‘A War Criminal Admitting to His Crimes’: Netanyahu Says He Ordered Military to Seize 70% of Gaza

As Israel expands its control over the Gaza Strip in violation of last year's ceasefire agreement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he had ordered the military to take over even more territory.

During a conference at the Ein Prat pre-military academy in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, the prime minister acknowledged that Israel has gradually expanded its control over Gaza since the ceasefire agreement was implemented in October.

"We are now in 60% of the Gaza Strip, more or less. We were at 50%; now we’ve moved to 60%," he told the crowd.

"My directive," he continued, "is to move to—"

Members of the audience then interrupted with shouts of "100! 100!"

"Wait, let's go in order," Netanyahu responded. "First 70%. Let's start with that."

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has said Israel's expansion of control in Gaza and construction of fortified military sites “directly contradicts the requirements of the second phase of the ceasefire agreement" and is creating conditions of "de facto annexation."

That agreement required Israeli forces to withdraw behind a so-called "yellow line" that left the military occupying about 53% of the country. Even that occupation was meant to be temporary, with later stages of the agreement involving a full pullout of Israeli troops as Hamas and other militant groups in the strip disarm.

But in recent months, the opposite has happened. The Israel Defense Forces have gradually pushed the yellow line deeper into Palestinian territory to the point where it encompasses more than 60% of the coastal strip, leaving Palestinians near the yellow line to wake up and learn they are in an "open-fire zone" where they can be shot on sight.

According to data from the United Nations Human Rights Office shared with Reuters on Wednesday, 152 Palestinians—comprising 102 men, 15 women, and 35 children—had been killed near the boundary during the ceasefire period up to February 5, which the office's head said raises "serious concerns that the Israeli army is shooting at and killing ⁠presumed civilians simply on the basis of their proximity to the so-called yellow line."

Netanyahu's remark follows Israel's orders on Wednesday for more than 200,000 residents of southern Lebanon to forcibly evacuate north of the Zahrani River despite an ongoing ceasefire that began last month.

Israel has systematically razed villages across southern Lebanon since the beginning of March, gradually pushing northward to the point where it now effectively controls about a fifth of the country's territory.

Those ordered to flee their homes on Wednesday joined more than 1 million Lebanese already forcibly displaced by Israel's forced expulsion orders and bombardments. More than 3,200 Lebanese have been killed, including hundreds of women and children.

Israel's far-right settler movement—represented in the Netanyahu government by figures like Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—speaks openly about ethnically cleansing Gaza and Lebanon of their residents to make way for permanent Israeli settlers, in a similar fashion to the intensifying annexation of the West Bank.

On Wednesday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Israel was pushing for the mass “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza and said the government would implement a plan for it “at the right time and in the right manner."

Human rights groups have said that the creation of unlivable conditions in Gaza to push its residents to leave would amount to the war crime of forced transfer.

Itay Epshtain, an Israeli expert in international law and the law of armed conflict, said Katz had "publicly committed himself to the mass deportation of Palestinians from Gaza" and that "members of Israel’s government openly endorsed conduct in gross and systemic breach of peremptory norms of international law."

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has previously expressed sympathy for the idea of "Greater Israel," which involves the expansion of the nation's borders to conquer all or part of current-day Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia in accordance with Biblical descriptions.

The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity during Israel's genocidal military campaign in Gaza, and is reportedly taking actions against Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as well.

Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said that Netanyahu's pledge on Thursday to further expand Israel's territorial control in Gaza was "a war criminal admitting to his crimes."

Ilan Goldberg, the senior vice president of the pro-Israel lobbying group JStreet, said plans to expand were "a blatant violation of the ceasefire and clear undermining of any plan for post-conflict Gaza."

"Yes, Hamas needs to disarm," he said. "But Israel cannot be launching plans to retake all of Gaza."

Owen Jones, a British journalist, lamented the lack of coverage of the slow-motion ethnic cleansing in the Western press.

"Israel doesn't try to hide its crimes. It broadcasts them to the world, knowing it has impunity," he said on Thursday. "Netanyahu boasts of annexing Gaza. Yesterday, his defense minister said the plan was to remove Gaza's population. No front page headlines. No Western denunciations."