Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Thursday that the Palestinian movement Hamas, like the jihadist group Islamic State, would be “crushed” after receiving strong support from the United States in the war that has already claimed thousands of lives.
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“We will always be at your side,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured after an interview with the prime minister, although he noted that the “legitimate aspirations” of the Palestinians were not represented by the Islamist movement in power in the Gaza Strip.
“Just as ISIS was crushed, Hamas will be crushed,” Netanyahu said, proposing a ground offensive in Gaza against Hamas, which launched a bloody attack of unprecedented proportions on Israeli territory on October 7 and has since held 150 hostages.
Around 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, were killed in that Hamas offensive, and 1,354 Palestinians, many of them civilians, died in six days, according to local authorities, in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli strikes in response reduced entire buildings to ruins.
An Israeli army spokesman said on Thursday that it was preparing for a “ground exercise” in Gaza but that “nothing has been decided yet.”
During the night, Israel again shelled the Gaza Strip, from where several volleys of rockets were fired into the south of the country and then towards Tel Aviv. Hamas said it was responding to attacks against “civilians” in two refugee camps in the Gaza Strip.
AFP correspondents witnessed dozens of airstrikes on the Al-Shati camp and in the northern Gaza Strip.
However, Israel’s great ally, American President Joe Biden, in his response called on the country to respect “the laws of war”, while Washington has already provided additional military aid.
“You may be strong enough to defend yourself, but as long as the United States exists, you will never have to do that,” Antony Blinken told Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday.
The Foreign Minister is also scheduled to meet with King Abdullah II and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan on Friday.
At dawn on October 7, in the middle of Shabbat, the weekly Jewish day of rest, and on the last day of the Sukkot holiday, hundreds of Hamas fighters entered Israel from the Gaza Strip in vehicles, by air and by sea, sowing terror among one Flood of rockets.
On the streets, in homes and even at a music festival, they killed more than a thousand civilians in this attack of extreme violence and on a scale unprecedented since Israel’s founding in 1948.
Israel responded by declaring war to destroy Hamas’s capabilities by relentlessly shelling the Gaza Strip and stationing tens of thousands of troops around the territory, in the south of the country and on the northern border with Lebanon.
After the attack, the army claimed to have recovered the bodies of 1,500 infiltrated Palestinian fighters.
In a sign of tensions surrounding Israel, there are frequent exchanges of fire on both sides of the Lebanese border with the pro-Iranian Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas and Syria.
According to Syrian media, Israeli airstrikes on Thursday shut down Syria’s two main airports, that of the capital Damascus and that of Aleppo in the north.
The Hamas offensive triggered a huge wave of solidarity in Israel. “Everyone is affected in Israel, in the north, in the south, in Tel Aviv,” confesses Joanna Ouisman, a 38-year-old financial manager, as she drops off two huge bags full of children’s books at a mall in Tel Aviv.
“No one,” she said, “can witness this barbarism and remain indifferent.”
At the entrance to Kibbutz Beeri, less than five kilometers from the Gaza border, a pile of bodies testifies to the scale of the attack, which the army said killed more than a hundred residents.
“The devastation here is absolutely immense,” complains Doron Spielman, spokesman for the Israeli army. “And that doesn’t count the many members of the kibbutz who were taken hostage and taken to Gaza,” another spokesman, Jonathan Cornicus, added.
During this offensive, Hamas kidnapped several dozen foreign and binational Israeli hostages and threatened them with execution.
Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday his country would not allow basic necessities or humanitarian aid to enter the besieged Gaza Strip until Hamas released the hostages.
“No electric switches will be turned on, no taps will be opened and no tankers will enter until the kidnapped Israelis return home,” he said.
Israeli authorities identify 150 hostages, while hundreds of people are still missing and bodies are being identified.
Among those hostages are young people captured during a music festival where Palestinian militants invaded on Saturday, killing 270 people, according to authorities.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Thursday it was in contact with Hamas to advocate for the release of the hostages.
According to an official source, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also initiated a negotiation process with the Islamist organization.
The Gaza Strip, a poor and cramped area of 2.4 million Palestinians who have suffered under a land, air and sea blockade since 2007, is now deprived of water, electricity and food supplies and cut off from Israel.
The region’s only power plant is shut down due to a lack of fuel.
Fabrizio Carboni, the ICRC regional director for the Middle East region, called on both camps to “reduce the suffering of civilians, particularly in the Gaza Strip.”
“Without power, hospitals risk becoming morgues,” he said, saying he particularly fears for newborns being put in incubators and patients receiving oxygen or dialysis.
In Gaza, where the attacks displaced more than 338,000 people, according to the UN, the bombings hit dozens of buildings, factories, mosques and shops, according to Hamas.
The troop concentrations at the border raise fears of a ground offensive in the area from which Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005 and which has been ruled by Hamas since 2007.
A terrifying prospect of fighting in the heart of an extremely densely populated city, underground and in the presence of hostages.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raïssi called on “Muslim and Arab countries” to “coordinate” to “stop Israel’s crimes” against Gaza. Iran supports Hamas financially and militarily, but emphasizes that it was not involved in the October 7 attack.