The war between Hamas and IsraelDossierFour days after the start of the offensive, the rocket fire continues and the extent of the murders committed in the kibbutz is revealed.
The Gaza Strip suffered the most intense airstrikes in 75 years of conflict on the fourth day of the war between Israel and Hamas. In response to the Hamas attack on Israel on Saturday, October 7, by far the deadliest in its history, the Hebrew state since Monday imposed a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, from where the attacks began, and closed its second quarter .3 million inhabitants. More than 200 air strikes have reduced entire parts of the city to rubble. In its latest count on Tuesday evening, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported 900 dead and 4,600 injured in the enclave.
In Israel, funerals followed one another, interrupted by warning sirens. Rockets fired from Gaza continue to hit several regions of the country. According to the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, the country regrets more than 1,200 deaths, most of them civilians. The daily also claims that 200 people kidnapped by Hamas on Israeli territory are being held hostage in Gaza. The Israeli military’s military response was complicated by the Palestinian Islamist group’s threat to execute a prisoner for every Palestinian home attacked without warning.
At the end of the day on Tuesday, October 10, tensions appeared to escalate on the border between Israel and Lebanon, raising fears about the opening of a new front and possible regional escalation. Israeli forces said a volley of rockets was fired at Israel from southern Lebanon and that Hezbollah – backed, like Hamas, by Iran – fired an anti-tank missile at a military vehicle. In response, an Israeli helicopter targeted Hezbollah observation posts. On Tuesday evening, residents of the Israeli town of Metula, on the border with Lebanon, were ordered by local authorities to evacuate.
“It’s a massacre”
The Israel Defense Forces said on Tuesday that it had killed Palestinian Economy Minister Juad Abu Smallah, accused of managing Hamas funds, in an airstrike in Gaza. The army, which says it has regained control of the Gaza border, also claims it has found “around 1,500 bodies” of Hamas fighters on Israeli soil since Saturday. Especially those who had infiltrated Zikim, a kibbutz near the border.
On Tuesday they gave the press access to another kibbutz, that of Kfar Aza, very close to the Gaza border. Shows the devastation after Saturday’s attack: the bodies of Israeli residents and Hamas fighters amid burned houses and charred cars. “This is not a war, this is not a battlefield, this is a massacre,” Israeli Major General Itai Veruv was quoted as saying by Portal. “You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their rooms, in their shelters and how the terrorists killed them,” he described, comparing the horror of the scene to that of the “pogroms” at the pass. According to a spokesman for the NGO Zaka, “more than 100” people were killed in the Beeri kibbutz.
In a statement, the UN Permanent Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Violations in the Palestinian Territories and Israel said it was collecting and preserving “evidence of war crimes committed by all parties” since Saturday’s attacks.
Seat
UN Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged Israel’s “legitimate concerns for its security” and reiterated its “absolute condemnation” of Hamas’s “deplorable attacks” and said he was “deeply disturbed” by the siege on the Gaza Strip. On Monday, Israel’s defense minister described Hamas fighters as “animals” and announced that “neither electricity, nor food, nor water, nor fuel” would be allowed into the enclave. On Tuesday evening, at a meeting with soldiers on the Gaza border, he said that “all restrictions” in the fight against Hamas had been lifted and announced “the transition to a major offensive.”
“The humanitarian situation in Gaza was extremely difficult before the hostilities, it will now deteriorate exponentially,” Guterres said. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said that imposing a siege that endangers the lives of civilians was “prohibited by international humanitarian law” – as was taking hostages, he recalled, calling on Hamas to release the captured civilians to release.
According to the United Nations, 180,000 residents of Gaza, a densely populated, poor area that has been under Israeli blockade since 2007, are now homeless. Hospitals are already facing shortages of medical equipment and power outages. Morgues are full and bombing of streets often prevents emergency services from reaching the attack sites. Residents seek refuge in schools or municipal buildings. But for a young Gazan, according to the Portal agency, “no place in Gaza is safe.”