Jerusalem (TDI): Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that the military was “dissecting” the Gaza Strip and seizing territory to pressure Hamas into freeing hostages still held in the territory.
It came as rescuers said 34 people were killed in continued Israeli attacks on Gaza, including on a UN building.
The military is “dissecting the Gaza Strip and increasing the pressure step by step so that Hamas will return our hostages,” Netanyahu said in a statement, adding that Israel “is seizing territory, attacking terrorists, and destroying infrastructure.”
He added that Israeli forces are “taking control of the ‘Morag Axis’,” a strip of land that is likely to run between the southern governorates of Khan Yunis and Rafah.
The name of the axis refers to a former Israeli settlement that was evacuated when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
Gaza’s civil defense agency said an Israeli strike that hit a UN building “housing a medical clinic in Jabalia refugee camp” killed at least nineteen people, including 9 children.
The Israeli army said it attacked Hamas militants “inside a command and control center” in north Gaza’s Jabalia.
The Palestinian foreign ministry, based in the occupied West Bank, condemned the “massacre” at the clinic run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and urged for “serious global pressure” to halt Israel’s widening offensive.
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Israel has on several occasions carried out strikes on UNRWA buildings housing displaced people in Gaza, where fighting has raged for most of the past eighteen months.
Israel also carried out deadly air strikes in southern and central Gaza on Wednesday. The civil defense said dawn strikes killed at least thirteen people in Khan Yunis and 2 in Nuseirat refugee camp.
In February, Katz announced plans for an agency to oversee the “voluntary departure” of Palestinians from the territory.
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That followed Israel’s support of a proposal from US President Donald Trump for the United States to take over the territory after relocating its 2.4 million Palestinians.
The proposal outraged Gazans and drew widespread condemnation on international level.
