UN chief calls Israel’s Gaza City plan ‘dangerous escalation’ as security council to meet on Saturday – as it happened

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The UK's ambassador to Israel has said extending the war in Gaza would only lead to more deaths and that occupying Gaza would be a huge mistake".

Simon Walters was quoted by Israel's Haaretz newspaper as saying on Thursday:

The IDF has achieved all that it can achieve in Gaza, and extending the war any further will simply lead to more deaths. Deaths of soldiers, deaths of Palestinians, deaths of hostages.

If you want to defeat Hamas, you cannot achieve that through military force. You need to use politics and diplomacy and you need to give the people of Gaza an alternative to Hamas.

We are working with friends, allies in Europe and in the Middle East to generate a real plan for what happens after the fighting stops, after the war.

It needs to be a description of what the governments will be for Gaza. That has to be governance by Palestinians who are not members of Hamas with a role for the Palestinian Authority.