Gaza is bombed, starved and occupied. On Thursday, August 7, Benjamin Netanyahu announced a new phase in the war against the Palestinian enclave, where 2.1 million people are surviving under extremely difficult conditions. After 22 months of devastating warfare, with more than 61,000 dead and 146,000 wounded, the Israeli prime minister now intends to occupy the entire Gaza Strip. This will come at the cost of new deadly military offensives, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, and the risk of triggering a political crisis inside Israel. It also risks further isolating Israel diplomatically, both with Arab countries and with the rest of the world.

Ahead of the Israeli security cabinet meeting, Netanyahu detailed his position on the American conservative TV channel Fox News. "We intend to; in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, and enable the population to be free of [the Palestinian movement] and to pass it to civilian governance. That is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel." "We do not want to keep [Gaza]. We want to have a security perimeter, but we do not want to govern it. (...) We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us and giving the Gazans a good life," he added.

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