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The Gaza Strip is shrinking drastically as Israel takes control over more land. This is despite growing calls in Israel among reservists and ex-military officers for a change of course in Gaza and a return to negotiations to free remaining hostages. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing ahead with the war and insisting Hamas must be eliminated. NPR's Aya Batrawy reports on Israel's expanding offensive in Gaza.
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: Israel's military is taking more land and pushing Gaza's 2 million Palestinians into small enclaves, divided and controlled by military corridors.
YAAKOV GARB: We just see a massive leveling and a systematic kind of leveling in the air shelters.
BATRAWY: Yaakov Garb is a professor at Ben-Gurion University who's examined maps published by the military showing territorial changes in Gaza over the past year and a half of war. He says the army's been carving out buffer zones around Gaza, leveling these areas. But in recent weeks, they've ballooned.
GARB: We've shifted from a regime where you had a thin, protective buffer inside Gaza to a regime in which you have very extensive areas that are, you know, functioning more as large moats around shrinking enclaves of the remaining Gazan population.
BATRAWY: Garb says more than half of the Gaza Strip is now no longer accessible to Palestinians. Nowhere is this clearer than in the south, where a fifth of Gaza's territory was taken over by the military last weekend. It's now off-limits to Palestinians. The Palestinian city of Rafah is now entirely cut off from neighboring Egypt and the rest of Gaza, and Gaza's surrounded from all sides by Israel. Defense Minister Israel Katz says Gaza's northern border area is next, and he had this warning to Hamas if it doesn't agree to Israel's terms.
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ISRAEL KATZ: (Speaking Hebrew).
BATRAWY: "The military's offensive will intensify, and Gaza," he says, "will become smaller and more isolated." Gaza's health ministry says more than 1,600 people have been killed since Israel ended a ceasefire last month that had freed some hostages. Israeli airstrikes on Sunday put out of service one of Gaza's last functioning hospitals. And the territory's under blockade, with no food, medicine or vital supplies entering. Walid Mughayer, a resident of Rafah, is among hundreds of thousands of people displaced again.
WALID MUGHAYER: (Speaking Arabic).
BATRAWY: He says the family has no money, no tent to shelter in and no sheets to sleep on.
Aya Batrawy, NPR News, Dubai, with reporting by Anas Baba in Gaza.
(SOUNDBITE OF VALGEIR SIGURDSSON'S "DRAUMALAND") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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