Netanyahu’s ‘70% Directive’ Unmasked: The Hidden Map to Annex Gaza

On 28 May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Ein Prat Leadership Academy at a conference held inside an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. “At this point, we are fully in control of 60 percent of the territory of the Gaza Strip,” he declared in Hebrew, according to footage broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12. “And my directive is to get to 70 percent.”

When an audience member called out demanding 100 percent of the besieged Palestinian territory, Netanyahu replied: “First 70 percent. We’ll start with that.”

The US-backed October 2025 ceasefire agreement allowed Israeli occupation forces to maintain a presence across roughly 53 percent of the strip—a devastating concession extracted from Palestinians, explicitly framed as temporary and pending a mandatory withdrawal. However, the reality on the ground shows Israel is actively using the framework to execute a permanent annexation.

The geography of land theft and creeping annexation

The ceasefire signed on 9 October 2025 allocated the Israeli military a temporary zone covering over half of Gaza’s 365-square-kilometre territory. Yet, by May, Israeli forces had expanded that footprint by roughly 11 percent beyond the designated Yellow Line. Netanyahu’s public confirmation of the 60 percent figure merely caught up with the realities on the ground prior to his Ein Prat address. Leaked Israeli military maps issued in March 2026 documented a restricted zone that independent analysts calculated at 64 percent. His 28 May directive to reach 70 percent aims to swallow another 10 percentage points of the strip. None of this creeping annexation is authorised by the agreed text.

An Al Jazeera Open Source Unit investigation, analysing satellite data up to May 2026, identified 40 distinct Israeli military outposts entrenched inside the enclave—eight of which were constructed entirely from scratch after the ceasefire took effect. In Juhor ad-Dik, Palestinian agricultural land was bulldozed and converted into an active military base beginning in March 2026. In Beit Lahiya, earlier Al Jazeera satellite analysis from March 4 documented a massive dirt berm erected more than 580 metres deep into territory the ceasefire ostensibly guarantees as civilian-accessible.

In December 2025, Israeli army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir referred to the arbitrary Yellow Line as a “new border.” Defense Minister Israel Katz later bluntly declared that Israel would “never leave Gaza.” These were not slips of the tongue by subordinates; they were definitive policy declarations, made on the record, and met with deafening silence and tacit approval from Washington.

The Yellow Line was sold to the international community as a temporary buffer pending a negotiated withdrawal. Today, it is defined by permanent berms, paved military roads, sniper watchtowers, and communications arrays linked to Israel’s domestic military grid. The human cost of this occupation has been devastating. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health figures compiled by Al Jazeera up to 4 June, at least 947 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during this period of declared “ceasefire”—a staggering death toll comparable to the massacres witnessed in the first two weeks after 7 October 2023.

The ‘Board of Peace’ and international complicity

On 21 May, Nickolay Mladenov warned the UN Security Council that Gaza faces a permanent geographic divide unless the ceasefire is fully implemented. Mladenov serves as the High Representative of the Board of Peace (BoP)—a body established under Donald Trump’s administration and endorsed by UN Resolution 2803. His formal written report to the Council outrageously placed the blame on Palestinian factions, citing their refusal to disarm as the “principal obstacle” to peace. In the same breath, the report acknowledged “near daily” violations of the ceasefire, glaringly omitting the Israeli military as the perpetrator.

This diplomatic framework systematically blames the occupied while shielding the occupier. The BoP documents violations by an Israeli army equipped with advanced weaponry, fighter jets, and surveillance infrastructure, yet exclusively directs its disarmament demands at the besieged Palestinians. Hamas controls no territory beyond the designated, shrinking Palestinian civilian zones. Palestinian factions have issued no directives to occupy 70 percent of the enclave, nor have they built military outposts on civilian land. The violations recorded in the UN Council’s own files are overwhelmingly Israeli, yet the framework provides zero mechanisms to hold Tel Aviv accountable.

Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour articulated the legal reality plainly: “International law is not optional. There should be only one path: compliance or enforcement.”

However, the Board of Peace lacks any mandate—or political will—to enforce that path against Israel. Instead, it weaponises a one-sided disarmament clause against Palestinians while maintaining an institutional silence on the relentless Israeli military construction documented by satellite imagery since November 2025.

Masking colonisation and ethnic cleansing as ‘security’

Israeli officials frequently recycle the pretext that absolute military control over Gaza is necessary to prevent Palestinian resistance groups from reconstituting. In their narrative, the October agreement forbids a return to Hamas governance, and achieving this requires perpetual military domination rather than withdrawal. By this colonial logic, expanding the Yellow Line is merely “security management,” not illegal annexation. The United States, acting as the primary guarantor of the agreement, has tellingly offered no formal written objection to this expansion. The Board of Peace’s “disarmament-first” approach rests on the exact same flawed premise: Palestinians must surrender their ability to defend themselves before Israeli occupation forces even consider pulling back.

Yet, the Palestinian perspective, rooted in decades of historical betrayal, carries an undeniable logic that the international framework deliberately ignores. Every previous Israeli commitment to withdraw—from the Oslo Accords to Camp David to the 2005 Gaza “disengagement”—was systematically reversed, renegotiated, or entirely circumvented by Israel to deepen the occupation. For Palestinians, disarming without ironclad, verifiable guarantees of full Israeli withdrawal simply means surrendering an already vulnerable population to the mercy of an unending occupation. The current BoP architecture offers no mechanism to force Israeli troops out even if Palestinian factions were to disarm.

A blueprint for forced displacement and starvation

Two indisputable facts expose Israel’s “security” narrative for what it truly is: a blueprint for ethnic cleansing and collective punishment.

First, Israel’s security cabinet quietly established a dedicated “voluntary emigration” directorate—a well-known euphemism for forced displacement—within the Defence Ministry in March 2025. This was a full seven months before the October ceasefire was signed, and long before any demands for Palestinian disarmament were proposed. Defense Minister Katz confirmed its continued operation on 27 May, alongside the assassination of Hamas commander Mohammed Odeh: “The plan for voluntary emigration from Gaza will also be implemented, all at the proper time and in the proper manner.” A state apparatus designed to engineer the mass expulsion of a captive civilian population is not a reaction to a refusal to disarm; it is a premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing. Article 1(2) of the UN Charter and the International Court of Justice’s landmark 2024 advisory opinion on the occupied territories explicitly define the forced transfer of an occupied population as a war crime, regardless of the Orwellian “voluntary” labels attached to it by the occupying power.

Second, the ceasefire text explicitly mandates that Gaza be redeveloped “for the benefit of its people.” Yet, the reality on the ground is a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe and the weaponisation of starvation. The Gaza Government Media Office reported that between 10 October 2025 and 31 May 2026, only 36 percent of the agreed daily aid target was allowed to enter the besieged strip—just 50,636 trucks out of the 139,200 desperately needed to prevent famine.

Simultaneously, a late-2025 investigation by Forensic Architecture identified 48 Israeli military sites inside Gaza, 13 of which were built after the ceasefire took effect, complete with permanent infrastructure linked to Israel’s domestic military network. Al Jazeera’s June 2026 investigation identified 40 active outposts; together, they paint a unified picture of colonial entrenchment. Reconstruction aid, as Mladenov cynically noted, will not flow until Palestinians lay down their arms. Yet, the only entities laying down permanent foundations—in the form of concrete berms, military outposts, and fortified sniper corridors—are the Israeli occupation forces.

Netanyahu’s chilling 70 percent directive does not dismantle the Trump plan from the outside; it weaponises it from within. Israel is using the ceasefire’s initial concession of 53 percent as a staging ground to swallow 70 percent of Gaza. Meanwhile, the international framework conveniently blames the victims—a besieged population with no tanks, no buffer zones, and no state-sponsored directorate for ethnic cleansing. The 21-point ceasefire agreement may exist on paper in diplomatic corridors in Washington and New York. But on the bleeding ground of Gaza, it has been entirely rewritten by the machinery of Israeli occupation.