Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waits for the start of an Israeli war cabinet meeting also attended by U.S. President Joe Biden on Oct. 18, 2023, in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated threats on Wednesday to seize territory in the Gaza Strip if Hamas failed to release the remaining hostages it still holds.
Hamas has regularly called for the two sides to enter into the second phase of the cease-fire agreement, which would see all hostages released and a permanent end to hostilities, but instead, on March 18, Netanyahu relaunched the war.
"The more Hamas continues in its refusal to release our hostages, the more powerful the repression we exert will be," Netanyahu told a hearing in parliament, which was occasionally interrupted by shouting from opposition members. “I say this [...] to Hamas: this includes taking territory, as well as other measures I won't detail here,” he added.
Netanyahu made this comments during the so-called "40-signatures debate" — a plenum discussion that the opposition can call once a month and that the prime minister is legally obliged to attend.
The threat comes just days after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said he had “ordered the [Israeli army] to seize more territory in Gaza, while evacuating the population.”
“The longer Hamas continues to refuse to release hostages, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed to Israel,” Katz said, in the statement released on Friday.
Netanyahu and his government have come under immense pressure from the Israeli public since breaking from the cease-fire agreement on March 18 and relaunching its bombing campaign against Gaza, killing more than 500 people in the first 12 hours.
Freed hostages and the families of those still held in Gaza spoke at protests attended by tens of thousands of people, accusing Netanyahu of abandoning hostages in favor of his own political career.
More than 800 people killed since the resumption of the offensive
The Gaza Health Ministry announced on Wednesday that 830 people have been killed since the resumption of Israeli bombardment on March 18, including 38 in the last 24 hours. These deaths bring the total death toll in Gaza since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023 to 50,183.
Hamas said on Wednesday that the Israeli hostages it is holding in Gaza could be killed if Israel tried to free them by force and if strikes on Palestinian territory continued.
In a statement, the group said it was doing “everything possible to keep the captives alive, but the indiscriminate Zionist bombardment is endangering their lives.”
“Every time the occupation tries to recover its captives by force, it ends up bringing them back in coffins,” it added.
During the first phase of a cease-fire that came into effect on Jan. 19, Hamas released 33 hostages, Israeli or dual nationals, eight of whom had died, in exchange for Israel's release of some 1,800 Palestinian detainees.
Of the 251 hostages abducted during the Oct. 7 attack, 58 are still being held in the Gaza Strip, 24 of whom are still believed by Israeli authorities to be alive.