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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has all but sealed the fate of the remaining captives still alive — believed to number 20 — and the bodies of some 30 more whose remains will never be returned to their families.

The 148 individuals kidnapped by Hamas and its camp followers on Oct. 7, 2023, who’ve been released in the 22 months since, were all liberated through diplomatic negotiations and temporary ceasefires. But Netanyahu and his far-right cabinet ministers aren’t having any more of that. They want Hamas crushed and completely eradicated, uprooted and extracted from their remaining redoubts, slaughtered as necessary.

I shed no tears for Hamas fighters, but the cleansing of Gaza as envisioned by Netanyahu — seizing Gaza City, displacing upward of 800,000 Palestinians — will cause untold deaths of Israeli soldiers, incalculable deaths of Palestinian civilians, and render Israeli even more of a pariah state internationally. It might save Netanyahu’s political bacon, though.

An emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Sunday denounced those plans for Gaza City but did not place a resolution on the table — a measure the United States has used its veto power to block on five previous occasions.

Increasingly, even before Netanyahu announced last week his intention to expand the war in Gaza by occupying it, taking control of the enclave by force, Israeli military, security and political leaders, past and present, have damned the plan as inoperable, even if the Jewish state can immediately call up thousands more reservists within a matter of days.

Military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, has objected strenuously. Following a meeting of Israel’s top military brass on Thursday, media reports from Israel quoted the general at length.

Occupying the Strip “would drag Israel into a black hole — taking responsibility of two million Palestinians, requiring a yearlong clearing operation, exposing soldiers to guerrilla warfare and, most dangerously, jeopardizing the hostages.’’

Zamir said the army is in the final days of the offensive launched in May, which was far more limited than the proposal approved by the cabinet on Friday.

“We are not dealing with theory; we are dealing with matters of life and death, with the defence of the state, and we do so while looking directly into the eyes of our soldiers and the citizens of our country.”

In a weekend interview with the New York Times, Gadi Shamni, a retired major general of the Israel Defense Forces, said: “This won’t bring back the hostages and it won’t lead to the defeat of Hamas or make it give up its weapons. What will this do? It will create more bereaved families, it will harm Israel’s standing in the world, it will undermine the economy, and it will deepen the crisis of trust between the government and the military.’’

Netanyahu is hell-bent, though, as he made clear in a bullish press conference with foreign media on Sunday.

The prime minister may be besieged by protests within and without Israel, but he is doggedly pressing on, despite all the warnings, the skepticism, the firing of his popular previous defence minister, and the entreaties from hostage families who have called for a nationwide strike next Sunday.

Netanyahu’s purpose in meeting with the media, he said, was to “puncture the lies and tell the truth.’’ And yes, there has been an abundance of lies surrounding the deprivations in Gaza, the government’s alleged sinister scheme to starve out Palestinians, the purported ethnic cleansing of the Strip. But the avowed intention to take over Gaza City isn’t a lie, forcing hundreds of thousands more into displacement. Upward of 61,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and fighters. That might be a dubious figure but there’s no denying the intolerable civilian death and suffering.

“The truth is, Hamas still has thousands of armed terrorists in Gaza,’’ said Netanyahu. “It vows to repeat the savagery of the October 7 massacre and to do so again and again and again … No nation can accept a genocidal organization, an organization committed to its annihilation, a stone’s throw from its citizens. Our goal is not to occupy Gaza. Our goal is to free Gaza. Free it from Hamas terrorists.”

That is an accurate statement. But Netanyahu’s version of the truth is profoundly suspect. The actual goal, according to many analysts and informed commentators, is to empty Gaza of Palestinians or force them into displacement satellites and make the Strip part of a Greater Israel with Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank.

“The war can end tomorrow if Hamas lays down its arms and releases all its remaining hostages,’’ Netanyahu continued. “Gaza will be demilitarized. Israel would have overriding security responsibility. A security zone will be established on Gaza’s border with Israel to prevent future terrorist incursions. A civilian administration will be established in Gaza that will seek to live in peace with Israel. That’s our plan for the day after Hamas.’’

Except Netanyahu made no mention of the fact that the intelligence disaster of Oct. 7 happened on his watch, that he had in fact for years propped up Hamas as a bulwark against the Palestinian Authority and its decrepit, corrupt president, Mahmoud Abbas.

It is indeed laughable that the Palestinian Authority should be advanced by international leaders as some kind of placeholder government under Abbas, who two years ago blamed the Holocaust on the “social role’’ of Jewish moneylenders. So too the performative theatre undertaken by Prime Minister Mark Carney, France and the United Kingdom in announcing unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state by September, if certain conditions are met — conditions that Hamas will never accept and which would reward terrorism.

Netanyahu blamed Hamas (true) and the United Nations (true) for millions of pounds of food aid that had been rotting on the Gaza border because the UN was unwilling to deliver it, a responsibility foolishly laid upon private contractors via the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint Israel-U.S. operation that has seen civilians killed as mobs surged toward food distribution points, through corridors that were supposed to be safe but aren’t.

“Two million people are now getting access to humanitarian aid,’’ Netanyahu claimed. “But I’ll tell you who isn’t. The only ones that are being deliberately starved in Gaza are our hostages, by Hamas monsters.’’

Netanyahu, however, conceded that Israel is losing — has already lost — the propaganda war, to a considerable extent because Hamas and its global acolytes have played that game more effectively. This was always as conceived by the Oct. 7 atrocity — drawing Israel into a devastating military response that would sicken the world and isolate Israel, torpedo peace negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and dramatically advance aspirations for a sovereign Palestinian state. Which is what Canada and 10 other Group of 20 industrialized countries have already done or avowed, along with 147 out of 193 UN member nations that already recognize Palestine.

While Netanyahu said he will now allow foreign reporters into Gaza — it’s unclear what freedom of movement they would have to document the horrors — what he didn’t articulate is how the hostages can be reached and safely removed from harm. “The move that I’m talking about I think has the possibility of getting them out. We’re talking about how to get the remaining hostages alive as we close in on Hamas. There are various ways, creative ways, that I think this can be done. But I won’t get into that now.’’

One alternative to dislodging Hamas is for an alliance of Arab nations to take over governance responsibility as part of an international security mission once Hamas is definitively toppled. So far there have been no takers. And Netanyahu knows that assignment would be perilous for Arab regimes.

“They can talk about the day after until eternity. No one’s going to go in there unless we finish Hamas.’’

The truth is, Netanyahu doesn’t want an independent Palestinian state of laws and political governance any more than Hamas does.