After days of a renewed aerial and (more recently) ground forces campaign in the Gaza Strip, which has already killed a reported nearly 600 Palestinians, Israel’s defense chief has warned Hamas that if it doesn’t immediately return the hostages the IDF military will beginning annexing the Gaza Strip.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said Friday that the Israel Defense Forces would “seize additional territories [in Gaza], while evacuating the population” if Hamas doesn’t sign on to revised terms of a hostage-for-ceasefire deal. “The more Hamas continues its refusal, the more territory it will lose and be annexed to Israel,” Katz warned. He said it would start through the expansion of border “security zones” in order to bring them under “permanent Israeli control.”
Katz is demanding for the first time that Hamas “release all the hostages, both living and dead, in advance and in two stages, with a ceasefire in between.”
Hamas has blamed Israeli side for pulling out of the ceasefire which had been on for two months since January, before it was supposed to enter a phase two, with a path to permanent peace. The Israelis have grown impatient.
Crucially, Katz has referenced Trump’s Gaza mass expulsion plan in announcing the potential for military annexation. He said the IDF will “intensify” operations against Hamas and use “all military and civilian pressure, including evacuation of the Gaza population south and implementing United States President Trump’s voluntary migration plan for Gaza residents.”
The army has been instructed “to seize additional areas in Gaza, evacuate the population, and expand security zones around Gaza to protect Israeli communities and [Israeli army] soldiers,” the defense chief was quoted in local media as saying further.
“The more Hamas persists in its refusal to release the hostages, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed to Israel,” he warned.
It looks like Israeli leaders are seizing the opportunity and initiative to push Palestinians out in the wake of Trump’s previous comments on turning the enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
But the administration has been somewhat quiet on the ultra-controversial plan of late, with Trump telling reporters most recently that “nobody is expelling any Palestinians” in response to a question on whether he still stands by his remarks which were tantamount to calling for ethnic cleansing of the enclave. “We’re working hard with Israel… to see [how] we can solve the problem,” Trump had explained in the mid-March exchange.
The White House position on Gazans being expelled to other countries is based on the prior explanation that “Gaza is currently uninhabitable and residents cannot humanely live in a territory covered in debris and unexploded ordnance,” in the earlier words of US National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes.
But even many Republicans see the plan as completely unrealistic and absurd, given that for starters it would ensure years more of brutal war, and the likelihood that conflict would spiral over into other Arab countries.
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