Israeli defence minister threatens to annex parts of Gaza

OCCUPIED AL-QUDS: Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz threatened on Friday to annex parts of the Gaza Strip unless Hamas militants release the remaining Israeli hostages held in the war-battered Palestinian territory.

“I ordered (the army) to seize more territory in Gaza... The more Hamas refuses to free the hostages, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed by Israel,” Katz said in a statement.

Should Hamas not comply, Katz also threatened “to expand buffer zones around Gaza to protect Israeli civilian population areas and soldiers by implementing a permanent Israeli occupation of the area”.

AFP images from northern Gaza on Friday showed donkey-pulled carts piled high with belongings as residents fled their homes along rubble-strewn roads. Israel resumed intensive bombing of Gaza on Tuesday, citing deadlock in indirect negotiations on next steps in the truce after its first stage expired early this month.

Its resumption of large-scale military operations was coordinated with US President Donald Trump´s administration but drew widespread condemnation. Israeli President Isaac Herzog expressed concern about the government´s actions in a video statement on Thursday, saying it was “unthinkable to resume fighting while still pursuing the sacred mission of bringing our hostages home”.

The Israeli military said on Thursday that troops had begun “conducting ground activity” in the Shabura area of Rafah, Gaza´s southernmost city near the Egyptian border. Katz vowed to step up the assault, using civilian as well as military “pressure points” to defeat Hamas.

“We will intensify the fight with aerial, naval and ground shelling as well as by expanding the ground operation until hostages are freed and Hamas is defeated, using all military and civilian pressure points.”

He said these included implementing Trump´s proposal for the United States to redevelop Gaza as a Mediterranean resort after the relocation of its Palestinian inhabitants to other Arab countries.Gaza´s civil defence agency said Israeli strikes killed 11 people on Friday, as the military pressed its offensive in the Palestinian territory for a fourth day.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP three people were killed in pre-dawn strikes. Eight more were killed during daytime, six of them in Gaza City and two in Abassan in the south.The UN warned on Friday that all of Gaza´s approximately one million children were facing “massive trauma” as fighting in the war-ravaged territory resumed, and amid dire aid shortages.

Humanitarians described an alarming situation in Gaza, amid a growing civilian death toll since Israel resumed aerial bombardment and ground operations this week after a six-week ceasefire.

Sam Rose, the senior deputy field director in Gaza for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA, highlighted the psychological shock for already traumatised children to one again find themselves beneath the bombs.

This is a “massive, massive trauma for the one million children” living in the Palestinian territory, he told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Gaza.

“It´s worse this time,” Rose warned, “because people are already exhausted, they´re already degraded, their immune systems, their mental health, (and) populations on the verge of famine. “Children who had come back to school after 18 months out of school, now back in tents,... hearing the bombardment around them constantly.