GAZA: The Zionist entity said Wednesday it would expand its military operations and seize “large areas” of the Gaza Strip, accompanied by large-scale evacuations of the population of the enclave, where rescuers said at least 60 people were killed in Zionist strikes, including on a UN building. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said troops were seizing an area he called the Morag Axis, a reference to a former Zionist settlement once located in an area between the cities of Rafah and Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip.

“Because we are now dividing the Strip and we are increasing pressure step by step so they will give us our hostages,” he said in a video message. He said the move, which would cut off Rafah from Khan Yunis, would give the Zionist entity control of a second axis in southern Gaza in addition to the so-called ‘Philadelphi Corridor’, running along the border with Egypt.

Defense Minister Israel Katz said the Zionist entity would bolster its military presence in the Palestinian territory to “destroy and clear the area of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure”. The operation would “seize large areas that will be incorporated into (Zionist) security zones”, he said in a statement. Gaza’s civil defense agency said at least 19 people were killed, including nine children, when a Zionist strike “targeted an UNRWA (UN agency for Palestinian refugees)

building housing a medical clinic in Jabalia refugee camp”. The Zionist army confirmed to AFP the building housed a UN clinic. The Palestinian foreign ministry, based in the occupied West Bank, condemned the “massacre at the UNRWA clinic in Jabalia” and called for “serious international pressure” to halt the Zionist entity’s widening offensive.

Reuters video of the aftermath of the strike showed blood on a floor as rescue workers removed bodies on stretchers. At the site of another strike in Khan Yunis, Rida Al-Jabbour held up a tiny shoe and pointed at a blood-spattered wall as she related how a neighbor had been killed along with her three-month-old baby. “From the moment the strike occurred we have not been able to sit or sleep or anything,” she said, describing how rescue workers were unable to separate the remains of those killed.

The Zionist entity has on several occasions conducted strikes on UNRWA buildings housing displaced people in Gaza, where fighting has raged for most of the past 18 months. The Zionist entity also carried out deadly air strikes in southern and central Gaza on Wednesday. The civil defense said dawn strikes killed at least 13 people in Khan Yunis and two in Nuseirat refugee camp.

According to the rights group Gisha, the Zionist entity has already taken control of some 62 sq km or around 17 percent of the total area of Gaza, as part of a buffer zone around the edges of the enclave. “It seems like Netanyahu will not stop his war on Gaza until we are displaced. But despite the extermination happening to us and the extreme anguish – as a citizen I was displaced eight times - with God’s will we will remain steadfast,” said Amer Al-Farra, a Palestinian in Gaza.

The Zionist entity resumed intense bombing of Gaza on March 18 before launching a new ground offensive, ending a nearly two-month ceasefire. A Zionist group representing the families of hostages still held in Gaza said they were “horrified” by Katz’s announcement of expanded military operations. “Has it been decided to sacrifice the hostages for the sake of ‘territorial gains?’” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum asked in a statement.

At least 1,042 people have been killed in Gaza since the Zionist entity resumed military operations, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said in its latest toll update on Tuesday. That took the overall toll to at least 50,399 since the war began in October 2023.

Zionist far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir visited Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Wednesday, drawing condemnation not only from Hamas but also from neighboring Jordan, which acts as custodian of the holy site. Ben Gvir has repeatedly challenged the longstanding convention that Jews may visit but not pray at the compound, stoking Palestinian fears about Zionist intentions.

Jordan condemned the visit as a “storming” and “an unacceptable provocation” in a foreign ministry statement. Hamas called it a “provocative and dangerous escalation”, saying the visit was “part of the ongoing genocide against our Palestinian people”. “We call on our Palestinian people and our youth in the West Bank to escalate their confrontation... in defense of our land and our sanctities, foremost among them the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque,” it said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Saudi foreign ministry expressed in a statement its “strongest condemnation” of the “storming” of the compound by Ben Gvir. Egypt also expressed “its total condemnation and denunciation” of Ben Gvir’s “storming of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque under the protection of (Zionist) police”. – Agencies