Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Security Office voted to increase the offensive against the Palestinian militant group Hamas in, to the point of taking all the enclave and keeping their territories, an Israeli authority said on Monday.
A report by the Israeli public broadcaster Canciting authorities with knowledge of the details, he said that the new plan is gradual and would take months, with the forces first concentrating in an area of the beaten enclave.
This schedule could leave the door open to a ceasefire and hostage liberation negotiations before US President Donald Trump’s visit to the region next week, according to Security Office Minister Zeev Elkin.
“There is still a window of opportunity until President Trump completes his visit to the Middle East if Hamas understands that we are serious,” Elkin told Kan on Monday.
Already in control of about one third of the territory of Gaza, Israel resumed land operations in March, after the collapse of a US-backed cease-fire that had interrupted the fighting for two months. Since then, the country has imposed a total blockade of help to the enclave.
Elkin said that instead of launching attacks on specific areas and then abandoning them, as the military has so far done, the Israeli forces will now keep the territories they take, until Hamas is defeated or agrees to disarm and leave Gaza.
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Hamas dismissed this possibility. Israel has not yet shown a clear view of the postwar in Gaza while facing international pressure to end a campaign that has shifted most of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants and made it dependent on help supplies that have been decreasing rapidly from blocking.
The Israeli authority said that the newly approved offensive plan would displace Gaza’s civilian population to the south and prevent humanitarian aid from falling into Hamas’s hands, although the blockade has not yet been raised.
On Sunday, the United Nations rejected what they said was a new help distribution plan on what they described as Israeli centers.
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On Monday, Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in X that Israel was demanding that the UN and non-governmental organizations close their aid distribution system in Gaza.
“They want to manipulate and militarize all the help to civilians, forcing us to deliver supplies through centers designed by the Israeli military, as soon as the government agrees to reopen the tickets. The NRC will defend our humanitarian principles and, with all our colleagues, will refuse to participate in this new scheme.”
