu says any future Palestinian state would be a platform to destroy Israel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday he wanted peace with Palestinians but described any future independent state as a platform to destroy Israel and for that reason sovereign power of security must remain with Israel.

Speaking at the White House, where he met U.S. President Donald Trump, Netanyahu described the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, where Hamas was in control, as evidence of what Palestinians would do with a state.

Trump said, "I don't know" when he was asked by reporters if a two-state solution was possible and referred the question to Netanyahu.

Netanyahu said: “After October 7th, people said the Palestinians have a state, a Hamas state in Gaza and look what they did with it. They didn't build it up. They built down into bunkers, into terror tunnels after which they massacred our people, raped our women, beheaded our men, invaded our cities and our towns, our kibbutzim and did horrendous massacres, the kind of which we didn't see since World War Two and the Nazis, the Holocaust. So people aren't likely to say, 'Let's just give them another state.' It'll be a platform to destroy Israel.

"We will work out a peace with our Palestinian neighbours, those who don't want to destroy us and we will work out a peace in which our security, the sovereign power of security, always remains in our hands," Netanyahu said. 

"Now people will say, 'It's not a complete state, it's not a state, it's not that.' We don't care. We vowed never again. Never again is now. It's not going to happen again.”

Palestinians have long sought to create an independent state in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem through a U.S.-mediated peace process. Many accuse Israel of having destroyed Palestinian statehood prospects through increased settlement building in the West Bank and by levelling much of Gaza during the current war. Israel rejects this.

Cabinet ministers in Netanyahu's Likud party called last week for Israel to annex the Israeli-occupied West Bank before the Knesset recesses at the end of July. Israel's pro-settler politicians have been emboldened by the return to the White House of Trump, who has proposed Palestinians leave Gaza, a suggestion widely condemned across the Middle East and beyond.

The Gaza war erupted when Hamas attacked southern Israel in October 2023, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Some 50 hostages remain in Gaza, with 20 believed to be alive.

Israel's subsequent assault on the Palestinian enclave has killed over 57,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry. Most of Gaza's population has been displaced by the war.

Trump hosted Netanyahu at a White House dinner on Monday, while Israeli officials held indirect negotiations with Hamas in Qatar aimed at securing a U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal. 

(Reporting by Howard Goller; Additional reporting by Rami Ayyub; Editing by Michael Perry)