Israel’s security cabinet has approved plans to take full military control of Gaza and to force the entire 2.3 million-strong population south, starting with an initial offensive and siege on its largest city, which they will empty by the symbolic anniversary of 7 October, according to sources briefed on the discussions.
The plan was pushed through early Friday after a tense 10-hour marathon meeting, where Benjamin Netanyahu faced fierce resistance from his own chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, a source briefed on the meeting told The Independent.
He said it would put the hostages’ lives at risk, damage international legitimacy, and deplete reserve soldiers. There are also concerns there are no guarantees of “total victory” and instead it will embroil Israel indefinitely in Gaza, impacting Israel’s global standing and making it even more of a pariah state.
The proposal has already faced local and global outrage: Keir Starmer said hours after the announcement it will “only bring more bloodshed”, and the UN Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, said it will lead to “more massive forced displacement, more killing, more unbearable suffering, senseless destruction and atrocity crimes”.
Civilians in Gaza described how they need “a miracle to save us”, and the families of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas, some of whom chained themselves to gates outside the cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Thursday night, called it “a colossal catastrophe for both the hostages and our soldiers”.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said publicly the main five goals are: Israel’s security control of the entire Strip, disarming Hamas, returning the hostages, demilitarisation of Gaza, and “the establishment of an alternative civil administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority”.
In practice, sources briefed on the discussion said the Israeli military plan to begin “gradually” at first – ordering the population of Gaza City to move and corral south of the tiny 25-mile enclave, which The Independent saw from the sky is already overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of displaced families living in makeshift shelters.
The focus of the initial military offensive will be carried out by the symbolic date of 7 October 2025, after which a siege will be imposed on Gaza City and army forces “will manoeuvre in it,” according to sources and reports.
During the talks, despite backlash from Israeli military chief Zamir, who proposed a watered-down version of partial military occupation, some ministers at the meeting claimed they would not settle for anything less than the full military occupation of the entire Strip.
There were some who also expressed anger at the increase of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
The same source told The Independent that the United States, the biggest ally and supplier of weapons, had been informed on some details beforehand.
According to the United Nations, over 86 percent of Gaza is already an Israeli-militarised zone, under displacement orders or in areas where these overlap – this new plan would see the army push into the final scraps left of the destroyed enclave.
It will also see the forced evacuation and mass displacement of approximately a million civilians believed to be sheltering in the north, including in Gaza City, to the already overcrowded south. Prominent rights groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have said the forced displacement of Palestinian civilians constitutes a crime against humanity.
Amnesty has also warned that the Israel’s blockade and use of starvation as a “weapon of war” is a part of an ongoing genocide, something Israel has repeatedly and vehemently denied.
In Gaza City, which will be the focus of the attack, families already displaced five or six times said they were praying for a miracle as they cannot survive another renewed offensive or forced evacuation order.
“We feel like we’re dead. Displacement is another death for me. It’s literally death,” said Hanaa al-Ghoul, 40, in tears. “I have no intention of moving south. Repeating the life of displacement in the south means feeling death every day. I can’t do it,” she added.
The plan has faced mass backlash from the families of the hostages and captives still held in Gaza, who said the decision was leading towards “a colossal catastrophe” for their relatives and the soldiers . There are around 50 hostages left in Gaza, only 20 are believed to still be alive, although there are fears that the true number is much less.
They said that by choosing military escalation over negotiation, the government had left their loved ones at the mercy of the militant group Hamas who killed over 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage on 7 October, according to Israeli estimates. It “means abandoning the hostages, while completely ignoring the repeated warnings from military leadership and the clear will of the majority of the Israeli public”.
“Our government is leading us toward a colossal catastrophe for both the hostages and our soldiers. The cabinet chose last night to embark on another march of recklessness, on the backs of the hostages, the soldiers, and Israeli society as a whole,” they added.
Israeli official sources said last week there was already pushback from among the reservists, “exhausted by the long call-ups.”
Earlier, Netanyahu had said in an interview with Fox News that Israel plans to take control of all of Gaza, but did not want to “keep” the besieged Strip long term, without specifying.
“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,” he added, without giving further details.
The Security cabinet later ruled it not would permit the Hamas militant group nor the Palestinian Authority – which is recognised globally and governs the occupied West Bank – to run Gaza.
They gave no clarity on who Israel would permit to run what is left of destroyed strip.
The office of the Palestinian presidency said that the displacement of one million Palestinians to the south “represents a continuation of the policy of genocide, systematic killing, starvation, and siege, and a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and international legitimacy resolutions.”
They said they would immediately address the UN Security Council “to request urgent and binding action to halt these crimes” and urged the international community to intervene.
The Palestinian deputy foreign minister, Omar Awadallah, urged the international community to urgently act: “To the international community, are we going to accept apartheid colonialism in the 21st century? … Words are not enough. You should take actions.”
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