August 7, 2025 - Gaza news updates

Our live coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza has moved here.

Planes drop aid packages by parachute over western Gaza City, Gaza on Thursday.

The Israeli security cabinet’s approval of an expansion of the war in Gaza would includes more than one phase, according to an Israeli source.

Initial phase: The deadline for the first phase of the operation, which includes the evacuation of Gaza City and an expansion of aid distribution, is October 7, according to the source.

October 7, 2025, is the second anniversary of the Hamas-led attack that triggered Israel’s war in Gaza. The date was intentionally picked for its symbolism, the source said.

Israel will significantly expand the humanitarian aid effort at the beginning at the first phase, according to a second Israeli source, but the plan calls for no distribution within Gaza City as a means of encouraging Palestinians to evacuate.

The overall plan is expected to take up to five months, an Israeli official told CNN before the cabinet vote.

The approved plan is somewhat narrower than a full takeover of the entire enclave, focusing only on Gaza City and excluding surrounding camps. But it still entails the forced evacuation of nearly half of the territory’s population. Israel’s military already controls 75% of Gaza.

Military misgivings: The Israeli military’s Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir warned the security cabinet of the danger of worsening the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the international implications of such an escalation of the war, according to the first source, but his warnings were brushed aside.

Zamir also cautioned the security cabinet about the danger to the remaining 50 hostages, 20 of whom are still believed to be alive.

Instead, Zamir presented a more limited plan focused on encircling Gaza City and other areas, but the source said the security cabinet rejected the plan.

In an apparent reference to Zamir’s proposal, Netanyahu’s office said an “alternative plan that had been submitted to the Security Cabinet would neither achieve the defeat of Hamas nor the return of the hostages.”

Indonesia plans to transform a medical facility on an uninhabited island to care for around 2,000 wounded Gaza residents, the presiden’ts spokesperson said.

President Prabowo Subianto ordered that the center provide medical treatment to those “injured by bombings or collapsed buildings amid the ongoing war,” Hasan Nasbi said in Jakarta on Thursday, according to Indonesia’s state agency Antara.

He said the facility will be on Galang Island, to the archipelago nation’s northwest, near Sumatra. The island – just south of Singapore – was once a refugee camp for Vietnamese asylum seekers.

The world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia has never recognised Israel diplomatically, and has for decades been a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause.

Palestinian National Initiative President Mustafa Barghouti poses for a portrait on May, 28, 2024 in Barcelona, Spain.

Palestinian National Initiative President Mustafa Barghouti said Israel’s decision to expand military operations in Gaza is a “declaration of a war crime.”

The longtime Palestinian politician said the move shows that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government’s “real intentions” were “the ethnic cleansing of all the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip.”

He said the security cabinet’s decision “is a declaration of a war crime of extermination, genocide, and ethnic cleansing” and Netanyahu “wouldn’t have dared commit all these crimes without the support of the American administration.”

Protesters march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the "March for Humanity Save Gaza," to call for an end to Israel's military assault on Gaza and demand immediate humanitarian aid access.

Australia has urged Israel to back down from its plan to occupy Gaza City, warning the expansion of the war would “only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

“Permanent forced displacement is a violation of international law,” Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong said.

More than 100,000 people were estimated to have marched over the Sydney Harbor Bridge on Sunday to protest the war.

Following pledges by France and Canada to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly meeting in September, Wong said it was a matter of “when, not if” Australia followed suit.

Israeli opposition leader and parliament member Yair Lapid speaks during an anti-government protest in Tel Aviv on December 21, 2024.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said the security cabinet’s approval of plans to take over Gaza City was “a disaster which will lead to many more disasters.”

Lapid said on X that the move was “completely contrary to the position of the military and the defense establishment, without taking into consideration the burnout and the exhaustion of the combat troops.”

Lapid said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been “dragged” into a move by far right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich that would “take many months, bring about the death of the hostages, the killing of many soldiers, cost tens of billions to the Israel taxpayer and cause a diplomatic collapse.”

The leader of Israel’s left-wing opposition Democrats party, Yair Golan, went further. He said the decision means a “death sentence to hostages and more bereaved families.”

Before the cabinet vote, Israel’s military chief Eyal Zamir warned against a full takeover of Gaza, according to three Israeli sources.

NRC communications adviser Shaina Low appears on CNN on Friday.

Conditions for Palestinian civilians inside Gaza will only get worse if Israel’s military expands its operations, a Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) adviser has warned, adding the international community must do more to save lives.

“The situation in Gaza is about the worst we’ve ever seen it. And to imagine it getting even worse is just unimaginable and unconscionable,” NRC communications adviser Shaina Low told CNN.

The starvation crisis in Gaza is so desperate that people there are thinking “meal to meal” not “day to day or week to week,” Low said.

Before Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to occupy Gaza City, an Israeli official told CNN a phased plan under consideration included evacuating about a million Palestinians in Gaza City and other areas. The military would establish compounds to house the massive influx of displaced Palestinians, the official said.

Displacement sites and shelters are all overcrowded in Gaza, she added, and would struggle to cope with an influx of more displaced.

Low said the international community has “so much leverage beyond just words of condemnation that could have pressured Israel to open these crossings and allow us to save lives.”

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Ex-Middle East negotiator says Netanyahu’s plan to occupy Gaza City would be ‘extremely difficult to pull off’

3:12 • Source: CNN

Ex-Middle East negotiator says Netanyahu’s plan to occupy Gaza City would be ‘extremely difficult to pull off’

3:12

Israel’s push to occupy Gaza City will seriously harm Palestinians and put Israeli hostages at risk, a former Middle East negotiator said.

Aaron David Miller called the plan “fantastical” and “extremely difficult to pull off,” warning that “the cost to hostages and Palestinian civilians in Gaza is going to be prohibitive.”

“Every day that those hostages, the 20 that are still alive, remain in prison, their condition, as we’ve seen in those ghoulish and sadistic videos, remains increasingly fraught,” he told CNN’s Victor Blackwell.

“There’s no way the Israelis can do this, operate, without serious injury and death to the Palestinian population,” he said.

Miller noted that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has the leeway to act, with US President Donald Trump having “acquiesced” and the Knesset closed for summer. But he added that the prime minister lacks a path to victory.

The Israeli security cabinet’s approval of a plan for the military to take control of Gaza City is yet another major escalation of Israel’s war in the battered enclave.

As the cabinet voted, mass protests erupted across Israel over fears the decision to expand military operations would endanger hostages, and as international pressure mounted on Israel to end the conflict and allow more food into the territory as starvation spreads.

What did the cabinet vote on? The office of Israel’s prime minister said the security cabinet had approved the plan to “defeat Hamas” and the military would prepare to take over Gaza City while ensuring what it described as the “provision of humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones.”

The security cabinet voted by a majority to adopt what it called “the five principles for ending the war,” including Israeli security control of Gaza and the establishment of a civilian administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.

It said the “vast majority of cabinet ministers believed that the alternative plan presented in the cabinet would not achieve the defeat of Hamas nor the return of the hostages.” It was not clear which alternate plan the statement was referencing or who submitted it.

Why just Gaza City? It’s not yet clear. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly pushed for full control over the entire enclave.

Ahead of the cabinet meeting, Netanyahu was asked whether Israel plans to take military control of all of Gaza. “We intend to,” Netanyahu told Fox News. He claimed Israel is aiming to “remove Hamas” in Gaza, before handing the territory to “civilian governance that is not Hamas, and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel.”

Before the vote, an Israeli official told CNN the phased plan under consideration would require up to five months, during which about a million Palestinians in Gaza City and other areas would once again be forced into evacuation areas in southern Gaza.

The military would establish compounds to house the massive influx of displaced Palestinians, the official said.

What’s the goal? CNN analyst and Axios reporter Barak Ravid said that the military aimed to evacuate all Palestinian civilians from Gaza City to central camps and other areas, citing an unnamed senior Israeli official. A siege and ground offensive in the city would follow.

It’s unclear whether areas outside of Gaza City not under Israeli control will later be taken over.

Mahmoud al-Qurashli, a displaced Palestinian in the enclave, told Reuters on Thursday that “practically all of Gaza has been squeezed into the western part of Gaza City.”

Israeli soldiers organize military equipment while standing on armored personnel carriers near the border with Gaza in Southern Israel on August 6.

Israel’s security cabinet has adopted five principles for ending the war in Gaza, including “Israeli security control in the Gaza Strip” and a new civilian administration to govern the enclave, the Prime Minister’s Office said Friday.

These are the five principles:

“A decisive majority of Security Cabinet ministers believed that the alternative plan that had been submitted to the Security Cabinet would neither achieve the defeat of Hamas nor the return of the hostages,” the office said.

It was not immediately clear which alternate plan the statement was referencing or who submitted it.

Ahead of the security cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel did not want to govern Gaza. “We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us and giving Gazans a good life – that’s not possible with Hamas,” he said.

The cabinet also approved a plan from Netanyahu to occupy Gaza City despite rising international alarm over the humanitarian crisis in the pulverized enclave and significant public opposition to the plan in Israel.