By Josef Federman, JERUSALEM
Israel
Israeli warplanes pounded
downtown Gaza City, home to Hamas’ centers of government, with relentless
bombardments into early Tuesday, after Israel’s prime minister vowed
retaliation against the Islamic militant group that would “reverberate for
generations.”Relatives mourn people killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on Monday, Oct. 9, 2023.
The 4-day-old war has already
claimed at least 1,600 lives, as Israel saw gun battles in the streets of its
own towns for the first time in decades and neighborhoods in Gaza were reduced
to rubble. Hamas also escalated the conflict, pledging to kill
captured Israelis if strikes targeted civilians without warning.
Israel’s military said it had
found the bodies of roughly 1,500 Hamas militants in Israeli territory as it
gained effective control in the south and “restored full control” over the
border. It was not immediately clear if those numbers overlapped with deaths
previously reported by Palestinian authorities.
Israel said that Hamas and
other militant groups in Gaza are holding more than 150 soldiers and civilians
snatched from inside Israel after the attack caught its vaunted military and
intelligence apparatus completely off guard.
As the
Israeli military activated 300,000 reservists in a massive mobilization, a
major question was whether it will launch a ground assault into the tiny
Mediterranean coastal territory. The last ground assault was in 2014.
Thousands
of Israelis were evacuated from more than a dozen towns near Gaza, and tanks
and drones were deployed to guard breaches in the Gaza border fence against new
incursions. In Gaza, tens of thousands fled their homes as airstrikes leveled
buildings.
The moves, along with
Israel’s formal declaration of war on Sunday, pointed to Israel
increasingly shifting to the offensive against Hamas, threatening greater
destruction in the densely populated, impoverished Gaza Strip.
“We have only started striking
Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a nationally
televised address. “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will
reverberate with them for generations.”Palestinians remove a dead body from the rubble of a building after an Israeli airstrike Jebaliya refugee camp, Gaza Strip, Monday, Oct. 9, 2023
The Israeli military said it
struck hundreds of Hamas targets in Gaza’s City Rimal neighborhood, which is
home to Hamas’ ministries and governing buildings, overnight.
The massive devastation in
Rimal signaled what could be a new Israeli tactic in Gaza: warning civilians to
leave certain areas and then hitting those areas with airstrikes of
unprecedented intensity.
The heavy bombardment began in
areas of Gaza bordering Israel over the weekend, and overnight shifted to the
center of Gaza City. If these types of bombardments continue, Gaza civilians
will have fewer and fewer places to shelter as more neighborhoods become
uninhabitable.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men
inspect a damaged road after it was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip,
in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Beitar Illit, Monday, Oct. 9, 2023. (AP
Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
In a briefing Tuesday, Hecht
suggested Palestinians should try to leave through the Rafah border crossing
with Egypt, but the military later said the crossing was closed.
Asked if Israel considered
Hamas’ civil government, such as parliament and ministries, legitimate targets,
Hecht said “if there’s a gunman firing rockets from there, it turns into a
military target.”
In response to Israel’s aerial
attacks, the spokesman of Hamas’ armed wing, Abu Obeida, said Monday night that
the group will kill one Israeli civilian captive any time Israel targets
civilians in their homes in Gaza “without prior warning.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli
Cohen warned Hamas against harming any of the hostages, saying, “This war crime
will not be forgiven.” Netanyahu appointed a former military commander to
manage the hostage and missing persons crisis.
The Israeli military said more
than 900 people already have been killed in Israel. In Gaza and the West Bank,
704 people have been killed, according to authorities there; Israel says
hundreds of Hamas fighters are among them. Thousands have been wounded on both
sides.
Israel and Hamas have had
repeated conflicts in past years, often sparked by tensions around a Jerusalem
holy site. This time, the context has become potentially more explosive. Both
sides talk of shattering with violence a yearslong Israeli-Palestinian deadlock
left by the moribund peace process.Israeli soldiers take position near the Israeli Gaza border, southern Israel
The surprise weekend attack by
Hamas left a death toll unseen since the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria. That
fomented calls to crush Hamas no matter the cost, rather than continuing to try
to bottle it up in Gaza. Israel is run by its most hard-right government ever,
dominated by ministers who adamantly reject Palestinian statehood.
Hamas, in turn, says it is
ready for a long battle to end an Israeli occupation it says is no longer
tolerable. Desperation has grown among Palestinians, many of whom see nothing
to lose under unending Israeli control and increasing settler depredations in the West Bank, the blockade in
Gaza and what they see as the world’s apathy.
Attacks by both sides created
more scenes of devastation Monday. In Israel’s southern coastal city of
Ashkelon, a man holding a crutch with one hand and an older boy with the other
joined evacuees being shepherded from a street after a rocket blew out the
front of a house.
In Gaza, Palestinians passed
the bodies of the dead through dense crowds of men in the rubble in the
Jebaliya refugee camp.
Early Monday evening, the
sound of explosions echoed over Jerusalem when a volley of rockets fired from
Gaza hit two neighborhoods — a sign of Hamas’s reach. Israeli media said seven
were wounded.
Israeli warplanes carried out
an intense bombardment of Rimal, a residential and commercial district of
central Gaza City, after issuing warnings for residents to evacuate. Amid
continuous explosions, the building housing the headquarters of the Palestinian
Telecommunications Company was destroyed.
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza
have razed 790 housing units and severely damaged 5,330, the U.N. Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said early Tuesday. Damage to three
water and sanitation sites have cut off services to 400,000.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav
Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, saying authorities would cut
electricity and block the entry of food and fuel.
Jan Egeland, secretary general
of the Norwegian Refugee Council aid group, warned that Israel’s siege would
spell “utter disaster” for Gazans.
“There is no doubt that
collective punishment is in violation of international law,” he told The
Associated Press. “If and when it would lead to wounded children dying in
hospitals because of lack of energy, electricity and supplies, it could amount
to war crimes.”
The Israeli siege will leave
Gaza almost entirely dependent on its crossing into neighboring Egypt at Rafah,
where cargo capacities are lower than other crossings into Israel.
An Egyptian military official,
speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the
press, said more than 2 tons of medical supplies from the Egyptian Red Crescent
were sent to Gaza and efforts were underway to organize food and other
deliveries.
Tens of thousands of Gaza
residents continued to flee. The U.N. said Tuesday that more than 187,000 of
Gaza’s 2.3 million people have left their homes — the most since a 2014 air and
ground offensive by Israel uprooted about 400,000.
UNRWA, the U.N. agencies for Palestinian refugees, is sheltering more than 137,000 people in schools across the territory. Families have taken in some 41,000 others.
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