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ANKARA: Muslim nations must act in unison and rally international opposition against Israel’s plan to take control of Gaza City, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Saturday after talks in Egypt.

Regional powers Egypt and Turkiye both condemned the plan on Friday. Ankara has said it marked a new phase in what it called Israel’s genocidal and expansionist policies, while calling for global measures to stop the plan’s implementation.

Israel rejects such description of its actions in Gaza.

Speaking at a joint press conference in El Alamein with his Egyptian counterpart Badr Abdelatty, after also meeting Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Fidan said the Organization of Islamic Cooperation had been called to an emergency meeting.

Fidan said Israel’s policy aimed to force Palestinians out of their lands through hunger and that it aimed to permanently invade Gaza, adding there was no justifiable excuse for nations to continue supporting Israel.

Israel denies having a policy of starvation in Gaza, and says Palestinian militant group Hamas, which killed 1,200 people in its October 2023 attack, could end the war by surrendering.

“What is happening today is a very dangerous development... not only for the Palestinian people or neighboring countries,” Abdelatty said, adding that Israel’s plans were “inadmissible.”

Abdelatty said there was full coordination with Turkiye on Gaza, and referred to a statement issued on Saturday by the OIC Ministerial Committee condemning Israel’s plan.

The OIC committee said Israel’s plan marked “a dangerous and unacceptable escalation, a flagrant violation of international law, and an attempt to entrench the illegal occupation,” warning that it would “obliterate any opportunity for peace.”

Mediating teams from Egypt, Qatar and the United States have been working for months to reach a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The OIC urged world powers and the United Nations Security Council to “assume their legal and humanitarian responsibilities and to take urgent action to stop” Israel’s Gaza City plan, while ensuring immediate accountability for what it called Israeli violations of international law.

BEIRUT: Five Lebanese soldiers were killed in a blast on Saturday while removing munitions from a Hezbollah military facility in south Lebanon, a military source told AFP.

Under a November truce that ended a recent war between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, the army has been deploying in south Lebanon and dismantling the militant group’s infrastructure there.

“Five soldiers were killed in an explosion... inside a Hezbollah military facility,” the source said, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to brief the media.

The blast erupted as the troops were “removing munitions and unexploded ordnance left over from the recent war” between Israel and Hezbollah, the source said.

The army did not immediately issue a statement.

But President Joseph Aoun said he spoke to army commander Rodolphe Haykal about a “painful incident” near Majdal Zoun and Wadi Zibqin in Tyre district that led to an unspecified number of casualties among troops.

The presidency statement said the blast was due to a munitions explosion as an engineering unit “was working to remove and disable” the ordnance.

Prime Minister Nawaf Salam paid tribute on X to the troops who were killed “while performing their national duty.”

The announcement came after Andrea Tenenti, spokesperson for UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, said Thursday that troops had “discovered a vast network of fortified tunnels” in the same area.

UN spokesman Farhan Haq had told reporters that peacekeepers and Lebanese troops found “three bunkers, artillery, rocket launchers, hundreds of explosive shells and rockets, anti-tank mines and about 250 ready-to-use improvised explosive devices.”