Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the military would have to retain open-ended security control over the Gaza Strip long after the war against Hamas ends.

The remarks came as Israel’s military said its troops had entered Gaza’s second-largest city in its its pursuit to wipe out the territory’s Hamas rulers.

The war has already killed more than 15,000 Palestinians and displaced over three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, who are running out of safe places to go.

The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll in the territory since October 7 has surpassed 15,890, with more than 41,000 wounded.

The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, but said 70% of the dead were women and children.

Israel says it targets Hamas operatives and blames civilian casualties on the militants, accusing them of operating in residential neighbourhoods.

The United States, Qatar and Egypt, which mediated an earlier ceasefire, say they are working on a longer truce.

Hamas said talks on releasing more of the scores of hostages seized by militants on October 7 must be tied to a permanent ceasefire.

Meanwhile, Israel has intensified its bombardment of Gaza’s second largest city, Khan Younis, with dozens of injured people rushed to hospital as a new phase of the war continues.

Under US pressure to prevent further mass casualties, Israel said it is being more precise as it widens its offensive into southern Gaza after obliterating much of the north.

At the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, ambulances brought dozens of injured people in throughout the night. At one point, a car pulled up and man emerged carrying a young boy in a bloody shirt whose hand had been blown off.

Satellite photos taken on Sunday showed tanks and troops massing outside Khan Younis, the latest target of the offensive, which was home to more than 400,000 people before the war.

Israel has ordered people out of nearly two dozen areas instead of the entire region, as it did in the north.

But with most of Gaza’s population already packed into the south, cramming UN shelters and family homes, there are few places left to go. Israel has barred people who fled the north earlier in the war from returning.

Palestinians say that as Israel continues to strike across the besieged territory, there are no areas where they feel safe, and many fear that if they leave their homes they will never be allowed to return.

Israel has said it must dismantle Hamas’ extensive military infrastructure and remove it from power in order to prevent a repeat of the October 7 attack that ignited the war.

The surprise assault through the border fence saw Hamas and other Palestinian militants kill about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and capture some 240 men, women and children.

The Israeli military has said it makes every effort to spare civilians and accuses Hamas of using them as human shields as it fights in dense residential areas, where it has a labyrinth of tunnels, bunkers, rocket launchers and sniper nests.

But the militant group is deeply rooted in Palestinian society, and its determination to end decades of open-ended Israeli military rule is shared by most Palestinians, even those opposed to its ideology and its attacks on Israeli civilians.

That will complicate any effort to eliminate Hamas without causing massive casualties and displacement.

Even after weeks of unrelenting bombardment, Hamas’ leaders in Gaza were able to conduct complex ceasefire negotiations and orchestrate the release of more than 100 Israeli and foreign hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners last week. Palestinian militants have also kept up their rocket fire into Israel, both before and after the truce.

The fighting has brought unprecedented death and destruction to the coastal strip.

The health ministry in Gaza said the death toll in the territory since October 7 has surpassed 15,890 people – 70% of them women and children – with more than 42,000 wounded. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. It says hundreds have been killed or injured since the ceasefire’s end, and many still are trapped under rubble.

An Israeli army official provided a similar figure for the death toll in Gaza on Monday, after weeks in which Israeli officials had cast doubt on the ministry’s count.

The official said at least 15,000 people have been killed, including 5,000 militants, without saying how the military arrived at its figures. The military says 84 of its soldiers have been killed in the Gaza offensive.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Monday that it was too soon to pass judgment on Israeli operations, but that it was unusual for a modern military to identify precise areas of expected ground manoeuvres and ask people to move out, as Israel has done in Khan Younis.

“These are the kinds of steps that we have asked them to undertake.” he said. “These are the conversations we’re having day in, day out.”

The US has pledged unwavering support to Israel since the October 7 attack, including rushing weapons and other aid to the country.

Militants behind an attack on Jordanian police supported Islamic State and investigations had revealed plans for more attacks on security and civilian targets, Jordan’s interior minister said on Monday.

Jordanian police said on Saturday a homemade explosive device planted near a police van killed a policeman and injured six others the day before.

The police vehicle had been maintaining security near a music festival in the majority Christian town of Fuhais, near the capital Amman and 15 kilometres (about 10 miles) from the hillside city of Salt.

In a huge security operation, Jordanian forces laid siege to a building in a residential part of Salt on Saturday night in search of those responsible for the bomb attack.

After the suspected militants refused to heed calls to surrender, the security forces stormed the building in a shoot out that resulted in the death of three militants and four security personnel, police said.

Ten members of the security forces were also injured.

Interior Minister Sameer al-Mobaideen said the militants, who blew up part of the building when the security forces stormed it, did not belong to a specific group but subscribed to Islamic State ideology.

Militants from Islamic State and other radical jihadist groups have long targeted U.S.-allied Jordan and dozens of militants are serving long prison terms.

“There were plots to wage a series of terror attacks that sought security points and popular gatherings. We know the targets but we won’t tell them so people won’t get terrified,” Mobaideen said.

King Abdullah, a Middle East ally of Western powers against Islamist militancy who has also safeguarded Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel, warned on Saturday the perpetrators of the attack would pay dearly.

SECRET INVESTIGATIONS

The monarch has been among the most vocal leaders in the region in warning of threats posed by radical groups.

The group were all Jordanian and there were no signs so far they had foreign links, Mobaideen said, refusing to give names of suspects. “The investigations are secret and ongoing,” he told a news conference

Alongside automatic weapons in the suspect’s possession, the authorities found a location where chemical ingredients for manufacturing explosives were buried, Mobaideen added.

General Hussein Hawatmeh, head of Jordan’ Gendarmerie, said the militant cell was recently set up and there were indications its members had embraced radical ideology.

“What is dangerous is that these new recruits are more impulsive than those with experience in executing operations that harm Jordan’s security,” Hawatmeh told reporters.

Jordan has been relatively unscathed by the uprisings, civil wars and Islamist militancy that have swept the Middle East since 2011.

But there have been some incidents of Islamist violence, increasingly carried out by members of powerful tribes that are traditionally the backbone of support for the ruling Hashemite dynasty.

Security forces have been extra vigilant having warned that sympathisers of Islamic State could launch revenge attacks after militants were driven out of most of the territory they once controlled in Syria and Iraq.

Intelligence officials and some experts believe widening social disparities and a perception of official corruption are fuelling a rise in radicalisation among disaffected youths in a country with high unemployment and growing poverty.

An Israeli court jailed an Israeli Arab poet for five months on Tuesday after convicting her of incitement to terrorism for a poem and remarks she posted on social media during a wave of Palestinian street attacks.

Dareen Tatour, 36, posted on Facebook and YouTube a video of herself reading out her poem “Resist, My People, Resist”, as a soundtrack to footage of masked Palestinian youths throwing stones and firebombs at Israeli soldiers.

Tatour published her poem in October 2015 during a spate of deadly Palestinian stabbing, shooting and ramming attacks on Israelis. She was arrested a few days later, and prosecutors said her post was a call for violence. She denied this.

Her case became a cause celebre for freedom of speech advocates in Israel and abroad. It drew attention to the advanced technology used by Israeli security agencies to trawl through social media to identify and arrest users suspected of incitement to violence, or of planning attacks.

Tatour said her poem was misunderstood by the Israeli authorities as it was not a call for violence, rather for non-violent struggle.

U.S.-backed negotiations on a Palestinian state in territory Israel captured in a 1967 war have been stalled since 2014.

Tatour was also charged with supporting a terrorist group. Prosecutors said she had expressed support for the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad’s call for an uprising.

“I wasn’t expecting justice to be done. The case was political from the start, because I am Palestinian and support freedom of speech,” she told reporters at the Nazareth Magistrate’s Court in northern Israel.

ARAB MINORITY

Tatour belongs to Israel’s Arab minority, which comprises mainly descendants of the Palestinians who remained on their land after the 1948 Arab-Jewish war that surrounded the creation of the state of Israel. Hundreds of thousands fled or were driven from their homes.

The court added a six-month suspended sentence to Tatour’s jail time, according to the official minutes distributed by the Justice Ministry. Her lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said Tatour would appeal both the verdict and the sentence.

Israel says the string of Palestinian attacks that began in 2015 was fuelled by online incitement and it has launched a legal crackdown to curb it.

Indictments for online incitement have tripled in Israel since 2014. Prosecutions by the Israeli military have also increased in the occupied West Bank – most of those charged are young Palestinians.

The campaign against alleged incitement has raised questions about the balance between security and free speech.

On July 18 the Israeli parliament was set to pass legislation that would have empowered the justice system to order Internet providers, such as Facebook and Google, to take down social media posts in Israel deemed as incitement.

But hours before the scheduled vote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shelved the bill. An adviser to Netanyahu, Jonatan Urich, said the law was open to a too-wide interpretation that could allow cyber-censorship and harm freedom of speech.

Bulgaria’s parliament on Friday banned the wearing of face veils in public in a move which supporters said would boost security in the wake of Islamist militant attacks in Europe.

The “burqa ban” law, pushed by the nationalist Patriotic Front coalition, echoes similar measures in western European countries such as France, Netherlands and Belgium which have various laws banning the wearing of burqas or niqabs.

People who do not follow the ban in Bulgaria face fines of up to 1,500 levs ($860) as well as suspension of social benefits.

The ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms refused to take part in the vote, which followed full-face veils ban in public in several Bulgarian towns. It said the ban it would incite ethic and religious intolerance.

The ruling centre-right party said the ban has nothing to do with religious outfits but only aimed at boosting national security and allowing better video surveillance.

“The law is not directed against religious communities and is not repressive,” ruling GERB’s senior lawmaker Krasimir Velchev said. “We made a very good law for the safety of our children.”

According to the law, clothing hiding the face may not be worn in government offices, schools, cultural institutions and places of public recreation, but exceptions are allowed for health or professional reasons.

A minority of Muslim women in Europe cover their faces, but their veils have become symbols for some Europeans troubled by securty, immigration and Muslim integration.

Muslims make up about 12 percent of Bulgaria’s 7.2 million population and most belong to a centuries-old community, largely ethnic Turks.

Muslim women in the country traditionally do not wear niqabs or burqas, exept for a small group in the Roma community who have recently started, sparking tensions in the city of Pazarzhik.

Many Bulgarians are concerned that the migrant inflows into Europe may pose a threat to their predominantly Orthodox Christian culture and help radicalise part of the country’s long-established Muslim minority.