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Israel says it will escalate its war with Hamas despite facing international calls to take over Gaza and end the 22-month conflict.
The plan was announced early on Friday after a cabinet meeting that ran late into the night, besides the full occupation of the Gaza Strip previously discussed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, it shows further escalation of the conflict that began after the terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The Israeli military will “prepared to control Gaza city, distributing humanitarian assistance to civilians outside the combat zone,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement after the meeting.
NBC News previously reported that commercial satellite images showed Israeli forces built up troops and equipment near the border with Gaza to support a new invasion that could be a Hamaslan Palestinian enclave.
Critics said taking over Gaza city would put the remaining hostages Hamas held in further danger, leading Israeli forces to further conflict and increasing the number of Palestinian civilian casualties.
The Israeli announcement comes as two million people in Gaza have already been destroyed, on the brink of hunger, and is causing international rage. The threat of a new attack in Gaza could be aimed at putting Hamas on Israeli terms to pressure the ceasefire.
The war began with a terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, during which Hamas-led extremists killed around 1,200 people and acquiring 251 people. Israel believes that of the 50 remaining hostages in Gaza, around 20 are still alive.
Israeli aviation and ground attacks killed around 61,000 people in Gaza, local health officials said. It is not clear how many fighter jets there are compared to civilians.
Netanyahu said on Thursday that Israel plans to take control of Gaza, but that it will ultimately be handed over the responsibility of governing the Arab army.
In an interview with Jerusalem’s Fox News, Netanyahu said that Israelis would take over Gaza “to ensure our security, to eliminate Hamas,” and “we will not pass it on to Hamas, but to civilian rule, who are not those who advocate for the destruction of Israel.”
He said Israel, which already controls about three-quarters of Gaza, does not want to “maintain” it in the long run.
“We want to have a security line. We don’t want to govern that. We don’t want to be there as governing bodies,” he said. “We want to threaten it and hand it over to the Arab army that properly governs it without giving Gazan a good life. That’s not possible in Hamas.”
Hamas official Osama Hamdan said in an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday that the new measures taken by the Israeli government in Gaza would not be successful.
“The Israeli occupation is trying to break the will of the Palestinian people through more bloodshed and destruction of the homes,” he said. “But that fails.”
Over the past few weeks, global views on Israeli military action in Gaza appear to have changed as images of weakened children have appeared in media around the world.
The world-leading group of hunger, an integrated food security stage class, said last week that “the worst case scenario of hunger” is being unfolded in Gaza.
Finding food has become more difficult and deadly for Palestinians as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US- and Israel-backed organisation, took over the aid distribution process in late May. Hundreds have been killed or injured in recent weeks as they attempted to obtain limited humanitarian aid.
Israeli forces, who say the UN Human Rights Office is responsible for most of the killings, say it is not targeting civilians.
Several aid organizations have denounced the way GHF distributes aid for the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Doctors Without Borders, whose French name, Medesin, sansenses Frontieres, criticised the distribution of GHF aid in a report published Thursday.
“The medical data is clear. This is not aid. It is the organisation of killing,” the report states.
This is a developing story. Please check for updates.
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