News- Middle East: Israeli protesters have staged anti-regime rallies, demanding an end to the zionist forces' years-long genocidal war against the Palestinian in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Protesters across Israel called on Sunday for an end to the Gaza war and a deal to release the 50 remaining Israeli captives held by the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement in Gaza since 2023.

Israeli police said they had arrested dozens of the protesters for disturbing law and order in numerous places across the occupied Palestinian land. Local media reported protests in numerous cities and locations across the land.

In Tel Aviv, protesters at a rally unfurled a huge flag covered with portraits of the remaining captives on it.

"Israelis are not all alike. There is a substantial part... that opposes the official policy," he added amid the crowd of protesters, some of them carrying flags emblazoned with "681", the number of days hostages have been held in Gaza.

Demonstrators also blocked roads, including the highway connecting Tel Aviv and Al-Quds Jerusalem where they set tires on fire, according to Israeli media footage.

"This is probably the last minute we have to save the hostages," demonstrator Ofir Penso, 50, told AFP as thousands gathered in downtown Tel Aviv ahead of a night of protests.

Sunday's protests took place days after the Israeli regime's war cabinet approved Israeli Prime Minister Benjamne Netanyahu's plans to capture Gaza City, 22 months into a war that has created dire humanitarian conditions in the Palestinian territory.

Israeli forces chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eya Zamir, said on Sunday that the military was "approving the plan for the next phase of the war".

"We will maintain the momentum of Operation 'Gideon's Chariots' while focusing on Gaza City. We will continue to strike until the decisive defeat of Hamas."

Nentanyahu,, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and whose new plan calls for the capture of the whole of Gaza by January, expressed anger over the anti-regime rallies, claiming any opposition to his war-mongering schemes would endanger the lives of the captives and "not only harden Hamas's position", but also, "ensure" that there would be more violence in the occupied Israeli territories in  the future.

The Israeli regime's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich decried the rallies, claiming the families of the captive  who organized the rallies were a "perverse and harmful" group that was playing "into the hands of Hamas."

However,  Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz slammed Netanyahu and Smotrich for "attacking the families of the hostages" while "bearing responsibility for the captivity of their children by Hamas for nearly two years".

“We are very, very close to losing our collective humanity,” Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s communications director, said in a post on X.

Touma said the crisis had been fueled by the new US-Israeli aid distribution system that “brings dehumanisation, chaos, and death.”

She insisted, “We must return to a unified, UN-led coordination and distribution system based on international humanitarian law. The abomination must end.”

The World Food Programme (WFP) says despite its teams “doing everything” to deliver food assistance in Gaza, current supplies only meet 47 percent of the intended target.

According to the UN agency, around 500,000 people are now on the “brink of famine”, and that only a ceasefire would allow food assistance to be scaled up to the required levels.

The Government Media Office in Gaza said Israel was deliberately starving Palestinians by blocking essential goods, including baby formula, nutritional supplements, meat, fish, dairy products, and frozen fruits and vegetables.

In a statement on Telegram, it said Israel was carrying out “a systematic policy of engineered starvation and slow killing against more than 2.4 million people in Gaza, including more than 1.2 million Palestinian children, in a complete crime of genocide”.

It warned that more than 40,000 infants face severe malnutrition while at least 100,000 other children and patients are in a similar condition.

Also, latest video footage released by Hamas and Islamic Jihad showed weak and emaciated Israli captives suffering from the Israeli-casued shortage of food leading to malnutrition and possible starvation death.

Hamas says Netanyahu's plan is to force Palestinians in Gaza to either flee their homes in "mass displacement", or face imminent death in "a new wave of extermination."

On Sunday, the Israeli regime forces killed at least 57 Palestinians, 38 of them aid seekers at US-run centers for food distribution.

The Israeli forces genocidal war on Gaza has killed nearly 62,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to official figures released by the enclave's Health Ministry.

Source: Press TV