Israel says it will take over Gaza City, escalating its war with Hamas even as it faces growing domestic and international outrage over the 22-month conflict.
The Israeli military “will prepare for taking control of Gaza City while distributing humanitarian assistance to the civilian population outside the combat zones,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement early Friday after a Cabinet meeting that ran late into the night.
While Israeli officials announced that Israeli forces would take Gaza City, the largest in the enclave, they appear to be casting a wider net. The plan envisions the disarming of Hamas, which has run the enclave since 2007, the return of all the hostages, and the demilitarization of the entire Gaza Strip and Israeli control of it.
It also calls for the eventual establishment of an as-yet-unnamed Arab authority in the strip.
NBC News reported earlier that commercial satellite images showed the Israeli military building up troops and equipment near the border with Gaza that would support a possible new ground invasion of the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave.
The Israeli move marks another escalation of the conflict, which began after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw around 250 taken hostage. Israel believes about 20 of the 50 hostages remaining in Gaza are still alive.
The Israel's air and ground offensive since then has killed more than 61,000 people in Gaza, more than half of them women and children, according to local health officials.
Israel has also upended the aid distribution system in the enclave, and hunger has surged. Last week, the world’s leading body on hunger, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, sounded the alarm that the “worst-case scenario of famine” was now unfolding in Gaza under Israel’s deadly military offensive and crippling aid restrictions.
Reactions to the plan
Echoing President Donald Trump's comments on Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told CBS News before the Gaza City announcement that the Israeli government should make its own decisions about taking control of the Gaza Strip, saying, “it’s not our job to tell them what they should or should not do.”
The United States remains the biggest supplier of arms to Israel, with American spending on Israel’s military operations reaching more than $17.9 billion from Oct. 7 last year to Sept. 30, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
Hostage families, many of whom worry a new offensive will endanger the remaining living hostages in Gaza, protested the government overnight, with police using water cannons and tear gas to disperse the crowds.
Calling the decision a “disaster,” Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said it would “take many long months, lead to the deaths of the hostages, the killing of many soldiers, cost the Israeli taxpayer tens of billions, and result in diplomatic collapse.”
Western governments including Australia and the U.K. also criticized the move, with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying it would “only bring more bloodshed.”
Urging the international community to step in, Turkey also condemned Israel’s ongoing military operations, describing them as part of an “expansionist and genocidal policy.”
Earlier in an interview with Fox News in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said that Israelis “intend to” take over Gaza “in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there” and pass the enclave “to civilian governance that is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel.”
He said Israel, which already controls about three-quarters of Gaza, does not want to “keep” it long term.
“We want to have a security perimeter. We don’t want to govern it. We don’t want to be there as a governing body,” he said. “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.”
A senior Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, said in an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday that any new steps the Israeli government takes in Gaza will not succeed.
“The Israeli occupation seeks to break the will of the Palestinian people through more bloodshed and destruction of homes,” he said. “But it will fail.”
In recent weeks, global opinion about Israel’s military actions in Gaza appears to have shifted as images of emaciated children have appeared in media outlets around the world.
Finding food has become more difficult and deadly for Palestinians following the introduction of a new aid distribution system led by the American and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in late May, after Israel lifted a two-and-half-month blockade.
According to the United Nations, 1,200 Palestinians have been killed and more than 8,100 injured since then while trying to obtain limited humanitarian aid.
The Israeli military, which the United Nations human rights office says is responsible for most of the killings, says it does not target civilians.
Several aid organizations have blamed GHF’s aid distribution methods for the death of Palestinian civilians. Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid organization also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, criticized GHF’s aid distribution in a report issued Thursday.
“The medical data is clear. This is not aid. It is orchestrated killing,” the report said.
GHF called the group’s accusations “false and disgraceful,” saying they were aiding Hamas.
