Israel and Hamas at war | Hamas threatens to kill hostages in response to Gaza raids

(Jerusalem) Hamas threatened Monday evening to execute Israeli hostages in response to increasing Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip on the third day of the massive offensive launched by the Palestinian Islamist movement, which caused astonishment in the country.

This threat comes after the “total siege” imposed Monday by Israel on the Gaza Strip controlled since 2007 by Hamas and shelled by the Israeli army in response to the unprecedented deadly attack launched on Saturday by Hamas by land, air and sea, compared by Israel to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

On Monday, the Israeli army announced that it had regained “control” of the targeted localities in the south of the country. “We are already in the heart of the campaign but this is only the beginning,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told senior local officials in southern Israel, where Hamas fighters launched their surprise attack. “What Hamas will experience will be difficult and terrible […]we will defeat them with force, enormous force,” he promised.

The Israeli Prime Minister called on Monday for the formation of a “government of national unity”.

“I call on opposition leaders to immediately form an emergency national unity government without preconditions,” Netanyahu said in a televised address.

Benjamin Netanyahu, at the head of a coalition of right, far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, is facing one of the greatest crises in the country’s history.

In his speech, he detailed the five points of his program: regain control of the territory and “eliminate the terrorists” still present in Israel, carry out a “massive” attack against Hamas with “unprecedented force”, “strengthen the others fronts, in the north against Hezbollah” and in the West Bank, continue the campaign to guarantee the support of the international community and finally “the unity of the people” with the formation of a government of national unity.

But Hamas warned Israel: “Every time our people are targeted without warning, it will result in the execution of one of the civilian hostages […]. The enemy does not understand humanitarian and ethical language, so we will speak to them in a language that they understand,” he stressed in a statement. More than a hundred Israelis have been kidnapped by Hamas, according to the government.

The war left nearly 1,400 dead in total, according to official reports from both sides.

“Massacred”

According to the army, more than 800 Israelis have been killed since the offensive began on Saturday. “To my knowledge, since the Holocaust, there have never been so many Jews killed in a single day,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a video.

On Saturday, 250 people were massacred in a rave organized in the Israeli desert near the Gaza Strip, according to the spokesperson for the NGO Zaka, Moti Bukjin, who participated in the collection of bodies.

The Israeli Health Ministry also reported 2,616 injuries. On the Palestinian side, 687 people were killed and 2,900 injured, according to local authorities.

Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers are deployed around the Gaza Strip, a thin coastal territory populated by 2.3 million Palestinians and controlled by Hamas since 2007.

In the wake of the announcement of the “siege” of Gaza, Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz ordered the “immediate cutoff” of the water supply to this Palestinian enclave to which Israel supplies 10% of the annual consumption.

The army is also trying to save Israelis taken hostage by Hamas, more than 100 according to the Israeli government, unprecedented in the history of the country taken by surprise by this offensive launched on Saturday on the last day of the Jewish holidays of Sukkot, “by far the worst day in Israel’s history,” according to an army spokesperson.

The Israeli army estimates the number of Hamas fighters to have participated in the “invasion of Israel” at around 1,000, a spokesperson said on X

The army also announced that it had killed “several armed suspects” who had infiltrated Israel from Lebanon.

On Monday, rocket warning sirens sounded in Jerusalem and central Israel, while rocket fire from Gaza continued, especially in southern Israel.

Foreigners killed

A number of nationals of other countries, some also having Israeli nationality, were killed in the Hamas offensive, including 12 Thais, 10 Nepalese, at least nine Americans, two French and one Canadian, according to the authorities of these countries.

Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, said that “Israel was taken by surprise by this unprecedented attack” and “many Israelis have difficulty understanding how this could have happened.” produce “.

For Yaakov Shoshani, 70, a resident of Sderot, in southern Israel, “the systems have all failed here, whether intelligence, military intelligence, civilian intelligence, detection systems, the barrier border [avec Gaza]everything failed.”

“This is by far the worst day in Israeli history. “Never before have so many Israelis been killed in one go,” an army spokesperson said, adding that it could be “both 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.” “.

After crossing the border barrier that Israel considered impregnable, Hamas fighters rushed from the Gaza Strip into Jewish communities in the south of the country. There, armed men went from house to house, shooting down citizens or kidnapping them to take them back to Gaza.

“Since the Holocaust, we have not witnessed scenes of Jews, women, children and grandparents taken on trucks in captivity,” Mr. Herzog said.

“Upset”

A former Israeli soldier said the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, which remains a national trauma in Israel, was “small matter” compared to Saturday’s Hamas raid, adding that it was a “very serious failure “.

The Hamas offensive was launched 50 years and one day after this war which took Israel completely by surprise and left 2,600 dead on the Israeli side in three weeks of fighting.

The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military branch of Hamas, announced that they had launched this operation and fired more than 5,000 rockets towards Israel to “put an end to the crimes of the occupation”.

The Hamas attack was condemned by many Western countries. The Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, while recognizing Israel’s “legitimate concerns for its security”, said he was “deeply upset” by the announcement by the Israeli authorities of the “complete siege” of the gang. Gaza.

For its part, the United States on Sunday began sending military aid to Israel with new munitions and moving its carrier strike group closer to the USS aircraft carrier Gerald Ford in Mediterranean.

The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, called an emergency meeting on Tuesday to discuss the situation in Israel and Gaza.