Benny Gantz, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wartime government, warned on Sunday that Israel would launch a ground attack on Rafah if Israeli hostages held by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip were not released by Ramadan.

“The world needs to know this and the leaders of Hamas need to know this: if by Ramadan the hostages are not home, fighting will continue everywhere, including the Rafah region,” said the former chief of the national defense general staff. Israel.

“To those who say the price is too high, I say clearly: Hamas has a choice. (Its members) can surrender, release the hostages, and the civilians in Gaza will be able to celebrate Ramadan,” he added during a speech at a conference of presidents of major American Jewish organizations in Jerusalem.

Ramadan, a holy month for Muslims, is expected to begin around Sunday, March 10.

Despite calls from part of the international community not to proceed, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu appears determined to launch an attack on Rafah, on the closed border with Egypt, where 1.4 million Palestinians have taken refuge. Most of those displaced by the war there live in extremely harsh conditions.

Mr. Gantz assured that the attack will be carried out in coordination and in the context of dialogue with the US and Egyptian governments, as well as that the urgent evacuation of civilians will be “facilitated” in order to reduce “as much as possible” the number of victims in the their classes.

Rafah and Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, a few kilometers away, as well as other sectors of the small Palestinian enclave, were intensively bombarded by the Israeli army, killing at least 127 people in 24 hours, it announced yesterday, Sunday. the health ministry of Hamas, a movement in power in this Palestinian territory since 2007.

Following the unprecedented attack by Hamas’s military arm in southern Israel on October 7, Israel’s civil-military leadership vowed to “annihilate” it.