Israel says it will take over Gaza City, escalating its war with Hamas even as it faces growing international calls to end the 22-month conflict.
The plan, announced early Friday local time after a Cabinet meeting that ran late into the night, stops short of the full occupation of the Gaza Strip that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had discussed earlier. But it marks a further escalation of the conflict, which began after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.
The Israeli military “will prepare for taking control of Gaza City while distributing humanitarian assistance to the civilian population outside the combat zones,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement after the meeting.
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.
Critics have said taking over Gaza City would further endanger the remaining hostages held by Hamas, entrench the Israeli military even further into the conflict and result in a higher number of Palestinian civilian casualties.
The Israeli announcement comes as the 2 million residents of Gaza, much of which has already been destroyed, are on the brink of famine, drawing international outrage. The threat of a new offensive in Gaza may be partly intended to pressure Hamas into a ceasefire on Israeli terms.
The war began with the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, during which Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people and abducted 251 others. Israel believes about 20 of the 50 hostages remaining in Gaza are still alive.
The Israeli air and ground offensive has killed more than 61,000 people in Gaza, including thousands of children, according to local health officials, whose numbers are considered credible by the United Nations.
Gaza City, which before the war was the largest in the enclave, has already been targeted by multiple Israeli bombings and raids. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the city after being told to evacuate early in the war, but many have since returned and it is unclear how many are living there now.
An Israeli offensive there could displace tens of thousands more people and make it even more difficult to deliver humanitarian aid.
Netanyahu had said Thursday that Israel plans to take control of Gaza in its entirety but ultimately hand over the responsibility of governing it to Arab forces.
In an interview on Fox News in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said 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.
The world’s leading body on hunger, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, said last week that the “worst-case scenario of famine” is now unfolding in Gaza.
Finding food has become more difficult and deadly for Palestinians after an American and Israeli-backed organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), took over the aid distribution process in late May, after Israel lifted a two-and-a-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. Of the 46 people killed across Gaza on Thursday, 20 were waiting for aid near U.S. distribution points, a spokesperson for the Gaza Health Ministry, Dr. Khalil al-Daqran, told NBC News.
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
