Netanyahu says he ordered stepped up efforts to evacuate civilians from Gaza City

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls for accelerated efforts to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza City as Israel begins a major ground offensive there, saying this will help ensure the war’s swift end.

“Right now, [Gazans] are leaving Gaza City, and so far almost 400,000 have already left,” Netanyahu says, adding that in a discussion at the IDF command bunker in Tel Aviv today, “I instructed them to find ways to make it easier for them to leave.”

“They want to leave, they want to get out of the city, because they want to — they are responding to us, not to Hamas, which, by the way, occasionally even shoots at them to stop them from doing so,” he says.

He says the effort to evacuate Gazans from the city ahead of the major offensive “is succeeding, but we need to intensify it — to help, to accelerate it — because we have an interest in ending the war quickly, and not ending it in defeat.”

“To those who say, ‘Come on, finish, just end it’ – ending it in defeat would be an enormous victory for the forces of evil, for Iran’s axis of evil, which would quickly recover from this, because everyone is watching who wins. If [Hamas] survives there, if they remain there, they will call that a victory – and of course, we want to achieve the opposite effect,” he continues.

Regarding voluntary departure from Gaza, Netanyahu says, “This possibility certainly exists; it has not been taken off the table. But it is not an active campaign we are running. It’s not something we are pushing.”

He claims that “If the gates were open, if there were a way to open the gates, they would leave — roughly 60 percent, according to surveys – surveys by Arab sources, by Western sources, and also by our own methods – would like to leave.”

He condemns claims by other nations, saying, “‘You must not let them leave, you must lock them in Gaza at any cost.'”

“Unlike in other war zones in the world, they say it is immoral to allow them to leave. I think what is immoral is not to allow them to leave,” he says.

The IDF says that as it launched its planned major offensive in Gaza City today, around 370,000 residents had already fled — less than half of the roughly one million Palestinians the military had ordered to evacuate. Even so, the departure has apparently already overwhelmed the available shelter space and transportation out of northern Gaza.