Gaza will become a ‘tent city’, an Israeli defense official has vowed, promising to raze every building to the ground in revenge for Hamas’ terror attacks at the weekend as the military forms up on the border ahead of an expected invasion.
In the early hours of Wednesday, Israeli forces conducted 250 airstrikes in just one hour across northern and eastern parts of the Gaza strip to pave the way for a massive ground operation.
Now, Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) spokesman Jonathan Conricus said the outfit is sending ‘infantry, armoured soldiers, artillery corps’, plus 300,000 reservists ‘close to the Gaza Strip to execute the mission that we have been given by the Israeli government’.
‘That is to make sure that Hamas at the end of this war won’t have any military capabilities by which they can threaten or kill Israeli civilians,’ he said, as Israelis living close to the border began evacuations.
Meanwhile, Border Guard forces engaged in gun battles with Hamas terrorists in the southern cities of Sderot and Ashkelon last night and into this morning, now four days after the Palestinian militant group launched its surprise attacks on the Jewish state.
A series of rocket salvos from Gaza also hit Sderot Wednesday morning, injuring at least one civilian and damaging five buildings, hours after Ashkelon sustained a fresh barrage of missiles in kind.
And three Israeli soldiers were killed in a confrontation with ‘terrorist infiltrators’ to the north on the frontier with Lebanon, where Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters and elements of Lebanon’s Hezbollah had launched a smattering of attacks.
On Wednesday morning, air raid sirens were blaring in Israel’s north as Hezbollah launched new rockets, forcing the IDF to deal with threats at both sides of the country.
On Saturday, the armed wing of Hamas streamed across the Gaza border fence and launched a ruthless attack on unsuspecting soldiers and civilians in what EU chief Ursula von der Leyen has described as an ‘act of war’.
At least 169 Israeli soldiers have been killed in fighting with Hamas, the army said on Wednesday.
‘As of this morning, we’ve informed the families of 169 fallen IDF (army) soldiers,’ military spokesman Daniel Hagari told reporters.
Men stand through debris and destruction littering a street in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City on October 11, 2023
This picture taken on October 11, 2023 shows an aerial view of buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City
A Palestinian boy who was wounded in Israeli strikes on a house sits in an ambulance, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip October 11, 2023
Israeli soldiers fire artillery cannon towards Gaza Strip from the Israel-Gaza border on October 11, 2023
A salvo of rockets is fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza towards Israel as the war’s death toll passed 3,000
A mourner reacts while burying the body of a Palestinian child of al-Agha family, who was killed in Israeli strikes, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip October 11, 2023
Israeli soldiers take a break as they hold a position along the Israel-Gaza border on October 11, 2023
As dawn broke on Wednesday, more airstrikes were launched on Gaza
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the Sousi mosque in Gaza City
Palestinians are seen picking through the rubble in Gaza after Israeli airstrikes
Palestinians inspect the rubble of a municipality building after Israeli airstrikes in Khan Yunis on Tuesday
In Israel, the death toll from Saturday’s shock cross-border assault by Hamas militants rose to 1,200, making it the deadliest attack in the country’s 75-year history, while Gaza officials reported more than 900 people killed as Israel pounded the territory with air strikes.
One key target was the al-Furqan neighborhood – so named after a mosque in the area – which defense officials said is a ‘nest of terror’ used by Hamas to launch attacks against Israel.
Hamas said two of its top officials had been killed, while Israel’s military said the bodies of roughly 1,500 Hamas infiltrators had been found.
Swathes of the densely-populated Gaza have already been reduced to rubble, photos emerging on Tuesday showed.
Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, said he has ‘released all restraints’ on the troops in their fight against Hamas.
‘Hamas wanted a change and it will get one. What was in Gaza will no longer be,’ he said, speaking to soldiers near the Gaza fence.
‘We started the offensive from the air, later on we will also come from the ground. We’ve been controlling the area since Day Two and we are on the offensive. It will only intensify.’
Gallant promised to show no mercy to the terrorists.
‘Whoever comes to decapitate, murder women, Holocaust survivors — we will eliminate him at the height of our power and without compromise.’
Fears of a regional conflagration have surged ahead of an expected Israeli ground incursion into Gaza.
Dozens were killed and hundreds wounded as Israel pounded the Gaza Strip with hundreds of air strikes overnight, a Hamas government official said Wednesday.
The strikes destroyed several buildings of the Hamas-linked Islamic University in Gaza City, a university official said.
The Israeli military confirmed it had hit dozens of Hamas targets during the night.
It said fighter jets destroyed ‘advanced detection systems’ that Hamas used to spot military aircraft.
They also hit 80 Hamas targets in the Beit Hanoun area of the northeastern Gaza Strip, including two bank branches used by the Islamist group to ‘fund terrorism’ in the enclave, the military said.
In response to Saturday’s attack, Israel imposed a ‘total siege’ on Gaza, suspending supplies of food, water, electricity and fuel to the already blockaded enclave.
Today’s airstrikes came as the barbarity of Hamas’ attacks on Israel was becoming apparent, with ever-more savage behavior being described.
At the Be’eri kibbutz, 100 people – 10 percent of the population – were murdered.
David Ben Zion, Deputy Commander of Unit 71, told i24News that he had seen victims shot dead in their beds.
David Ben Zion, Deputy Commander of Unit 71, told i24News that he had seen victims decapitated, including children
Gunshots and blood stains are seen on a door and walls of a house where civilians were killed days earlier in an attack by Hamas on this kibbutz near the border with Gaza on Tuesday
A baby’s seat and child’s dress is seen covered in blood in the aftermath of a Hamas attack
Hamas terrorists gunned down entire families in their homes in a small kibbutz in Israel, Israeli soldiers have claimed
Israeli soldiers remove the body of a compatriot, killed during an attack by Hamas terrorists in Kfar Aza, on Tuesday
‘We went door after door, we killed a lot of the terrorists,’ he said.
‘We are stronger than them. They are aggressive, they are very bad… But we are stronger than them.’
Harrowing images from the scene at Kfar Aza kibbutz showed a baby’s cot covered with blood; her small bloodied dress lying next to it.
The Israeli soldiers were seen comforting each other after witnessing such horrors, including the bodies of entire families who were gunned down in their beds.
‘You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms and how the terrorist kills them,’ said Israeli Major General Itai Veruv.
‘It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre, it’s a terror activity.
‘It is something that I never saw in my life. It’s something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places. It’s not something that happens in new history.’
Veruv said his soldiers spent ‘about 48 hours’ fighting ‘waves and waves of terrorists’ on roads and in neighboring communities.
Joe Biden called it ‘an act of sheer evil’, and said it was reminiscent of ‘the worst rampages of ISIS.’
U.S. President Joe Biden, accompanied by Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, makes remarks after speaking by phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Biden was joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and senior security officials for a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the Situation Room before delivering his speech
People mourn at the graveside of Eden Guez, who was killed a festival that was attacked by Hamas gunmen that left at least 260 people dead, at her funeral in Ashkelon, in southern Israel
He pledged that the US would make sure Israel has the tools it needs to defend itself: he has dispatched the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford and five guided-missile cruisers and destroyers to the scene, and they arrived on Tuesday.
Biden said the U.S. has ‘enhanced our military force posture’ in the region and is surging military assistance to Israel.
Biden also spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, on Tuesday, for the third time.
Gaza’s health ministry said at least 900 people have been killed and 4,600 wounded in the crowded coastal enclave.
Aid agencies were urging Israel to open humanitarian corridors to allow in food and medical supplies.
But Israel said it will cut off water, electricity, food and fuel to the territory in a ‘total siege’.
After Israel imposed its blockade, European Union foreign ministers joined calls for humanitarian corridors for those trying to flee.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk said such sieges are prohibited under international humanitarian law.
Medical supplies, including oxygen, were running low at Gaza’s overwhelmed Al-Shifa hospital, said Mohammed Ghonim, a doctor in the emergency room.
Palestinian media said Israeli airstrikes also hit homes in Gaza City, the southern city of Khan Younis and in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
One home struck belonged to the father of Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’ armed wing in Gaza, reports said. Deif’s brother and other family members were killed, according to the reports.
Residents appealing for help on social media said many buildings had collapsed, sometimes trapping as many as 50 people inside with rescue workers unable to reach them.
Rockets fired from the Gaza City (R) being intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense missile system (L) on Tuesday
Rockets fired from Gaza are seen being intercepted by the Iron Dome protection system
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip overnight on Tuesday
The United Nations said more than 180,000 Gazans had been made homeless, many huddling on streets or in schools.
At the morgue in Gaza’s Khan Younis hospital, bodies lay on the ground on stretchers with names written on their bellies. Medics called for relatives to pick up bodies quickly because there was no more space for the dead.
A municipal building was hit while being used as an emergency shelter. Survivors there spoke of many dead.
More than 250,000 people have fled their homes in Gaza, the U.N. said, the most since a 2014 air and ground offensive by Israel uprooted about 400,000. The vast majority are sheltering in schools run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. Damage to three water and sanitation sites has cut off services to 400,000 people, the U.N. said.
The U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) said that supplies it had pre-positioned for seven hospitals in Gaza have already run out amid the flood of wounded. The head of the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said surgical equipment, antibiotics, fuel and other supplies were running out at two hospitals it runs in Gaza.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said Tuesday it was targeting food help for some 800,000 people in Gaza and the West Bank following the outbreak of more violence.
The WFP is appealing for $17.3 million in the next four weeks to address the ‘critical situation’ in the Palestinian territories, and also echoed a call by the WHO for a humanitarian corridor to provide aid to Gaza.
‘Distributions are ongoing daily for displaced people in shelters in Gaza, amid concerns that the city is running out of critical resources like food, water, and electricity, with damaged infrastructure severely impeding both food production and distribution networks,’ it said.
It is also beginning to distribute cash-based transfers to 164,000 people in Gaza and the West Bank, electronic vouchers which can be redeemed for food in local shops, it said – even while expressing fears that local supplies are running out.