Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered Israel’s military to seize 70 per cent of the Gaza Strip, an expansion that openly breaches the fragile October 2025 ceasefire. Addressing a conference in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Netanyahu declared that the Israel Defense Forces now control 60 per cent of the Palestinian territory and would move incrementally to the new target. “We are squeezing Hamas,” he said, dismissing a suggestion from the audience of eventual full annexation with the retort: “Let’s go step by step — first of all, 70.”

Under the US-brokered truce, Israeli forces were to withdraw to a so-called “Yellow Line” that would have capped their presence at 53 per cent of the coastal strip. Yet the ceasefire has failed to halt Israeli military operations or secure Hamas’s disarmament, and Israel has since expanded its footprint to an estimated 64 per cent, according to military maps and sources. The first phase of the deal did see the release of the last hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, but wider negotiations remain deadlocked, with no path towards a permanent settlement.

Viewed from Washington, the directive represents a collapse of American mediation efforts, with the Trump-negotiated ceasefire now in tatters. Analysts in European capitals had long predicted the incremental land grab; a pair of experts in Montreal called it “prévisible” — predictable — given the Israeli government’s pattern of expanding reality on the ground. In the Muslim world, the announcement has drawn fury: Indonesian media characterised Israel’s grip as “colonial,” reflecting widespread sentiment that the expansion is a prelude to permanent occupation. Israeli critics, writing in outlets like Haaretz, note the unilateral nature of the move, which compounds the humanitarian catastrophe in an enclave already reduced to rubble by two years of war.

The Gaza directive arrives amid a broader escalation. Israel has stepped up air strikes in southern Lebanon, targeting Hizbullah positions, and claimed to have killed the new Hamas military chief in a separate operation. The deadlock in talks over the next phase of the US-led plan for Gaza — which was meant to pair further withdrawals with Palestinian governance arrangements — now appears insurmountable. As one anonymous IDF commander in Lebanon warned, Israel faces “threats that could endanger its very existence” on multiple fronts.

The incremental seizure of Gaza points to a strategy of making any future Palestinian state unviable, slowly corralling the population into ever-shrinking coastal enclaves. With 70 per cent control, Israel would hold the majority of the Strip’s agricultural land and all its border crossings, leaving the roughly two million residents without sovereign territory. Regional diplomats fear that without renewed international pressure, the final 30 per cent will inevitably be swallowed, extinguishing the two-state paradigm for good and stoking a cycle of violence that could enflame the entire Middle East.