Israel’s Cabinet ministers okay plans to seize entire Gaza Strip
Tel Aviv: Israel approved plans Monday to capture the entire Gaza Strip and to stay in the Palestinian territory for an unspecified amount of time, two Israeli officials said, a move that, if implemented, would vastly expand Israel’s operations there and likely draw fierce international opposition.
Israeli Cabinet ministers approved the plan in an early morning vote, hours after the Israeli military chief said the army was calling up tens of thousands of reserve soldiers.
The new plan, which the officials said was meant to help Israel achieve its war aims of defeating Hamas and freeing hostages held in Gaza, also calls for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to move to Gaza’s south. That would likely amount to their forcible displacement and exacerbate an already dire humanitarian crisis.A third person, a defence official, said the new plan would not begin until after US President Donald Trump wraps up his expected visit to the Middle East this month, allowing for the possibility that Israel might agree to a ceasefire in the meantime.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 after a decades-long occupation and then imposed a blockade on the territory along with Egypt. Capturing and potentially occupying the territory again for an indefinite period would not only further dash hopes for Palestinian statehood, it would embed Israel inside a population that is deeply hostile to it and raise questions about how Israel plans to govern the territory, especially at a time when it is considering how to implement Trump’s vision to take over Gaza.
Since Israel ended a ceasefire with the Hamas militant group in mid-March, Israel has unleashed fierce strikes on the territory that have killed hundreds. It has captured swaths of territory and now controls roughly 50 per cent of Gaza. Before the truce ended, Israel halted all humanitarian aid into the territory, including food, fuel and water, setting off what is believed to the be the worst humanitarian crisis in nearly 19 months of war.
