At least 1,100 Israelis killed & 2,741 others injured in result of Hamas attacks

GAZA, Oct 10 (SABAH): Israel said on Tuesday it had reclaimed control of the Gaza border, pounding the enclave with the fiercest air strikes in the 75-year history of its conflict with the Palestinians despite a Hamas threat to execute a captive for each home hit. Meanwhile so far at least 1,100 Israelis have been killed and 2,741 others injured in result of the Hamas attacks. Prior to this Israeli media had confirmed death of over 800 Israelis in result of Hamas attacks.

At least 770 Palestinians including 140 children have since been martyred and 2,200 others have been injured in result of Israeli air strikes, according to officials, while whole districts in Gaza have been flattened. The condition of 22 injured Palestinians is critical.

Air strikes wrought widespread destruction in the Jabalia refugee camp, where charred bodies were pulled from the rubble and relatives wailed in grief.

The United Nations said 180,000 Palestinians had been made homeless, many huddling on streets or in schools. Smoke and flames rose into the morning sky, while bombardment of the roads often made it impossible for emergency crews to reach the scene of strikes.

At the morgue in Gaza’s Khan Younis hospital, bodies were laid on the ground on stretchers with their names written on their bellies. Medics called for relatives to pick up bodies quickly because there was no more space for the dead.

There were heavy casualties in a former municipal building struck while being used as an emergency shelter for displaced families.

“There is an extraordinary number of martyrs, people are still under the rubble, some friends are either martyrs or wounded,” said Ala Abu Tair, 35, who had sought shelter there with his family after fleeing Abassan Al-Kabira near the border. “No place is safe in Gaza, as you see they hit everywhere.”

Israel already imposed a “total siege” on the Gaza Strip on Monday, cutting off food, water and electricity supplies, and sparking fears that an already dire humanitarian situation will swiftly deteriorate.

Tel Aviv has been left reeling by Hamas’s unprecedented ground, air and sea assault. The death toll rose to more than 900 in Israel, which has retaliated with a withering barrage of strikes on Gaza, raising the death toll in the besieged enclave to 687.

The Israeli army said Tuesday it had “more or less restored control” over the Gaza border after Saturday’s mass breach by Palestinian fighters.

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) claimed it had recovered the bodies of around 1,500 Hamas fighters inside Israel, confirming the scale of Saturday’s assault. It said it had “nearly completed” the evacuation of Jewish communities around the border.

Fireballs lit up Gaza City before dawn on Tuesday as explosions sounded and sirens wailed.

Hamas said Monday that Israeli air strikes had killed four captives. It later said it could start killing them itself.

“Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of one of the civilian hostages,” Hamas armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement.

In a televised speech late Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Hamas to the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, and said Israel planned to deploy “unprecedented force”.

“Hamas terrorists bound, burned and executed children. They are savages. Hamas is ISIS,” Netanyahu said.

He also vowed to “strengthen other fronts in the north against Hezbollah”, where fighters and Israeli forces exchanged fire for a second day.

Hamas launched more rockets as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where missile defence systems fired and air raid sirens blared.

Israel said it had called up 300,000 army reservists for its “Swords of Iron” campaign. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel would impose a “complete siege” on the long-blockaded enclave of 2.3 million people: “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed.”

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply distressed” by the siege announcement, and warned Gaza’s already dire humanitarian situation will now “only deteriorate exponentially”.

Palestinians in the coastal territory braced for what many feared would be a massive Israeli ground attack aiming to defeat Hamas and liberate the captives.

Hamas has called on fighters in the West Bank and in Arab and Islamic nations to join what it has dubbed “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”.

“The military operation is still continuing,” Hossam Badran, a Hamas official, told a foreign news agency from Doha, adding that “there is currently no chance for negotiation on the issue of prisoners or anything else”.

Israel, which has long prided itself on a high-tech military and intelligence edge, has been shaken to the core by the surprise Hamas strike, and now faces the threat of a multi-front war.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas in a phone call that the Gulf kingdom was working to prevent the conflict from spreading across the region, state media said early Tuesday.

The European Commission said it was reviewing its development aid to the Palestinians, but clarified that no support had yet been suspended. Britain said it was undertaking a similar review.
The United States and European Union consider Hamas a terrorist group.

Analysts said the unprecedented nature of the Hamas assault could make any diplomatic efforts fruitless for now.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is among those trying, nonetheless. He held an urgent round of telephone diplomacy Monday.

Erdogan warned Israel against “indiscriminately” attacking civilians and also delivered measured criticism of Hamas, urging both sides to respect the “ethics” of war.

Meanwhile four more Palestinian journalists were martyred in Israeli air strikes on Gaza City on Tuesday, media unions and officials have said.

The latest deaths bring the number of Palestinian journalists martyred in the fighting since Saturday to eight, the Palestinian Press Union said in a statement.

Another union, the Gaza journalists’ syndicate, announced earlier “the martyrdom of three journalists in the Gaza Strip in the ongoing Israeli aggression”.

The chief of Gaza’s Hamas-run government media office, Salameh Maarouf, identified the three as Said al-Taweel, director of Al-Khamisa news agency; press photographer Mohammed Sobboh, and Hisham Nawajhah, a correspondent for a Gaza news agency.

They were martyred in a strike while covering the evacuation of a residential building near Gaza City’s fishing port, Maarouf said, condemning Israel’s “criminal behaviour against journalists”.

Members of the press were standing several dozen metres (yards) from the building after a resident received a telephone call from the Israeli army warning of an imminent strike, an foreign news agency correspondent reported.

Witnesses said the Israeli strike hit a different building, closer to where the journalists had been.

Later in the day, the press union said the head of its committee of women journalists, Salam Khalil, was martyred along with her husband and children when the family’s home in the northern Gaza Strip was hit in a “treacherous” Israeli bombing.

Journalist Asad Shamlakh was martyred on Sunday, the media office statement said, adding two cameramen were missing and 10 journalists were wounded.

Three journalists were martyred on Saturday, according to the Palestinian statement and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The New York-based media rights group said on Monday that Ibrahim Mohammad Lafi, a photographer, Mohammad Jarghoun, a reporter, and Mohammad El-Salhi had been martyred in different incidents.

“We call on all sides to remember that journalists are civilians and should not be targeted,” Sherif Mansour of the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement. “Accurate reporting is critical during times of crisis and the media has a vital role to play in bringing news from Gaza and Israel to the world. “