Israel says seizing ‘large areas’ of Gaza as strike kills 23

GAZA CITY: Israel said Wednesday its troops are seizing “large areas” in Gaza and making the Palestinian territory “smaller and more isolated,” as an air strike on a residential block killed at least 23 people.

Defense Minister Israel Katz’s comments come weeks into a renewed offensive by the military on the war-battered territory, which has displaced hundreds of thousands, while an aid blockade has revived the spectre of famine for its 2.4 million people.

“Large areas are being seized and added to Israel’s security zones, leaving Gaza smaller and more isolated,” Katz said during a visit to the newly announced Morag Corridor between the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Yunis.

Katz emphasized that Israel would keep increasing pressure on Gaza “until the hostages are freed and Hamas is defeated.”

As the available space for Gazans recedes to expanding buffer zones, Katz said Israel was encouraging plans for “voluntary emigration... in accordance with the vision of the US president, which we are working to implement.”

US President Donald Trump had earlier this year proposed a plan to develop Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” while displacing its population elsewhere.

The Israeli military meanwhile continued to pound the territory on Wednesday.

Gaza’s civil defense agency said an air strike on a residential building in Gaza City killed at least 23 people, most of them children or women, while the military said it targeted a “senior Hamas” militant.

The strike took place in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, the agency’s spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.

“The death toll from the Shujaiya massacre has risen to 23 martyrs, including eight children and eight women,” he said, adding that more than 60 people were wounded.

“There are still people trapped under the rubble.”

Ayub Salim, a 26-year-old Shujaiya resident, told AFP he witnessed the strike on the four-story block.

He said the area was hit with “multiple missiles” and was “overcrowded with tents, displaced people and homes.”

“Shrapnel flew in all directions,” he said, speaking of “a terrifying and indescribable scene.”

“Dust and massive destruction filled the entire place, we couldn’t see anything, just the screams and panic of the people.”

Salim said the dead were “torn to pieces.”

“Even now, emergency crews are still transporting the dead and the injured. It is truly a horrific massacre,” he said.

A crew from the Gaza civil defense agency rushed to the scene, only to find several people trapped under the rubble, a rescuer said.

“This house was home to many people who believed they were safe. It was blown up over their heads,” rescuer Ibrahim Abu Al-Rish told AFP while men worked hard to clear out rubble behind him.

He added that the strike hit while many children were playing inside.

“We pulled out the remains of women and children. There are still people buried under the rubble,” he said.

First responders and neighbors worked to break through the concrete floor of an entire story that collapsed in the strike and trapped residents, AFP footage showed.

Taking turns swinging a sledgehammer through the thick, hard surface, they eventually broke a hole through which the bodies of children were extracted and taken away wrapped in dusty blankets.

When asked by AFP about the strike, the Israeli military said it “struck a senior Hamas terrorist who was responsible for planning and executing terrorist attacks” from the area.

It did not give the target’s name.

Hamas condemned the strike as one of the “most heinous acts of genocide.”

The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry also condemned the strike as a “heinous massacre.”

“The ministry considers it an official Israeli attempt to systematically kill our people en masse and destroy the very foundations of their existence in the Gaza Strip, thus forcing them to emigrate,” it said in a statement.

Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas. Efforts to restore the truce have so far failed.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said on Wednesday that at least 1,482 Palestinians have been killed in the renewed Israeli operations, taking the overall death toll since the start of the war to 50,846.

Hamas’s October 2023 attack that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Hossam Badran, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP on Tuesday that it was “necessary to reach a ceasefire” in Gaza.

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that new negotiations were in the works aimed at getting more hostages released from Gaza.