The Israeli Defense Minister spoke on Saturday afternoon following the intense bombardment in the Gaza Strip overnight from Friday to Saturday.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Saturday that the war against Hamas had “entered a new phase” after a night of intense bombing and an Israeli army incursion into the Gaza Strip.
“We have entered a new phase of the war. Yesterday the earth shook in Gaza,” said Yoav Gallant in a video released by his services.
Earlier in the day, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said the Israeli offensive was ongoing IDF was still “in the beginning”. “IDF troops have entered the Gaza Strip and expanded their operations,” a spokesman said
The Israeli army bombed the Gaza Strip relentlessly on Saturday, following a night of fierce attacks three weeks after the outbreak of war that rescuers said destroyed hundreds of buildings by the Hamas attack, the deadliest in Israel’s history.
On the 22nd day of the conflict that has claimed thousands of lives, the Israeli-besieged Palestinian territory of Gaza, where some 2.4 million residents are crammed without anything, is cut off from the world due to the shutdown of telecommunications and the internet.
The United Nations fears an “avalanche of human suffering” in Gaza, where the Israeli army has been carrying out a devastating bombing campaign since October 7 in retaliation for an attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas that killed more than 1,400 people. According to the authorities, the victims in Israel are mainly civilians.
The Hamas government’s health ministry in Gaza said 7,703 people, mostly civilians, including more than 3,500 children, were killed in Israeli bombings, the highest number of casualties in a war in Gaza since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 38 years .
The Israeli army said it attacked “150 underground targets” on Friday night in northern Gaza, where it said Hamas controls its operations from a gigantic network of underground tunnels. She reported “several Hamas terrorists killed.”
According to Gaza Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal, “hundreds of buildings and houses were completely destroyed” during the nighttime raids.