According to the country’s defense minister, Israel is starting a significant military operation expansion in Gaza and plans to occupy sizable portions of the region.
There will be a mass evacuation of Palestinians from regions of conflict, Israel Katz stated in a statement.
“I call on the people of Gaza to act now to remove Hamas and return all the hostages,” he said in a post on X. The conflict can only be ended in this manner.
He stated that the assault was “expanding to crush and clean the area of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure and capture large areas that will be added to the security zones of the State of Israel” .
A fresh Israeli attack is intensified by the military operation’s expansion in Gaza.
Israel launched many airstrikes on targets around Gaza in March, ending the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that had started in January.
A Palestinian man walks near a bakery that has stopped operating due to a lack of flour and fuel in Gaza City.
Dozens of hostages and hundreds of Palestinian inmates had been freed as part of the agreement, but it fell through before it could proceed to phase two, which called for the release of all hostages and the evacuation of Israeli soldiers from Gaza.
Residents of Gaza who lived in the southern city of Rafah and in the direction of Khan Yunis had already received evacuation warnings from the IDF, advising them to relocate to the shore’s Al-Mawasi region, which had already been designated as a humanitarian zone.
Israeli forces established a sizable buffer zone within Gaza, enlarging the pre-war region surrounding the territory’s perimeter and establishing a sizable security zone in the so-called Netzarim corridor that runs through the center of Gaza.
The most recent battle started on October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and capturing about 250 captives.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry reports that over 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent Israeli onslaught.
