Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has threatened ‘total destruction’ in Gaza as he issued what Israel calls a ‘last warning’ for Hamas to return the hostages and be removed from power
| DAILY MAIL ONLINE | Published March 20, 2025
Israel has threatened ‘total destruction’ in Gaza as it issued what it calls a ‘last warning’ for Hamas to return the hostages and be removed from power.
The Israeli military bombarded Gaza with heavy air strikes and launched a new ground operation on Thursday, shattering a relative calm that had pervaded since the ceasefire took hold in mid-January.
The offensive, which began Tuesday, has killed more than 430 people, the Hamas-run healthy ministry in Gaza says.
Israeli airstrikes overnight and into Thursday struck several homes and killed at least 58 people across the Gaza Strip, according to three hospitals.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz overnight warned Gazans to take the ‘advice’ of President Donald Trump and echoed the American president’s previous warning that failing to release the hostages would be fatal.
‘Take the US president’s advice. Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open up for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who desire. The alternative is total destruction and ruin,’ Katz said.
People perform funeral prayer as bodies of Palestinians, who lost their life following the Israeli attack, are brought to Nasser Hospital for funeral process in Khan Yunis on March 20, 2025
The renewed Israeli bombardment sent a stream of new casualties yesterday to the few hospitals still functioning in Gaza.
A UN Office for Project Services employee was killed and at least five others were wounded when a UN building in the central city of Deir el-Balah was hit by ‘explosive ordnance’. A British bomb disposal expert, 51, was among the injured, BBC reports.
A full investigation into the Wednesday morning attack will be needed, the deputy spokesperson for the UN secretary general told the broadcaster. The name of the injured UK national has not yet been released.
Israel resumed heavy airstrikes across Gaza on Tuesday, shattering a ceasefire that had halted the 17-month war.
On Wednesday, the Israeli military announced it had resumed ground operations ‘in the central and southern Gaza Strip to expand the security perimeter and create a partial buffer between the north and south’.
Hamas has yet to respond militarily, but Israel’s actions threaten to drag the sides back into all-out war.
The death toll from new Israeli strikes on Gaza has climbed to 58, according to hospitals in the territory. The latest total of those killed was according to three hospitals in different parts of the territory.
Multiple homes were targeted in the middle of the night late Wednesday and early Thursday. The strikes hit residences in the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah in southern Gaza and the northern town of Beit Lahiya, officials say.
The European Hospital in the southern city of Rafah said 26 people, mostly women and children, were killed in strikes on two family homes overnight. One of the strikes killed a father and his seven children, it said.
The Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis received the bodies of seven people killed overnight in an attack on a home. In northern Gaza, the Indonesian Hospital said it had received the bodies of seven people killed in a strike on a home in Beit Lahiya, a town near the border.
The Israeli military also said it intercepted a missile launched by Yemen´s Iran-backed Houthi rebels early Thursday before it reached Israeli airspace, as air raid sirens and exploding interceptors were heard in Jerusalem. No injuries were reported.
It was the second such attack since the US began a new campaign of airstrikes against the rebels earlier this week.
Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike in north Gaza, as seen from Israel’s border with Gaza, Israel March 19, 2025
As Israel defied calls from foreign governments to preserve the ceasefire, Gazans were left to once again comb through rubble to find the bodies of their loved ones.
‘We’re digging with our bare hands,’ said a man trying to dislodge a child’s body from a heap of concrete in Gaza City.
After Israel urged civilians to leave areas it described as ‘combat zones’, families with young children filled the roads leading out of northern Gaza.
Fred Oola, senior medical officer at the Red Cross field hospital in Rafah, said the renewed strikes shattered the relative calm of the past two months.
‘Now, we can feel the panic in the air… and we can see the pain and devastation in the faces of those we are helping,’ he said.
Addressing the ‘residents of Gaza’ – governed by Hamas since 2007 – Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a video Wednesday night: ‘This is the last warning.’
He said that if they took Trump’s advice, returned the hostages and removed Hamas from power that ‘other options will open up for you – including the possibility of leaving for other places in the world for those who want to’.
He was apparently referring to a warning earlier this month by US President Donald Trump, who said: ‘To the People of Gaza: A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD!’
Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, 58 are still held by the terror group in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
A boy sits amid rubble as Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a house, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on March 20, 2025
Hamas says it is willing to negotiate and has called on the international community to act to bring the war to an end.
An official from the group rejected, however, Israeli demands to renegotiate the three-stage deal agreed with Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators.
‘Hamas has not closed the door on negotiations but we insist there is no need for new agreements,’ Taher al-Nunu told AFP.
Talks have stalled over how to proceed with the ceasefire, after the first phase expired in early March. Israel and the US have sought to change the terms of the deal by extending phase one.
Hamas wants negotiations for phase two, meant to establish a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza while the remaining hostages are exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.
‘Moving to the second phase seems to be a non-option for Israel,’ said Ghassan Khatib, a political analyst and former Palestinian Authority minister.
‘They don’t like the second phase because it involves ending the war without necessarily achieving their objective of ending Hamas.’
Israel and Washington have portrayed Hamas’s rejection of a phase one extension as a refusal to release more hostages.
Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz issues chilling warning as they threaten ‘total destruction’ of Gaza.
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SOURCE: www.dailymail.co.uk
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