The city of Gaza is the largest population center in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. Around one million Palestinians are crowded there – around half of the total population. The rest lives in the al-Mawasi tent camp in the southwest and in refugee districts in the middle Gaza Strip. According to the media, the army should take two months to prepare for the operation. You would have to convene hundreds of thousands of reservists. Many of them are exhausted after a good two years of war. The army would also have to repair or replace worn war equipment.
The General Staff will cheapen the “basic ideas” for use against the city of Gaza by the end of the week, the Israeli news portal “Ynet” reported. Army chief Ejal Zamir is skeptical about the project, according to media reports. Critics of the planned expansion of military operation, among them most of the hostages, fear that the lives of kidnapped people would endanger. “What Netanyahu has served us today means that hostages and soldiers will die that the economy will collapse and that our international reputation will be ruined,” wrote the Israeli opposition leader Jair Lapid on the X.
At a special meeting of the UN Security Council, there was violent criticism of Israel. Several European states condemned the plans to expand the war. “We urgently ask Israel not to rethink this decision and not to implement,” said Slovenian UN ambassador Samuel Zbogar before the start of the session. Israel rejected the criticism.
In Israel, Netanyahu referred to the principles of war to terminate the war on the foreign journalists: the disarmament of the Hamas, the release of all hostages, the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, the military control of the coastal area by Israel and the establishment of a civil government that is peacefully incorporated without the participation of Hamas or the Hamas Palestinian Authority (PA).
