Israel yesterday said it had largely secured the Gaza border and was evacuating nearby towns where the bodies of 1,500 Hamas militants had been recovered after days of grueling battles outside the Palestinian enclave.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the military campaign following Saturday’s surprise onslaught was only the start of a sustained war to destroy Hamas and “change the Middle East.”
Fears of a regional conflagration have surged amid expectations of a looming Israeli ground incursion into Gaza, the crowded enclave from where Hamas launched its land, air and sea attack on the Jewish Sabbath.
Photo: AFP
The death toll in Israel has surged above 1,000 from the worst attack in the nation’s 75-year history, while Gaza officials have reported 687 people killed so far.
Netanyahu compared the large-scale slaughter of Israeli civilians to the atrocities committed by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, when it controlled vast swathes of Syria and Iraq.
“Hamas terrorists bound, burned and executed children,” a seething Netanyahu said in a televised address to the grieving nation late on Monday. “They are savages. Hamas is ISIS.”
The veteran leader at the helm of Israel’s right-wing coalition also called for an “emergency government of national unity” after years of political crisis and bitter societal divisions.
The Israeli army has called up 300,000 reservists for its “Swords of Iron” campaign, and massed tanks and other heavy armor near Gaza and on the northern border with Lebanon.
The military said its forces had largely reclaimed the embattled south and the border around Gaza, and dislodged holdout Hamas fighters from more than a dozen towns.
“Around 1,500 bodies of Hamas [fighters] have been found in Israel around the Gaza Strip,” Israeli Army spokesman Richard Hecht said, adding that security forces had “more or less restored control over the border” with the enclave.
Key ally the US — which reported 11 of its own citizens killed, and more missing in the spiraling conflict — stressed its full support for Israel, as did the UK, France, Germany and Italy.
Their five leaders said they “recognize the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people,” but said Hamas “offers nothing for the Palestinian people other than more terror and bloodshed,” in a joint statement released by the White House.
The five Western powers and many other nations have reported citizens killed, abducted or missing, including Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, Nepal, Panama, Paraguay, Russia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Ukraine.
Hamas has held about 150 hostages since its ground incursion, among them children and young people who were captured at a music festival where about 270 died.
Hamas on Monday said that it would start killing hostages every time Israel launches a strike on a civilian target in Gaza without warning.
Fear and chaos reigned among the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the crowded and impoverished territory that has been hammered by thousands of Israeli bombs.
Fireballs repeatedly lit up Gaza City before dawn yesterday as explosions shook the ground and sirens wailed.
Israeli strikes have leveled residential tower blocks and mosques, and wrought widespread destruction in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, where many charred bodies were pulled from the rubble.
Gaza resident Muhammad Najib, 70, said he fled his home on Monday after receiving an Israeli warning to evacuate and returned yesterday to a “terrifying scene” in his al-Rimal neighborhood.
“The entire area was devastated, a large number of houses were completely destroyed,” he said. “What is the fault of the children and the women?”
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