2023-10-09 05:52:02
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel intensified bombing of the Gaza Strip on Monday, following declaring war and promising to destroy “the military and governance capacity” of Hamas, which controls the enclave. Israeli soldiers were fighting to expel Gazan gunmen from several areas in southern Israel.
At least 700 people had died in Israel, a huge toll not seen in the country for decades, while more than 400 deaths were reported in Gaza. Palestinian armed groups said they had regarding 130 hostages on the Israeli side.
More than 48 hours following Hamas launched its unprecedented incursion from Gaza, Israeli forces were still fighting with militants entrenched in several locations.
Israel said it had brought in special forces to try to regain control of four points, including two kibbutzim that the militants had entered at the start of the attack. Images from one of the locations released by Israeli police showed officers kneeling in tall grass in a shootout with Hamas militants in an open field.
The declaration of war presaged more fighting in the short term. A big question is whether Israel will begin a ground offensive into Gaza, an action that has previously led to an increase in the number of victims. An Israeli army spokesman said he had called up some 100,000 reservists and said in a statement that Israel aimed to end Hamas control over Gaza.
“Our task is to ensure that Hamas no longer has the military capacity to threaten Israel like this,” spokesman Jonathan Conricus said in a video tweeted by the Israeli military. “And on top of that, we will ensure that Hamas can no longer govern the Gaza Strip.”
After blasting their way through the barriers at dawn on Saturday, Hamas militants raged for hours, shooting civilians and capturing people in towns, highways and at a desert techno music festival attended by thousands. The Zaka rescue service said it had removed regarding 260 bodies from the festival, and the number was expected to rise. It was unclear how many of those dead were already included in the total count in Israel.
The Israeli military estimated that regarding 1,000 Hamas fighters had participated in Saturday’s initial raid. The high figure underscored the extent of planning by the armed group, which said it launched the attack in response to the blockade of Gaza and the accumulated suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
In retaliation, Israel hit more than 800 targets in Gaza, according to the military, including strikes that devastated much of the town of Beit Hanoun, in the northeast corner of the enclave.
Israeli Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters that Hamas was using the town to launch attacks. There was initially no information on the number of victims, and most of the thousands of local residents probably fled before the bombing.
“We will continue to attack in this way, with this force, continuously, in all the assembly (places) and routes” used by Hamas, Hagari said.
For their part, Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad group said they had captured more than 130 people inside Israel and taken them to Gaza, and said they would exchange them for the release of thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Although unconfirmed, the announcement was the first indication of the scale of the kidnappings.
The hostages were known to include soldiers and civilians, including women, children and the elderly, mostly Israelis but also some of other nationalities. The Israeli military only said that the number of people captured was “significant.”
Civilians on both sides were already paying a high price. Israel’s military was evacuating at least five towns near Gaza, and the United Nations said more than 123,000 Gazans had been displaced by the fighting.
Mayyan Zin, a divorced mother, learned that her two daughters had been kidnapped following a relative sent her photos from a Telegram group in which they were seen being held and sitting on a mattress. Then she found videos on the Internet that showed a chilling scene in her ex-husband’s house in the town of Nahal Oz: armed men who had broken into the place asked him questions while his leg was bleeding a short distance from the girls, Dafna, 15 years old, and Ella, 8. Another video showed the father being taken across the border into Gaza.
“Just bring my daughters home to their family. To all people,” declared Zin.
In Gaza, a small territory of 2.3 million people that has been isolated for 16 years due to the blockade imposed by Egypt and Israel since Hamas took power, residents fear intensified bloodshed.
By Sunday night, Israeli airstrikes had destroyed 159 homes in Gaza and seriously damaged 1,210, according to the UN. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said a school housing more than 225 people had taken a direct hit. He did not say where the fire came from.
In the Palestinian city of Rafah in southern Gaza, an Israeli airstrike early Monday killed 19 people, including women and children, said Talat Barhoum, a doctor at the local Al-Najjar hospital. Barhoum said an aircraft had attacked the Abu Hilal family home and that among those killed was Rafaat Abu Hilal, the leader of a local armed group. The attack caused damage to nearby houses.
Over the weekend, another airstrike on a home in Rafah killed 19 members of the Abu Outa family, including women and children, who had taken shelter on the ground floor of the property, according to survivors.
Several Israeli media outlets citing rescue workers said at least 700 people had died in Israel, including 44 soldiers. Gaza’s Health Ministry said 413 people, including 78 children and 41 women, had died in the territory. About 2,000 people were injured on each side. An Israeli official said security forces had killed 400 militants and captured dozens more.
Over the weekend, the Israeli security cabinet formally declared war and gave the green light to “significant military measures” in response to the Hamas attack. No details were given regarding the plans, but the statement appeared to give a broad mandate to the military and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a statement, his office said the goal will be the destruction of Hamas’s “military and governance capabilities” to the extent that it prevents it from threatening Israelis for “many years.”
The declaration of war was largely symbolic, said Yohanan Plesner, director of the Israel Democracy Institute, a local think tank. “But it shows that the government thinks it is regarding to enter a longer, more intense and significant period of war,” he added.
Over the past four decades, Israel has carried out major military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza that it has described as wars, but without formal declaration.
The presence of hostages in Gaza complicates the Israeli response. Israel has in the past made very lopsided exchanges to bring home Israeli captives.
An Egyptian official said Israel sought help from Cairo to ensure the safety of the hostages. Egypt also spoke with both sides regarding the possibility of a truce, but Israel is not open to one “at this stage,” according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to make public statements.
In northern Israel, a brief exchange of attacks with the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah stoked fears that the fighting might escalate into a broader regional war. Hezbollah fired rockets and projectiles on Sunday at Israeli positions in a disputed area along the border, and Israel responded with armed drones. The Israeli military said the situation was calm following the exchange.
Elsewhere, six Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers on Sunday in various parts of the West Bank.
Over the past year, the far-right Israeli government has increased settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. Israeli settler violence has displaced hundreds of Palestinians from the area, and tensions have grown around the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a sensitive place of worship in Jerusalem.
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Adwan reported from the Gaza Strip. Associated Press journalists Isabel DeBre and Julia Frankel in Jerusalem; Wafaa Shurafa in Gaza City; Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv, Israel; Bassem Mroue in Beirut; Samy Magdy in Cairo and Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.
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