(JNS) The Israeli Security Cabinet decided by a “decisive majority” to approve Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to defeat Hamas, including controlling Gaza City, the premier’s office said shortly before 5 a.m. on Friday.

“A decisive majority of Security Cabinet ministers believed that the alternative plan that had been submitted to the Security Cabinet would neither achieve the defeat of Hamas nor the return of the hostages,” according to Netanyahu’s office.

The Israel Defense Forces will prepare for “taking control of Gaza City, while distributing humanitarian assistance to the civilian population outside the combat zones,” the Prime Minister’s Office said.

The US-funded Gaza Humanitarian Foundation does not currently have aid distribution sites in Gaza City.

Netanyahu’s office said that the forum voted on five principles: disarming Hamas, returning all of the living and dead hostages, demilitarizing Gaza, Israeli security control of the Strip and creating an “alternative civil administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.”

Earlier on Thursday, Netanyahu confirmed that Israel intends to take control of the entire Gaza Strip to remove Hamas, and transfer authority to non-hostile “civilian governance.”

When asked whether Israel intends to take control of all of Gaza, the premier told Fox News’s Bill Hemmer, “We intend to, in order to ensure our security.”

The continuation of the war will seek to “remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza and to pass it to civilian governance that is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel,” Netanyahu told Fox News.

“We want to liberate ourselves and liberate the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas,” the prime minister said.

Netanyahu stressed that the Israeli government does not “want to keep it” after taking control of the entire 26-mile-long coastal enclave.

“We want to have a security perimeter,” he said. “We don’t want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly, without threatening us, and giving Gazans a good life. That’s not possible with Hamas.”

David Friedman, a former US ambassador to Israel, stated that “Israel’s objectives in Gaza have been the same since Oct. 7—defeat Hamas, such that it no longer threatens Israel or the people in Gaza and recover all the hostages.

“These goals have not changed even for a single day. To those who criticize Netanyahu’s decision to control Gaza temporarily, what else should he do?” Friedman asked. “There is no hostage deal on the table, and there is no willingness by Hamas to surrender. And the abandonment of Israel by the United Kingdom, Canada and France, along with 27 Democrat senators, gives Hamas no incentive to make a deal.”