Far-right ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition have called for destroying Gaza City as part of a military operation to take full control of the Gaza Strip, a report said Wednesday.
The Haaretz daily, which cited unnamed sources, said that Netanyahu did not rule out the plan.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir raised the proposal at a cabinet meeting this week, sources told the outlet.
The pair, who lead the Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit parties, respectively, asked the military to present a plan for destroying Gaza City and the tunnels under it, along with seizing control of all of the coastal enclave.
The Israel Defense Forces controls the eastern parts of Gaza City, while over a million Gazans are sheltering in the west of the city, where there is a daily 10-hour humanitarian pause in the fighting.
According to the report, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir told the meeting that if the political leadership instructs the army to maneuver in all of Gaza City or the refugee camps in the central Gaza region, then it must declare that bringing home the hostages is only a secondary goal of the war, as such operations would endanger the captives.
According to the report, the government, which has repeatedly listed saving the hostages as a prime goal of the war along with destroying Hamas, is not prepared to declare such a change in objectives at this time.
The hostages were seized from Israel during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, onslaught that triggered the war. On Wednesday, Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, of Otzma Yehudit, provoked outrage by saying the hostages should be labeled “prisoners” of war, which would allow for their release to be delayed until “victory” has been achieved over Hamas.
A military representative also told cabinet members that an operation to destroy Gaza City would take months and require a significant increase in IDF manpower that could only be met by extending mandatory IDF service or calling up large numbers of reservists. The warning came amid concerns that soldiers and reservists are already being overstretched by the prolonged war. Some reservists have already served hundreds of days in Gaza.
At the meeting, Zamir reported that the IDF has conquered 75 percent of Gaza and thus completed the goal of Gideon’s Chariots, the official name for the renewed ground offensive launched in March, which ended a two-month ceasefire. According to the report, the IDF in the coming days will announce the end of the campaign, even though it did not achieve the key goal of defeating Hamas and creating a favorable situation for hostage release negotiations. Zamir was said to warn cabinet members of the difficulties of continuing with operations without risking harm to the hostages.
The coalition’s far-right flank has consistently pushed for continuing the war until Hamas is eradicated in Gaza, threatening to pull out of the government if it reaches a ceasefire deal that would release the hostages but also end the war.
Mediated negotiations are currently stalled, with Hamas’s demand for an end to the war one of the key sticking points.
Alongside calls to conquer all of Gaza, right-wing ministers have backed a plan introduced by US President Donald Trump for the relocation of Gazans abroad, framing it as voluntary emigration.
Netanyahu is now pushing the plan more than in the past in an attempt to keep the far-right parties from leaving his coalition, several right-wing outlets reported Thursday, citing government officials.
Sources said that at one meeting, Netanyahu assured Ben Gvir: “I’m moving toward you on the matter of voluntary emigration.”
They said that Netanyahu had told Ben Gvir that if there is no hostage deal in the coming weeks, the voluntary emigration plan will begin.
The sources, cited by both the Israel National News outlet and Channel 14, said that progress on the plan has taken the form of regular meetings on the subject, which include representatives of the Foreign Ministry, the Mossad and other entities. Netanyahu was said to have told the Mossad to advance contacts with countries that have said that they would take in Gazans.
They said that so far, it has been agreed that during the first week of putting the plan into operation, thousands of Gazans who are interested in emigrating would leave the Strip for other countries via Jordan.
The idea of emptying Gaza of most of its residents was first touted by Trump in February, as a plan to have the US develop the Strip and create a “Gaza Riviera.” Although Trump himself has more recently not made many mentions of the idea, Israeli officials repeatedly touted it as the way forward.
In a recent radio interview, Ben Gvir said: “We now have an opportunity to occupy all of the Gaza Strip, to encourage voluntary migration and to take down as many Hamasniks as possible.”