Outgoing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday in response to a question about the intentions of the extremist Israeli right-wing, whom the United States has punished in the past by expanding settlements, annexing more land in the occupied West Bank, and settling Gaza, that this would not be acceptable to the United States.

“What I can say is that our policy is very clear, including the principles that I laid out months ago at the beginning of the conflict in Tokyo, which is that there can be no permanent occupation of Gaza, that Israel must withdraw, that the territory of Gaza should not be altered. And of course, it is clear that Hamas cannot run Gaza, which it uses as a base for terrorism,” Blinken said in his interview with CNN.

“The ceasefire itself requires Israeli forces to withdraw and then fully withdraw, assuming a permanent ceasefire is reached,” Blinken explained. “But that’s what’s so important about this post-conflict plan, the need to reach an agreement on the arrangements for it, because there has to be something in place that gives the Israelis confidence that they can withdraw permanently and not allow Hamas to come back and not really repeat the last decade.”

In response to a question about President-elect Donald Trump’s tweet about former official and current Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs saying that Netanyahu is basically a vile, rude, dark person and all that, and then alluding to the fact that he was the one who got the ceasefire deal done, not you, Blinken said: “First of all, I focus less on personalities and more on policies. What does a country actually do? It doesn’t matter who the individual is. What they actually do matters. Secondly, I think what has been misunderstood around the world is the attribution of policies that Israel is pursuing that many people don’t like to one individual or maybe a small group of individuals. I think that’s a reflection of 70, 80, 90 percent of Israelis after the shock of October 7th, and I think attributing that to any one individual is a mistake and actually leads to the wrong conclusions.”

“This is the state of the country (Israel), and the policies of the government actually reflect the state of the country, even for many people who do not like the prime minister. This is one thing, and it is important to understand. We are dealing with a society that is traumatized, just as Palestinian society is traumatized by the horrors that children, women and men have had to endure in Gaza, after they were caught in the crossfire of Hamas, which was not Hamas’s doing, and which it was unable to stop.”

“I can’t speak to individual cases,” Blinken said of State Department staff protests over U.S.-enabled genocide. “But I can say, obviously, that we were concerned — more than just concerned — about the way that Israel conducted itself, and we recognize first and foremost that this is a unique environment, one that we’ve never really seen before, where people are trapped inside Gaza. In almost every other situation in the world, people are able to flee harm. They become refugees in a neighboring country. That’s not a good thing, but it’s better than being caught in that kind of spiral.”