In response to the attack by the Palestinian movement Hamas, which traumatized Israel and triggered a war in which the death toll was already in the thousands, there were new Israeli raids in Gaza on Wednesday, in which entire buildings were destroyed.
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The Israeli army announced the “impressive” toll of 1,200 Israelis killed, most of them unarmed civilians, while the death toll in the Gaza Strip rose to 1,055, according to local authorities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the massive offensive of unprecedented proportions launched from Gaza against Israel at dawn on October 7 as “an atrocity not seen since the Holocaust” and vowed that his country would fight back “with strength, enormous strength.” will win.
This attack caused a stir in the country, where, according to the army, at least 169 soldiers were killed in four days and reports from survivors or witnesses reporting scenes of extreme violence are increasing.
Israel responded with relentless shelling of the Palestinian enclave, mobilizing 300,000 reservists and stationing tens of thousands of troops around Gaza and on the northern border with Lebanon.
The Gaza Strip, a poor and cramped enclave controlled by Hamas since 2007 and home to 2.3 million Palestinians, is now under siege. Israel has cut off water, electricity and food supplies there.
Bombings in Gaza on Tuesday night killed at least 30 people and affected dozens of buildings, factories, mosques and shops, the Hamas government said. According to the Israeli army, several targets of the Islamist movement were hit.
On Wednesday, women fled with their children in their arms among the rubble of buildings in the destroyed streets of Gaza City.
Mazen Mohammad spent the night on the ground floor with his family as explosions rocked his neighborhood before discovering the destruction in the morning. “It was like a ghost town, as if we were the only survivors,” says this 38-year-old.
Israeli warplanes also bombed a Hamas-affiliated Islamic university in the Gaza Strip.
Threats against hostages
The Hamas offensive has drawn widespread international condemnation and raised concerns about the possibility of a ground attack on Gaza, while the situation on Israel’s border with Lebanon remains tense.
On Wednesday, the Israeli army attacked southern Lebanon again in response to rocket fire from the pro-Iranian Hezbollah, a Hamas ally.
The army said on Tuesday it had recovered the bodies of 1,500 Hamas fighters in areas adjacent to Gaza over which it had regained control.
“We are now discovering the bodies of Israelis killed in the places that Hamas infiltrated and carried out its massacres,” army spokesman Jonathan Conricus said Wednesday. “The death toll reached a staggering 1,200 dead, the vast majority of whom were civilians,” he added.
For Weizman Nissan, 72, a resident of the Israeli town of Sderot near Gaza, “the war is going in the right direction.”
“The army is doing what it has to do. It doesn’t kill women or children, it doesn’t massacre babies. She has morals,” said this veteran of three Israeli wars.
Hamas, for its part, is threatening to execute hostages kidnapped in Israel, a total of around 150 people, and claims that four hostages were killed in Israeli attacks.
Among those hostages are young people captured during a music festival that militants broke into on Saturday, killing 250 people, according to an NGO.
Growing distrust
In the kibbutz of Kfar Aza, where 100 more people were killed, a 24-year-old Israeli officer, Omer Barak, recounts horrific scenes.
“I’ve never seen anything worse. When I saw the bodies of two murdered children, I collapsed,” he recalls.
At dawn on Saturday, hundreds of Hamas fighters from the Gaza Strip stormed into towns in the south of the country after crossing the border fence that Israel considered impregnable, moving from house to house, killing or driving out citizens.
The land, air and sea offensive surprised Israel in the middle of Shabbat, the weekly Jewish rest period, and on the last day of the Sukkot holiday.
In Israeli cities that have fallen into an unusual calm, some speak of growing mistrust between Jews and members of the Arab minority.
“Israelis are afraid of Arabs and Arabs are afraid of Jews. Now everyone is afraid of each other,” says Ahmed Karkash, 35, owner of a souvenir shop in Jerusalem.
US President Joe Biden pledged to help his ally defend himself against “pure evil”, while EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described Wednesday’s Hamas attack as an “act of war”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected in Israel on Thursday.
Hospitals overloaded
The situation in hospitals in the Gaza Strip is catastrophic. Al-Chifa Hospital in Gaza City is overflowing with the wounded and lacking equipment, including oxygen. “Some die long before they can be treated,” says a doctor.
The UN said the total siege of the territory, where more than 263,000 people have already been displaced by the war, was “prohibited” by international humanitarian law.
The Hamas offensive was launched 50 years and one day after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, which took Israel by surprise and left 2,600 Israeli dead in three weeks.
The Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, said it wanted to “put an end to the crimes of the occupation,” referring to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Israel withdrew its troops and evacuated settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, having occupied the territory since 1967.
But it retains control of airspace and territorial waters and has imposed a blockade since 2007 that strictly controls the movement of goods and people between Israel and the enclave.