CAIRO, July 26. /TASS/. The government of Palestine will reject any initiative that implies separation of the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, said Mahmoud al-Habbash, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

"Palestinians will never accept a situation in which the West Bank is separated from the Gaza Strip," the Al-Qahira Al-Ekhbariya TV channel quoted him as saying.

Al-Habbash added that the government of Palestine, headquartered in the West Bank city of Ramallah, "will never agree to a scenario that puts Gaza outside the Palestinian autonomy’s jurisdiction."

According to al-Habbash, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "does not want Palestinians to have any true authority over their own land" and is "persistently working to abolish the Palestinian Autonomy in the West Bank, through its policy of creating more and more Jewish settlements in this region."

Tensions flared up again in the Middle East on October 7, 2023, when militants from the Gaza Strip-based radical Palestinian movement Hamas staged a surprise attack on Israeli territory from Gaza, killing residents of Israeli border settlements and taking over 240 hostages, including women, children and the elderly. Hamas described its attack as a response to the aggressive actions of Israeli authorities against the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City. In response, Israel declared a total blockade of the Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million Palestinians before the crisis, and has been delivering air strikes on Gaza as well as some parts of Lebanon and Syria. Clashes have also been reported on the West Bank.