At a conference in the occupied West Bank, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bragged about Israel’s overt “cheating” on the so-called Gaza peace deal. Israel’s temporary control over 53% of Gaza (the “yellow line") was supposed to decline according to the terms of the peace agreement, yet Netanyahu announced that he had ordered an increase to 70%. He announced: “We are now in 60% of the territory of the Gaza Strip. We were at 50%. We moved to 60%. My directive is to move to—take it step by step—first of all 70. Let’s start with that.”
Two days earlier, Hamas had said that Israel’s moving the yellow line “constitutes an explicit and ongoing undermining of the ceasefire agreement, a serious violation of its provisions, and an exposed attempt to impose new facts on the ground by force, with the aim of entrenching military control over the Strip and undermining any real chance of stabilizing the situation or making de-escalation efforts succeed.”
Netanyahu appears to agree with Hamas’s assessment.