WASHINGTON: The United States and Israel want an interim government in Gaza, backed by the United Nations, after eliminating Hamas and want friendly Arab governments to ensure the new set-up is not `radicalised`.

The suggestion for installing such a set-up in Gaza started appearing in the US media soon after the Oct 7 raid in Israel but it gained wider acceptance after senior US officials openly talked about a new arrangement in the Palestinian territory in Sunday`s talk shows.

US Secretary for State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin discussed this in some details and both indicated that Washington was working with regional and global powers to define a future set-up for Gaza. During an appearance on ABC`s `This Week, Secretary Austin was asked by an anchor about the next phases of the crisis after the Israeli ground offensive.

`Well, it`s got it has to transition to something else. ...

Hamas is a terrorist organisation. And this is not the Palestinian people. ... At the end of the day, Israel wants Hamas to be gone from Gaza, Mr Austin replied. `What does it transition to? Left to be defined, but I think that`s an issue for the region and for the world to work together on,` he added.

Secretary Blinken, while talking about Gaza`s political future in NBC`s `Meet The Press,` said Israel did not want to govern Gaza once the war was over, but it did not want to hand Gaza back to Hamas either.

`There are different ideas out there about what could follow, but all of that I think needs to be worked, and it`s something that needs to be worked even as Israelis deal-ing with the current threat, he said. `Something needs to be found that ensures that Hamas can`t do this again. But that also doesn`t revert to Israeli governance of Gaza, which they do not want and do not intend to do.

In Israel, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant also said that his country had no long-term plans to control Gaza after the ground offensive..

Addressing the long-term plans for the territory with Israeli lawmakers on Friday, Mr Gallant outlined a threephase approach that includes air strikes and ground invasion and a new set-up in Gaza.

Reports in the US media suggest that the proposed set-up would be an interim government backed by the United Nations and supported by Arab governments such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan.

Diplomatic sources told Dawn that Washington was particularly keen on involving other Arab governments as doing so would also keep the Abraham Accords alive.

The Abraham Accords are bilateral agreements on Arab-Israeli normalisation signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on Sept 15, 2020.

Washington wants Saudi Arabia and other states to join the accords, although the Oct 7 Hamas raid seem to have derailed the process.

Washington fears that a ground assault without a future plan could destabilise the entire region and could bog down Israel in a long conflict that it cannot win. In a recent statement US President Joe Biden urged 1srael to formulate a long-term plan and expressed concern that it will make similar mistakes as the US did after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks in Afghanistan.

Washington captured Afghanistan without much resistance but got trapped in a 20-year-long war and had to leave the country withoutachieving the end result a friendly Afghanistan. `I caution this: While you feel that rage, don`t be consumed by it, Mr Biden told Israelis during a visit to the country last week.

`After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States.

While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.` Commenting on Mr Biden`s statement, some US media outlets reported that the fate of Gaza after the likely ground invasion has become one of the most pressing worries for American officials. William Usher, a former senior Middle East analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, told the Bloomberg news agency that establishing an interim government would be incredibly difficult, and getting Arab governments` acquiescence would be even more of a challenge.

`A plan that involved Arab governments would require a major shift in how Arab states accept risk and work with one another,` he said. `It would also require a leap oftrustby Jerusalem a commodity in short supply.` The report noted that Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid has suggested handing control of Gaza back to the Palestinian Authority, which was defeated by Hamas in elections there in 2006. `I think in the end the best thing is that the Palestinian Authority goes back into Gaza,` Mr Lapid said at a media briefing in Tel Aviv on Thursday. Jake Sullivan, President Biden`s National Security Adviser, said on CBS on Sunday that the Palestinian people in Gaza deserved a leadership that allowed them to live in peace and security. `What that exactly looks like going forward, I`m not in a position to say today,` Mr Sullivan said, `But it is the right question to be asking now, as this unfolds, because we have to think not just about the immediate term, but about the long-term, too.