Keir Starmer on Friday led international condemnation of Israel over a major military escalation in the Gaza Strip in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to take over Gaza City.“The Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong, and we urge it to reconsider immediately,” the British Prime Minister said in a statement. “This action will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages. It will only bring more bloodshed,” he said. Britain and its allies are working on a long-term plan to secure peace in the region as part of a two-state solution, but “without both sides engaging in good faith in negotiations, that prospect is vanishing before our eyes,” the U.K. leader said.Turkey also lambasted Netanyahu’s decision, which was approved by Israel’s security cabinet early Friday. Ankara called on Israel to stop its plans.“Every step taken by the fundamentalist Netanyahu government to continue the genocide against the Palestinians and expand the occupation deals a heavy blow to international peace and security; increasing regional instability and deepening the humanitarian crisis,” Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said.United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk said Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip “must be immediately halted.” Any further escalation of the conflict “will result in more massive forced displacement, more killing, more unbearable suffering, senseless destruction and atrocity crimes,” he said. The Israeli plan includes disarming Hamas, returning all the hostages captured by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, demilitarization of the Gaza Strip with Israeli security control in the area, and establishing of an administration that is “neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority,” according to the Israeli government. Ahead of the security cabinet’s meeting, Netanyahu was asked in a Fox News interview if Israel plans full take over of the Gaza Strip, which he confirmed. The plan as approved by the security cabinet, however, only mentions Gaza City.“We intend to, in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza, and to pass it to civilian governance,” Netanyahu said in the interview.“We don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us and giving Gazans a good life,” he added.Yair Lapid, Israel’s opposition leader and former prime minister, slammed the security cabinet’s decision as “disaster that will lead to many more disasters” in a post on X.“This is exactly what Hamas wanted: for Israel to be trapped in the field without a goal, without defining the picture of the day after, in a useless occupation that no one understands where it is leading,” Lapid wrote.
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