JERUSALEM (AP) — In retaliation for a bloody incursion by Hamas militants, Israel stepped up airstrikes on the Gaza Strip on Monday, cutting it off from food, fuel and other supplies, as the war death toll on both sides rose to nearly 1,600. Hamas also escalated the conflict, promising to kill captured Israelis if attacks targeted civilians without warning.
On the third day of the war, Israel was still finding bodies from Hamas’ stunning weekend attack on southern Israeli cities. Rescue workers found 100 bodies in the tiny farming community of Beeri – about 10% of the population – after a long hostage situation involving gunmen. In Gaza, tens of thousands fled their homes as relentless airstrikes leveled buildings.
The Israeli military said it had largely gained control in the south after the attack caught its vaunted military and intelligence apparatus by surprise and sparked heavy fighting on its streets for the first time in decades. Hamas and other militants in Gaza say they are holding more than 130 soldiers and civilians kidnapped from inside Israel.
Israeli tanks and drones have been used to guard breaches in the Gaza border fence and prevent new attacks. Thousands of Israelis were evacuated from more than a dozen towns near Gaza and the military called up 300,000 reservists – a massive mobilization in a short period of time.
These moves, as well as Israel’s formal declaration of war on Sunday, indicate that Israel is increasingly taking the offensive against Hamas and threatening greater destruction in the densely populated, impoverished Gaza Strip.
“We have only just begun to attack Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a nationally televised address. “What we do to our enemies in the days to come will affect them for generations.”
As the Israeli military brought additional forces near the border, a key question was whether it would launch a ground attack on the tiny Mediterranean coastal area. The last ground attack took place in 2014.
According to media reports, around 900 people have already been killed in Israel, including 73 soldiers. According to authorities there, more than 680 people were killed in Gaza; Israel says there are hundreds of Hamas fighters among them. Thousands were injured on both sides.
In response to Israel’s airstrikes, Hamas’ armed wing spokesman Abu Obeida said Monday evening that the group would kill a captured Israeli civilian every time Israel attacks civilians in their homes in the Gaza Strip “without prior warning.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen warned Hamas against harming the hostages, saying: “This war crime will not be forgiven.” Netanyahu appointed a former military commander to handle the hostage-taking and missing-persons crisis.
In recent years there have been repeated conflicts between Israel and Hamas, often triggered by tensions surrounding a holy site in Jerusalem. This time the context has become potentially more explosive. Both sides are talking about using force to break the years-long Israeli-Palestinian deadlock caused by the failed peace process.
Hamas’ surprise weekend attack claimed an unprecedented death toll since the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria. It sparked calls to crush Hamas at all costs rather than continuing to try to contain it in Gaza. Israel is led by the most right-wing government ever, dominated by ministers who strongly oppose Palestinian statehood.
Hamas, for its part, says it is prepared for a long fight to end the Israeli occupation, which it says is no longer tolerable. Desperation has grown among Palestinians. Many of them see nothing to lose from endless Israeli control and increasing settler looting in the West Bank, the blockade in Gaza and what they see as the world’s apathy.
Attacks from both sides caused further scenes of devastation on 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 led off a street after a rocket blasted the front of a house.
In Gaza, Palestinians passed the bodies of the dead through dense crowds in the rubble of the Jebaliya refugee camp.
Early Monday evening, explosions reverberated across Jerusalem as a volley of rockets fired from Gaza hit two neighborhoods – a sign of Hamas’s reach. Israeli media said seven were injured.
Israeli warplanes intensively bombed Rimal, a residential and commercial district in central Gaza City, after urging residents to evacuate. The building that housed the headquarters of the Palestinian Telecommunications Company was destroyed in sustained explosions.
Israeli air strikes on Gaza have destroyed 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 systems left 400,000 people cut off from supplies.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip and said authorities would cut off electricity and block imports of food and fuel.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council’s aid group, warned that Israel’s siege would mean a “complete catastrophe” for Gazans.
“There is no doubt that collective punishment violates international law,” he told The Associated Press. “If it resulted in wounded children dying in hospitals because of a lack of energy, electricity and supplies, it could be a war crime.”
Because of the Israeli siege, Gaza will be almost entirely dependent on crossings to neighboring Egypt at Rafah, where cargo capacity is lower than other crossings to Israel.
An Egyptian military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said more than two tons of medical supplies had been sent to Gaza from the Egyptian Red Crescent and that efforts were being made to provide food and other supplies to organize.
Tens of thousands of Gazans continued to flee. The United Nations said Tuesday that more than 187,000 of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have left their homes, the highest number since an Israeli air and ground offensive in 2014 that displaced about 400,000 people.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, hosts more than 137,000 people in schools across the territory. Families have taken in around 41,000 more.
An Israeli airstrike killed 19 people, including women and children, in the southern Gaza town of Rafah early Monday, said Talat Barhoum, a doctor at the local Al-Najjar hospital.
According to Israeli Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, hundreds of Hamas fighters were buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel in the last 48 hours. His claims could not be confirmed.
New clashes on Israel’s northern border on Monday raised fears that the war could spill over to a new front.
Palestinian militants from the Islamic Jihad group slipped into Israel from Lebanon, sparking Israeli shelling of southern Lebanon. Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group said five of its members were killed and responded with a barrage of rockets and mortars at two Israeli army bases across the border.
After breaching Israeli barriers with explosives at dawn on Saturday, an estimated 1,000 Hamas gunmen rampaged for hours, gunning down civilians and kidnapping people in cities, along highways and at a techno music festival attended by thousands in the desert. According to the military, Palestinian militants also fired around 4,400 rockets into Israel.
Hamas spokesman Abdel-Latif al-Qanoua told the AP that the group’s fighters continued to fight outside the Gaza Strip and had captured more Israelis as recently as Monday morning.
He said the group aims to free all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, which has in the past agreed to unilateral swap deals in which it has released large numbers of prisoners in exchange for individual prisoners or even the remains of soldiers.
The prisoners include soldiers and civilians, including women, children and older adults, mostly Israelis but also some people of other nationalities.
Hamas has ruled Gaza since ousting troops loyal to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority in 2007, and its rule has remained unchallenged during the blockade and four previous wars with Israel.
Meanwhile, strict movement restrictions for Palestinians in the West Bank have been in place for a fourth day. Israeli authorities have sealed off crossings into the occupied territory and closed checkpoints, blocking traffic between cities and towns. Clashes between stone-throwing Palestinians and Israeli forces in the area since the raid began have left 15 Palestinians dead, according to the United Nations
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Adwan reported from Rafah in the Gaza Strip. AP writers Isabel DeBre and Julia Frankel in Jerusalem; Wafaa Shurafa in Gaza City; Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv, Israel; Bassem Mroue and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut; Samy Magdy in Cairo; and Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.