Ammon News - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will have “overall security responsibility” over the Gaza Strip “for an indefinite period” after the war against Hamas ends.

“I think Israel for an indefinite period will have the overall security responsibility because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t have it. When we don’t have that security responsibility, what we have is the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we couldn’t imagine,” he tells ABC News.

"As far as practical, little pauses — an hour here, an hour there. We’ve had them before. We’ll check the circumstances [to have additional pauses] in order to enable humanitarian goods to come in or our hostages, individual hostages to leave,” Netanyahu adds, becoming the first Israeli official to confirm that Jerusalem agreed to a temporary pause in fighting to allow a pair of hostages released by Hamas to be able to travel safely to the border, as revealed by a US official last week.

Netanyahu then indicates that he would agree to a ceasefire if Hamas releases all of the roughly 240 hostages being held in Gaza. “There would be a ceasefire for that purpose, and we’re waiting for that to happen. It hasn’t happened so far,” he says.

For the 32nd day of the war on Gaza, Israel is intensifying its raids on the Strip, targeting residential neighborhoods, vital facilities, and hospitals, which has killed more than 10,000 people so far, most of them women and children.