Israel expanding operations to ‘seize large areas’ of Gaza, military says

BEIRUT – Israel will “seize large areas” of the Gaza Strip in a major expansion of military operations, the defense minister said Wednesday, as airstrikes continued to pound the blockaded territory where supplies are quickly dwindling.

The military operations in Gaza are “expanding, involving the broad evacuation of the Gazan population from combat zones,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement. They will also include “the destruction and clearing of the area of terrorists and terror infrastructure, and the seizure of large areas to be added to Israel’s security zones to protect our fighting forces and communities,” the statement read.

Katz did not specify which areas Israeli forces intend to take or how much of the territory, but his statement came after the Israeli military on Monday ordered the full evacuation of the southern city of Rafah and some surrounding areas.

Israeli leaders, including Katz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have said increased military pressure on Hamas is the best way to secure the release of the 59 living and deceased hostages still held in Gaza. Hamas has said the hostages will be freed only through negotiations.

“Last night in the Gaza Strip, we shifted gears,” Netanyahu said in a video address Wednesday evening. He announced the establishment of an additional security corridor in Gaza that would further divide the territory. The corridor will be called Morag, named for a former Israeli settlement that had been located between the Palestinian cities of Rafah and Khan Younis.

“We are now dividing the Strip and increasing the pressure step by step, so that they will release our hostages. And the more they refuse, the more the pressure will mount – until they comply,” Netanyahu said.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents most of the hostages’ families, said Wednesday that it was “horrified” by Katz’s statement about expanding the buffer zone in Gaza.

“Did you decide that we are sacrificing hostages for capturing land?” the group said Wednesday in response to Katz’s statement. “Instead of getting the hostages out in a deal and ending the war, Israel’s government is sending more soldiers to Gaza to fight in the same places that they already fought over and over again.”

Inside war-battered Gaza, the resumption of fighting alongside the complete blockade on aid imposed by Israel a month ago is compounding the suffering of a population already exhausted by more than 17 months of war.

The World Food Program announced Tuesday that all of the bakeries it supports in Gaza had been forced to close down due to a lack of fuel and flour. The last remaining food parcels the aid organization has to distribute will be gone by Thursday, it added, and the supplies for hot meals will be exhausted within two weeks.

Israel has regularly said, without providing evidence, that assistance is being diverted to Hamas. COGAT, the Israeli military agency that coordinates aid deliveries, said Tuesday there is enough food in Gaza to last a “long period of time” if Hamas would allow civilians access to it.

Aid agencies have long denied the claims, with United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric telling reporters Tuesday: “As far as the U.N. is concerned, that’s ridiculous. … We are at the tail end of our supplies.”

Doctors Without Borders warned Wednesday that the siege of Gaza has left some critical medicines in short supply and forced the group’s teams to start rationing painkillers and turning patients away. A U.N. report last week said that fewer than 500 units of blood remained in blood banks in Gaza and that hospitals there typically need at least 8,000 units per month.

At least 1,042 people have been killed since Israel broke a ceasefire two weeks ago and renewed its bombardment of Gaza, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry. Israeli airstrikes continued Wednesday, and photos showed bodies, covered in white plastic, piled up outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

One Israeli strike in Jabalya, in northern Gaza, killed at least 19 people when it hit a facility for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees that had been serving as a shelter, according to Gaza’s civil defense agency. Nine of them were children, it said.

The Israel Defense Forces said it hit a “command and control center” for Hamas where “terrorists were hiding.”

Elsewhere in Gaza, the military said that it had encircled the Tel al-Sultan area of Rafah and had “dismantled dozens of weapons and terrorist infrastructure.” The IDF published photos of two rockets and a rocket launcher that it said it had confiscated.

Also on Wednesday, Gaza’s civil defense agency said it had found evidence that members of one of its crews had been executed by the Israeli military after going missing along the road to Tel al-Sultan. Fifteen medics, including some from the Palestine Red Crescent Society, were found dead in a mass grave Sunday, a week after their disappearance.

“Some of the bodies had their hands bound, and bullet holes were visible in the chest and head,” the civil defense agency said. “One of them was found beheaded, and some had their features altered and their limbs were dismembered.”

The Israeli military has said it fired on the vehicles after they “advanced suspiciously toward the troops.” It said Wednesday that the incident had been referred to the army’s internal investigative body.

At a news briefing Tuesday, Dujarric said the men appeared to have been killed in waves. “Other emergency and aid crews were struck one after another over several hours as they reached or tried to reach for their missing colleagues,” he said.