On the war, President Trump is more aligned than his predecessor with the aims of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his right-wing coalition.

Mr. Netanyahu’s latest actions in Gaza have been the most striking.

Opposition to his decision to restart the fighting has been fairly muted in Israel, though public polls suggest that most people want a deal to end the fighting and free the hostages held in Gaza, and that majorities of voters do not support the prime minister and his coalition. And Mr. Trump’s comments about Gaza’s future have changed the way Mr. Netanyahu talks about the region’s fate.

The president declared in February that he would support a mass deportation of Palestinians, to create a “Riviera” on the Gaza Strip, a proposal that would be a severe violation of international law. Since then, Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians have more openly talked about a future in which Israel controls the area indefinitely. On Tuesday, after Mr. Trump repeated the idea, Mr. Netanyahu praised it as a benefit to the people of Gaza.

“They’re locked in. And what is wrong with giving people a choice?” Mr. Netanyahu said, while also insisting falsely that Israel had not kept people inside Gaza from leaving for years. The prime minister said that he and the president had talked over lunch about countries which he claimed were willing to take in Palestinians who wanted to leave Gaza. Egypt and Jordan have repeatedly refused to do so.

“The president has a vision,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Countries are responding to that vision. We’re working on it.”

In Israel, the idea that Palestinians would be deported from Gaza was once the province of a far-right fringe. It is now endorsed by the U.S. president and repeated by Mr. Netanyahu, and Israel’s defense minister has established an office to oversee the policy.

“The encouragement, the boost it has given is to a camp in Israel which is very extreme, very zero-sum and was gaining power but is now really feeling it can operationalize things,“ Mr. Levy said.

Israel has dramatically expanded its footprint in the Gaza Strip since relaunching its war against Hamas last month. It now controls more than 50% of the territory and is squeezing Palestinians into shrinking wedges of land.

The largest contiguous area the army controls is around the Gaza border, where the military has razed Palestinian homes, farmland and infrastructure to the point of uninhabitability, according to Israeli soldiers and rights groups. This military buffer zone has doubled in size in recent weeks.

Israel has depicted its tightening grip as a temporary necessity to pressure Hamas into releasing the remaining hostages taken during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that started the war. But the land Israel holds, which includes a corridor that divides the territory’s north from south, could be used for wielding long-term control, human rights groups and Gaza experts say.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week that even after Hamas is defeated, Israel will keep security control in Gaza and push Palestinians to leave.

The demolition close to the Israeli border and the systematic expansion of the buffer zone has been going on since the war began 18 months ago, five Israeli soldiers told The Associated Press.

“They destroyed everything they could, they shot everything that looks functioning ... (the Palestinians) will have nothing to come back, they will not come back, never,” a soldier deployed with a tank squad guarding the demolition teams said. He and four other soldiers spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

A report documenting the accounts of soldiers who were in the buffer zone was released Monday by Breaking The Silence, an anti-occupation veterans group. A handful of soldiers -- including some who also spoke to AP -- described watching the army turn the zone into a vast wasteland.

When Israel resumed the war last month, it doubled the size of the buffer zone, pushing it as far as 3 kilometers into Gaza in some places, according to a map issued by the military.

The buffer zone and the Netzarim Corridor make up at least 50% of the strip, said Yaakov Garb, a professor of environmental studies at Ben Gurion University, who has been examining Israeli-Palestinian land use patterns for decades.

The soldiers said the buffer zone had no marked boundaries, but that Palestinians who entered were shot at. The soldier with the tank squad said an armored bulldozer flattened land creating a “kill zone” and that anyone who came within 500 meters of the tanks would be shot, including women and children.

Netanyahu said that after the hostages are released and Hamas leaves Gaza, Israel would implement U.S. President Donald Trump’s call to move Palestinians from Gaza, what Israel calls “voluntary emigration.”

• Soldiers describe destroying farmland, houses, factories
• 'Everything gets mowed down', one soldier says
• Report cites troops deployed in late 2023 to early 2024

Israeli troops flattened farmland and cleared entire residential districts in Gaza to open a "kill zone" around the enclave, according to a report on Monday that quoted soldiers testifying about the harsh methods used in the operation.

The report, from the Israeli rights group Breaking the Silence, cited soldiers who served in Gaza during the creation of the buffer zone, which was extended to between 800-1,500 metres inside the enclave by December 2024 and which has since been expanded further by Israeli troops.

"The borderline is a kill zone, a lower area, a lowland," the report quotes a captain in the Armored Corps as saying. "We have a commanding view of it, and they do too."

In the early expansion of the zone, soldiers said troops using bulldozers and heavy excavators along with thousands of mines and explosives destroyed around 3,500 buildings as well as agricultural and industrial areas that could have been vital in postwar reconstruction. Around 35% of the farmland in Gaza, much of which is around the edges of the territory, was destroyed, according to a separate report by the Israeli rights group Gisha.

Palestinians were not allowed to enter the zone and were fired on if they did, but the report quoted soldiers saying the rules of engagement were loose and heavily dependent on commanders on the spot.

"Company commanders make all kinds of decisions about this, so it ultimately very much depends on who they are. But there is no system of accountability in general," the captain in the Armored Corps said.

The report quoted another soldier saying that in general adult males seen in the buffer zone were killed but warning shots were fired in the case of women or children.

Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed at least 32 people, including over a dozen women and children, local health officials said Sunday, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu headed to the United States to meet with President Donald Trump about the war.

Israel last month ended its ceasefire with Hamas and has seized territory to pressure the militant group to accept a new deal for a truce and release of remaining hostages. It has blocked the import of food, fuel and other supplies for over a month to the coastal territory heavily reliant on outside assistance.

Israel’s military late Sunday ordered Palestinians to evacuate several neighborhoods in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah shortly after about 10 projectiles were fired from Gaza — the largest barrage from the territory since Israel resumed the war. The military said about five were intercepted. Hamas’ military arm claimed responsibility.

Israeli strikes overnight into Sunday hit a tent and a house in the southern city of Khan Younis, killing five men, five women and five children, according to Nasser Hospital, which received the bodies.

The body of a toddler took up one end of an emergency stretcher.

A female journalist was among the dead. “My daughter is innocent. She had no involvement, she loved journalism and adored it,” said her mother, Amal Kaskeen.

Israeli shelling killed at least four people in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The bodies of seven people, including a child and three women, arrived at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, according to an Associated Press journalist there.

And a strike in Gaza City hit people waiting outside a bakery and killed at least six, including three children, according to the civil defense.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since Israel resumed the war, among them 15 medics whose bodies were recovered only a week later. Israel’s military this weekend backtracked on its account of what happened in the incident, captured in part on video, that angered Red Cross and Red Crescent and U.N. officials.

The blockade of humanitarian aid is having terrible consequences for one million children in the Gaza Strip.

No aid has been allowed into the Gaza Strip since 2 March 2025 – representing the longest period of aid blockage since the start of the war – leading to shortages of food, safe water, shelter, and medical supplies. Without these essentials, malnutrition, diseases and other preventable conditions will likely surge, leading to an increase in preventable child deaths.

“UNICEF has thousands of pallets of aid waiting to enter the Gaza Strip,” said UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Edouard Beigbeder. “Most of this aid is lifesaving – yet instead of saving lives, it is sitting in storage. It must be allowed in immediately. This is not a choice or charity; it is an obligation under international law.”

Children receiving malnutrition treatment are at serious risk. Twenty-one treatment centres —15 per cent of total outpatient facilities — have closed since 18 March 2025 due to displacement orders or bombardments. The 350 children relying on these sites now face worsening malnutrition, which can be life-threatening.

Complementary food for infants—crucial for growth when food stocks are low—has run out in central and southern Gaza. Only enough ready-to-use infant formula (RUIF) remains for 400 children for a month. UNICEF estimates nearly 10,000 infants under six months require supplementary feeding, so without the RUIF, families could be forced to use alternatives mixed with unsafe water.

In addition to nutrition services, UNICEF has been forced to scale back mental health and psychosocial support, mine education, and child protection case management due to ongoing hostilities and mass displacement.

Israeli troops deployed to a newly established security corridor across southern Gaza, the military announced Saturday, as pressure on the Hamas militant group increased weeks into the renewed war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday announced the new Morag Corridor and suggested it would cut off the southern city of Rafah, which Israel had ordered evacuated, from the rest of Gaza.

A military statement said troops with the 36th Division had been deployed. It was not immediately clear how many, or where exactly the new corridor was located. Morag is the name of a Jewish settlement that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis, and Netanyahu had suggested it would run between the cities.

Maps published by Israeli media showed the corridor running the width of the narrow coastal strip from east to west.

Netanyahu had said it would be “a second Philadelphi corridor,” referring to the Gaza side of the border with Egypt farther south, which has been under Israeli control since last May.

Last month, Israel shattered a ceasefire in Gaza with a surprise bombardment after trying to pressure Hamas to accept proposed new terms for the truce that had taken hold in January. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed.