Maliki said the priority was engaging the international community on to help provide emergency relief to Palestinians and then looking at how Gaza could be reconstructed.
“Later, when the situation is right, then we could contemplate that option. But what comes first is how to salvage the situation. How to salvage innocent Palestinian lives. How to stop this insane war and how to be able to protect Palestinian people,” he said.
“That’s why I think Hamas should understand this, and I do believe that they are in support of the idea to establish, today, a technocratic government.
“A government that is based on experts, individuals who are completely committed to take up the reins and the responsibility for this period – a difficult one – and to move the whole country into a period of transition into a stable kind of situation where, at the end, we might be able to think about elections.
“And after elections, the outcome of the elections will determine the type of government that will govern the state of Palestine later.”
Maliki is in Geneva to attend the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The war in Gaza began after the Hamas militant group that controls the Palestinian territory launched an attack on Oct 7 that killed about 1,160 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli figures.
Hamas militants also took hostages, 130 of whom remain in Gaza.
Israel’s retaliatory bombardment and ground offensive in Gaza have killed at least 29,954 people, most of them women and children, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
