The Israeli military has said it now controls 40 per cent of Gaza City, and said it would “expand and intensify” its offensive there in the coming days.
This came hours after Gaza’s civil defence agency
said that Israeli strikes on Thursday killed more than 30 people in the city, out of at least 64 Palestinians killed across the Gaza Strip.
In a televised briefing, Israeli military spokesman Brigadier General Effie
Defrin said, “We hold 40 per cent of the territory of Gaza City.”“We will continue to expand and intensify in the coming days,” he added.
Defrin vowed to “increase the pressure” on Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose October 2023 attack on Israel sparked the war, “until it is defeated”.
In recent days, Israel has intensified its bombardments of the area of Gaza City, in the territory’s north, ahead of the planned offensive, despite mounting international pressure to halt the campaign.
With the vast majority of Gazans already displaced at least once during the war, a senior Israeli military official told journalists on Wednesday that authorities expected the new offensive to push an estimated one million Palestinians south, away from Gaza City.
Last month, the United Nations declared a famine in and around Gaza City, where it estimates nearly one million people live.
Meanwhile, speaking in Paris, European Commission vice president Teresa Ribera called the war a “genocide” and slammed the 27-nation bloc for failing to act to stop it.
“The genocide in Gaza exposes Europe’s failure to act and speak with one voice,” Ribera said, in remarks slammed by Israel as serving “Hamas propaganda,” he said.
Hamas’s October 2023 operation resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 64,231 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the United Nations considers reliable.
A Hamas statement, meanwhile, said that top officials from the group, which is backed by Iran, met in Doha with Tehran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to discuss efforts to bring the war to an end.
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