THE increasingly beleaguered and desperate Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week announced he has ordered the Israeli army to seize control of 70% of the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu, speaking on Thursday at a conference in a settlement in the occupied West Bank, said: ‘We are now in 60% of the territory of the Gaza Strip. We were at 50%, we moved to 60%’, and his latest directive is ‘to move to – take it step by step – first of all, 70%. Lets start with that.’
Netanyahu’s speech outlining the intention to forcibly seize control over the entire Gaza Strip ‘step by step’ was met with an enthusiastic response from his Zionist audience which erupted in calls for him to take over all of Gaza’s territory.
The seizure of 70% of Gaza would force approximately 2 million Palestinians into a shrinking fraction of the coastal Strip already shattered by the genocidal war waged by the Zionist regime.
In October 2025, a ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Palestinian resistance organisation Hamas was imposed on Netanyahu by Donald Trump.
Under the terms of this ‘agreement’ Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) were supposed to withdraw to a demarcation line known as the ‘yellow line’ which covered around 53% of Gaza.
Under the second phase of the agreement IOF troops were supposed to withdraw completely from the Strip.
The Zionist regime had no intention of honouring any commitment and Palestinians in Gaza have been subjected to daily violence in blatant violation of the so-called ‘ceasefire agreement.’
Over 900 Palestinians have been killed by Zionist troops since the start of the ceasefire without any word of rebuke from the US or any of those imperialist lackeys who make up Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ for Gaza, which styles itself as an ‘international coalition of leaders dedicated to achieving lasting peace and reconstruction in Gaza.’
On Wednesday, Israel’s Minister of Military Affairs, Israel Katz, confirmed the Zionist goal of ethnically cleansing Gaza through the large scale forced displacement of Palestinians.
In a statement, Katz said the Zionist regime would implement a plan for large numbers of Palestinians to leave Gaza ‘at the right time and in the right manner’.
The forced displacement of civilian population is a war crime and calling it ‘voluntary migration’ cannot disguise the fact that the Zionist regime is planning the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem said that the continuous statements of the criminal Israeli leaders, most recently Katz’s open call for ethnic cleansing, prove that ‘the illusion of uprooting our people from their land still haunts the enemy’s leaders, despite their abject failure to break our people’s will or impose their aggressive projects throughout months of war and genocide.’
The Zionist regime has killed over 72,700 Palestinians since October 2023 and, as Qassem says, failed to crush Palestinian resistance or drive over 2 million from the land in the Gaza Strip.
The unprovoked war that it launched with its US protector against Iran has proved to be an unmitigated disaster and defeat for both Trump and the Netanyahu regime.
This has created a massive crisis for both with Trump, desperate to extricate the US from a war he started, and Netanyahu and the Zionist regime, desperate to achieve some military success in Gaza and Lebanon.
A military success that has proved impossible to achieve despite all the support and backing given to Israel by US imperialism which is itself facing defeat at the hands of the Iranian people.
The working class in the UK, US and Europe have shown repeatedly their determined support for the Palestinian fight against the Zionist occupiers.
Now is the time for the working class and youth across the world to demand their trade union leaders take action by organising mass general strikes to bring down their capitalist governments and go forward to workers governments and socialism.
Workers governments that will end all support for the terrorist Zionist regime and give all the financial and military support required to establish the independent state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.
