By Quds News Network
Gaza (QNN)- The Israeli military now occupies approximately 70 percent of the Gaza Strip, and officials believe the area under Israeli control could expand further in the coming months after ICC-wanted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed the military to expand its control of Gaza. This comes amid ongoing violations of the ceasefire agreement.
“It is possible that the scope of operational control in Palestinian territory will increase in the coming months, ” a security source told Walla.
The forces are also expanding military zones near Israeli settlements adjacent to Gaza. Forces are building new routes, paving roads, and upgrading positions facing the Yellow Line.
Defense officials said that the military could be required to launch a new assault on Gaza.
In May, Netanyahu said that he had directed the Israeli military to take control of 70 percent of the Gaza Strip as a “start”.
During an interview at a conference in the occupied West Bank, Netanyahu said, “We are now in 60% of the territory of the Gaza Strip. We were at 50%. We moved to 60%.”
When someone in the audience shouted that Israel should take the entire besieged enclave, Netanyahu said “we are going in order”, according to The Times of Israel.
“My directive is to move to — take it step by step — first of all 70. Let’s start with that.”
In late April, the Israeli military issued maps to international aid groups that showed the forces already controlling approximately 64% of Gaza by expanding the so-called “yellow line” westward across Gaza in the seven months since the ceasefire, forcing approximately 2 million Palestinians into a shrinking fraction of the coastal enclave’s shattered territory.
According to a new report by the Wall Street Journal, Israel now holds around 59% of the enclave, up from 53% at the start of the US-brokered ceasefire in October.
Recently, Hamas said Israel’s moving of the line “constitutes an explicit and ongoing undermining of the ceasefire agreement, a serious violation of its provisions, and an exposed attempt to impose new facts on the ground by force, with the aim of entrenching military control over the Strip and undermining any real chance of stabilizing the situation or making de-escalation efforts succeed.”
Nickolay Mladenov, a Bulgarian diplomat who serves as the official in charge of implementing the agreement, said that the “yellow line” could turn “into a fence or wall, a permanent separation of Gaza.”
There has been a spike in Israeli attacks in the war-torn Strip despite the ceasefire.
Israel has violated the ceasefire which took effect in October more than 3,200 times, killing hundreds and blocking the entry of much-needed aid.
Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians since the ceasefire, including over 300 children, women, and the elderly.
Apartment buildings, markets, vehicles, and cafés have continued to come under attack. In some cases, families received displacement orders only minutes before their homes were bombed, while many others received no warning at all.
Over 73,700 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since the war began on October 7, 2023.
United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk condemned Israel’s recent attacks in the Gaza Strip, saying that “the unrelenting pattern of killings” reflects Israel’s “sweeping impunity”.
“Palestinians are still being killed and injured in what is left of their homes, shelters and tents of displaced families, on the streets, in vehicles, at a medical facility and a classroom,” Turk said.
The yellow line is a non-physical demarcation line separating the Israeli occupation forces deployment from certain areas of Gaza, while occupying more than half of the Strip. The line divides Gaza into two zones: an eastern area under Israeli military control and a western area where Palestinians live, were forcibly displaced to, and are under constant Israeli threat of attacks.
During a visit to the Gaza Strip in December, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, said unequivocally that the “Yellow Line” is “a new border line”.
Haaretz previously reported that the Israeli military is turning the “yellow line” into a physical border, despite it being initially intended as a temporary demarcation. The report added that there is currently no detailed mechanism regulating a withdrawal from it.
The Defense Minister, Israel Katz, said that Israel’s ultimate aim was to expel large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza in what he claimed to be “voluntary migration” but human rights activists describe as a long-term plan for ethnic cleansing by making living conditions inside Gaza intolerable.
Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said: “Netanyahu is now declaring the whole Trump deal, the framework for Gaza, to be null and void. That’s what it means in a nutshell. There’s no other way to spell it out.”
Israeli forces have systematically destroyed the remaining buildings in their zone, so its expansion to 70% of Gaza would mean that the 2.2 million Palestinians who have survived the war would be crammed into less than a third of their original territory, which was already overcrowded, just 109 square kilometres of land.
“The conditions there are already appalling. It is the single most overcrowded place on the face of the planet,” Shehada said.
“Every square metre has another displaced family, another makeshift tent, or some sort of improvised shelter on it. So it would be a death sentence for a lot of people who physically have no place to go.”
“We mourn as Gaza reaches yet another tragic milestone … Thousands more people who were told the worst was over are still burying their loved ones,” said Fikr Shalltoot, Gaza director at Medical Aid for Palestinians.
23 June 2026
Source: countercurrents.org