An internally displaced Palestinian barber cuts a customer’s hair Tuesday in a makeshift parlor set up amid the ruins of a bombed-out building in Gaza City as a renewed Israeli military offensive against the Hamas-controlled Palestinian enclave shifted into a higher gear. Photo by Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE
April 2 (UPI) — Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced Wednesday a significant escalation of Israel’s renewed offensive in Gaza to capture “large areas,” creating security buffers between the Palestinian enclave and Israeli territory to the north and east and along the border with Egypt.
The operation to “crush and clean the area of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure,” which got underway overnight, would require large numbers of Palestinians to be evacuated, said Katz who also called on the people of Gaza to turn on Hamas, free themselves from its grip, and hand back hostages.
The territory seized in the operation would become part of what he described as “security zones of the State of Israel.”
“Expanding the operation this morning will increase the pressure on the Hamas murderers and also on the population in Gaza and advance the achievement of the sacred and important goal for all of us. I call on the residents of Gaza to act now to remove Hamas and return all the hostages. This is the only way to end the war,” Katz wrote in a post on X.
Katz’ proclamation, backed with the deployment of an additional Israel Defense Forces division into southern Gaza, followed a night of Israeli bombardment of Rafah on the Gaza-Egypt border and across the south, with authorities reporting at least 15 people killed including 12 people the Hamas-run civil defense agency said had been pulled dead from a home in the Khan Yunis area.
On Monday, Israel issued evacuation orders covering the whole of Rafah and much of the area between the southern city and Khan Yunis ordering hundreds of thousands of people to move to a humanitarian zone in Al Mawasi ahead of the IDF “returning to fight with great force to eliminate the capabilities of terrorist organizations.”
The escalation comes two weeks into Israel’s resumption of its war on Hamas after the breakdown of a cease-fire and hostage release/prisoner exchange deal brokered by Arab countries and the United States that had been keeping a tenuous peace since Jan. 19.
Campaign groups for Israeli hostages condemned the ramping up of the military campaign saying they were appalled that the government had opted to go down the route of more bloodshed when it was a failed strategy, compared with cease-fires which were responsible for virtually all the hostage releases to date.
Families “were horrified to wake up this morning to the defense minister’s announcement that the military operation in Gaza would be expanded for the purpose of ‘capturing extensive territory,'” said the Families and Missing Hostages Forum.
“Has it been decided to sacrifice the hostages for the sake of ‘territorial gains? Instead of securing the release of the hostages through a deal and ending the war, the Israeli government is sending more soldiers into Gaza to fight in the same areas where battles have already taken place repeatedly.”
In a post on X, the group said the Israeli government had an obligation to free all 59 hostages from Hamas captivity — to pursue every possible channel to advance a deal for their release.
“We call on the Trump administration and mediating countries to continue exerting pressure on Hamas for the immediate release of our loved ones. Our highest priority must be an immediate deal to bring ALL hostages back home — the living for rehabilitation and the murdered for proper burial — and end this war.”
