Israel approves Gaza City occupation plan after emergency cabinet meeting

Israel’s security cabinet early Friday approved a plan to occupy Gaza City, marking an escalation in Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas.

The announcement comes after an all-night meeting of the security cabinet, following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement that Israel planned to retake control over the entire territory and eventually hand it off to friendly Arab forces opposed to Hamas. 

“The Security Cabinet has approved the Prime Minister’s proposal for defeating Hamas. The IDF will prepare for taking control of Gaza City while distributing humanitarian assistance to the civilian population outside the combat zones,” read a post from the official X account of the Prime Minister of Israel. 

The office said the Security Cabinet had adopted, by vote, five principles for concluding the war which include: the disarming of Hamas, the return of all hostages – living and deceased, the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, Israeli security control in the Gaza Strip, and the establishment of an alternative civil administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority. 

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“A decisive majority of Security Cabinet ministers believed that the alternative plan that had been submitted to the Security Cabinet would neither achieve the defeat of Hamas nor the return of the hostages,” the prime minister’s office said. 

Israel has bombarded Gaza City repeatedly since Oct. 7, 2023 massacre in addition to carrying out numerous raids. Today, it is one of the few areas of Gaza that hasn’t been turned into an Israeli buffer zone or placed under evacuation orders.

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Hundreds of thousands have fled Gaza City since the start of the war, but many returned during a ceasefire earlier this year. 

Asked in an interview with Fox News ahead of the Security Cabinet meeting if Israel would “take control of all of Gaza,” Netanyahu replied: “We intend to, in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza.”

“We don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter,” Netanyahu said in the interview. “We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us and giving Gazans a good life.”

The prospect of a full military occupation of Gaza comes 20 years after Israel’s full disengagement from the enclave when, as part of the country’s unilateral disengagement, the government forcibly removed around 8,600 Jewish residents from the area. Shortly after, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections and staged a violent coup to overthrow the Palestinian Authority and seize control of the Gaza Strip. 

Hamas-led militants abducted 251 people and killed around 1,200 in the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre that triggered the war. Since then, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory offensive according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. 

Most of the hostages have been released in ceasefire deals but 50 remain inside Gaza. The Israeli government believes around 20 of them are still alive. 

Fox News’ Amelie Botbol and The Associated Press contributed to this report.