For the first time since the October 2025 ceasefire took effect, a senior Israeli commander has publicly confirmed that the IDF controls 60% of Gaza. The milestone reshapes the security map of the Strip nearly three years after the October 7 massacre.
Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, chief of the IDF’s Central Command, delivered the announcement this week at a ceremony near Netiv Haasara. He paired it with a statement that residents of Israel’s south have waited almost three years to hear: another Hamas invasion is, in his words, no longer possible.
First reported by The Times of Israel, the confirmation marks a significant expansion from the roughly 53% of Gaza territory that Israel held when the truce with Hamas began last October. Behind the single percentage point shift lies a methodical campaign: a fortified security zone manned by two full divisions, an ongoing operation to eliminate the terrorists who carried out the October 7 attack, and a strategic posture that Israeli commanders say has permanently removed Hamas’s ability to repeat the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
What Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth Announced
Bluth made his remarks on Wednesday during a handover ceremony for the commander of the 99th Division, whose forces have operated inside the Strip for the past several years. Standing within sight of the Gaza border, the general took stock of what Israeli forces have accomplished since the darkest day in the country’s modern history.
“We are standing here [near] the northern Gaza Strip, looking at everything we have achieved, and we have achieved a great deal. More than 60% of the Strip is in our hands,” Bluth said.
His most consequential line addressed the scenario that has haunted Israeli defense planning since 2023. “There is a security zone for the communities near the Gaza border, held by two divisions and the IDF’s finest soldiers. The threat of an invasion, as occurred nearly three years ago, is no longer possible,” he said.
No IDF official had publicly confirmed expanded control beyond the lines drawn at the start of the ceasefire until this week. Until now, the expansion had been reported in fragments but never acknowledged from the podium.
IDF Controls 60% of Gaza: How Did the Map Change?
Consider how the Gaza Strip control map has shifted since the truce began:
- October 2025: The ceasefire takes effect with the IDF holding approximately 53% of Gaza’s territory. Hamas retains the other 47%, the portion where nearly all of the Strip’s two million residents live.
- May 2026: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has ordered the military to take control of 70% of Gaza.
- July 2026: Bluth confirms the IDF controls 60% of Gaza and more, the first public acknowledgment that Israeli forces have pushed past the ceasefire lines.
That directive has generated friction with Washington. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged last month that the 70% goal runs counter to President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the conflict. Yet the practical American response has been telling: Washington has not pressed Israel to pull back from any of the additional territory. For Jerusalem, that restraint amounts to breathing room. For the communities of the western Negev, it means the buffer between their homes and Hamas keeps widening.
Critics note the ceasefire framework contemplated Israel holding roughly 53% on a temporary basis, and they describe the expansion as a violation of those terms. Israeli commanders answer that the ceasefire has never been honored in full by Hamas, which continues to rebuild capabilities and plot attacks from the territory it still holds, and that the IDF’s posture reflects conditions on the ground rather than lines on a diplomatic map.
Why Another October 7 Is No Longer Possible
Bluth’s verdict on the Hamas invasion threat rests on hard infrastructure, not optimism. The security zone along the border is held continuously by two divisions composed of what he called the IDF’s finest soldiers. That standing force did not exist on October 7, 2023, when Hamas breached a lightly manned barrier and murdered some 1,200 people in Israeli border communities and at the Nova music festival.
Compare then and now. Three years ago, terror squads crossed the fence in minutes and reached kibbutz dining rooms before reinforcements arrived. Today, an attacking force would need to cross a deep Israeli-controlled zone, under observation and fire the entire way, before ever reaching the border itself. The physical geography that made the 2023 invasion possible has been engineered out of existence.
Alongside the defensive buildup runs a relentless offensive campaign. According to a Times of Israel analysis, Israel has been methodically hunting the roughly 5,000 terrorists who participated in the October 7 onslaught. About 1,200 were killed on that day itself. Since then, another 1,500 have been eliminated and 300 more captured, with strikes accelerating in recent months even as the truce formally holds.
The Precision Campaign Against October 7 Terrorists
Two recent operations illustrate how that campaign works. On Thursday, an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza killed Nihad Riyad Abd al-Rahim Arouq, whom the IDF identified as a platoon commander in Hamas’s Shati Battalion and a participant in the October 7 invasion. The military said Arouq had recently been training additional terrorists and planning attacks on Israeli troops.
“The terrorist posed a threat to our forces operating in the Gaza Strip and was eliminated in a precise aerial strike,” the IDF said in a statement.
A day earlier, Israeli forces killed Omar Ahmed Abu Qasem, described by the military as a Hamas sniper commander who had been working to restore the group’s capabilities in violation of the ceasefire agreement. Overnight strikes also destroyed four Hamas weapons depots in central Gaza, part of a pattern of preemptive action against the terror group’s efforts to rearm.
None of this is accidental. A doctrine took shape after the ceasefire: Israel will not wait for Hamas to reconstitute. Each identified October 7 participant, each weapons cache, and each commander attempting to rebuild attack capability is treated as a legitimate and time-sensitive target.
What Hamas Still Controls, and What It Still Wants
Yet the general was careful not to declare the threat extinguished. Hamas continues to govern the portion of the Strip where most of Gaza’s population is concentrated, and the general warned against complacency.
Hamas “still controls [its portion of the Strip] and the murderous organization retains residual capabilities, and its vision of destroying Israel has not changed,” Bluth said.
That assessment matters for anyone tempted to treat the current calm as permanent peace. The group that carried out October 7 has been degraded, fenced off, and driven from more than half its former territory, but its founding ideology remains intact. Israeli security officials consistently describe the situation as managed threat rather than resolved conflict, which is precisely why the two-division security zone and the strike campaign continue. As analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has argued in his critique of Hamas’s continued grip on Gaza’s civilian population, the organization’s survival strategy depends on retaining control of Gazans even at catastrophic cost to them.
The Human Cost and the Critics’ Case
Palestinians living through the campaign describe a very different reality than the one visible from the Israeli side of the fence. Five people were killed in strikes across Gaza on Thursday: two in an airstrike near the Tuffah neighborhood, one by tank fire in Zeitoun, one in a strike on a tent encampment in western Gaza City, and one in a vehicle in Khan Younis. Gazan health officials say more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes since the ceasefire took effect, a figure that does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
“The entire people of Gaza have not lived a single day or a single moment of ceasefire. This ceasefire is an illusion,” Jibril Khattab, a relative of one of Thursday’s victims, told Reuters at Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital. “No place in all of Gaza is safe.”
Israel’s answer to that charge is consistent: the strikes target terrorists who themselves violate the truce by rebuilding attack capabilities, and responsibility for the environment in which they operate rests with Hamas, which embeds its commanders and weapons among civilians. The IDF notes that nearly every strike it conducts is accompanied by specific intelligence naming the target and the threat posed.
Border Towns Rebuild as Defense Contracts Surge
Territorial control on this scale changes more than military maps. The widening buffer has underwritten the return and rebuilding of Israeli border communities whose evacuation after October 7 carried an enormous economic and social price. Defense procurement has surged as well, with Israeli and allied firms competing for contracts tied to border sensing, air defense, and autonomous systems, a trend visible in Anduril’s push into the Israeli defense market alongside incumbents like Elbit.
Beyond the border, the regional picture raises the stakes. Israel’s Gaza posture is one front in a wider confrontation with Iran and its proxies, which has escalated sharply this summer as the IRGC navy threatens shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Veterans of Israel’s security establishment, including figures like Benny Gantz, have long argued that deterrence in Gaza and deterrence against Tehran are inseparable. A Gaza where Hamas can no longer invade is, in that framing, a message delivered to every member of the Iranian axis at once.
