TEHRAN - Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on Friday that Israel won’t permit the establishment of a Palestinian state, claiming that such a state would pose a security threat to Israel.

In a post on X, Israel Katz said, “Iran and Hamas have taken over the Palestinian issue.”

He added, “A Palestinian state would mean an Iranian base in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, just like in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq - threatening population centers, flight paths, shipping routes, and economic hubs in Israel.”

These statements by Katz are just pretexts.

The Gaza Strip has been under Israeli complete siege since 2007. It has been controlling entry and exit from Gaza by land, sea and air. It also has been controlling Gaza’s population registry, telecommunication networks and many other aspects of daily life. But it suffered the greatest blow from the Gaza-based Hamas since its 1948 establishment on Oct. 7 last year.

The Oct. 7 attack proved that Israel could not escape the accumulated anger of a small population, no matter that they were under the strictest control to the extent that the Gaza territory got the title of the biggest open-air prison on the earth.

Of course, the world has realized that Israel does not intend to let the Palestinians have their own sovereign state and what Katz says is just false and misleading. His master Benjamin Netanyahu, when addressing the U.S. Congress for the first time as a young prime minister, unequivocally announced that Israel would never allow the creation of a Palestinian state and his statement faced the ovation of American lawmakers.

At that time there were no resistance groups in Yemen and Iraq who have unnerved Israel in addition to Hezbollah of Lebanon.

Katz is smart enough to know that what led to the emergence of resistance groups in Iraq and Yemen were respectively the result of the Daesh attack on Iraq and Syria and the Saudi assault on the Yemenis, who rose against the Sanaa corrupt dictators. The emergence of Hezbollah was also the product of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon for 18 years.

Even around the year that Netanyahu addressed the American Congress diplomats from Israel and Syria met behind closed doors for talks on the return of the occupied Golan Heights to Syria, even though it was clear that Israel had no intention to return the Golan to Syria.

Katz must know that resistance against the Israeli occupation is intrinsic and the longer Israel fails to respect the rights of Palestinians they will become more isolated in the world and face stronger resistance by the future generations both in occupied Palestinian lands and the wider Arab world.

What is the greatest threat to security and even the existence of Israel is a refusal by its extremists to allow Palestinians to have their own state within the 1967 borders. Actually, Israel has taken the path toward extinction by banning the Palestinians from having a portion of their native land to live on.

How many Palestinians can Israel kill in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank? The barbaric war that it has unleashed against the Palestinians in Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack has made Hamas and other resistance groups more popular not just in Gaza but also in the occupied West Bank. This shows that extremists in Israel, including Katz and co-ideologists, have just one alternative and that is ending the apartheid against Palestinians.