Israel and Hamas at war | More than 1,600 dead since the start of the offensive

(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 left more than 1,600 dead from either side.

This threat comes after the “total siege” imposed Monday by Israel on the Gaza Strip controlled since 2007 by Hamas. It is 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 attack. surprise. “What Hamas will experience will be difficult and terrible […]we will defeat them with force, enormous force,” Mr. Netanyahu promised.

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 threatened in a statement. More than a hundred people have been kidnapped in Israel by Hamas, according to the government.

The United States, which began sending military aid to Israel on Sunday with new munitions and bringing its carrier strike group closer to the Mediterranean, said Monday evening that it had “no intention of sending troops,” according to a spokesperson for the US National Security Council.

“Massacred”

According to the government press office, more than 800 Israelis have been killed since the offensive began on Saturday. The Israeli Ministry of Health also reported 2,616 injuries.

On Saturday, 250 people were killed in a rave organized in the Israeli desert near the Gaza Strip. “They massacred people in cold blood in an absolutely inconceivable way,” says Moti Bukjin, spokesperson for the NGO Zaka, who participated in collecting the bodies.

On the Palestinian side, 687 people were killed and 3,727 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.

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 provides 10% of its annual consumption.

In a televised address Monday evening, Mr. Netanyahu called on “opposition leaders to immediately form an emergency national unity government without preconditions,” in the face of the offensive launched on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. which took the country by surprise.

The Israeli army estimates that around 1,000 Hamas fighters took part in the “invasion of Israel”, a spokesperson said.

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

Lebanese Hezbollah, Israel’s nemesis, claimed Monday to have bombed two Israeli barracks, in response to the death of three of its members by Israeli bombings on a border area in southern Lebanon, against a backdrop of fear of escalation on another front.

“Jerusalem, ghost town”

A number of nationals of other countries, some also having Israeli nationality, were killed in the Hamas offensive, including 12 Thais, 10 Nepalese, 11 Americans, seven Argentinians, two Ukrainians, two Frenchmen, one Russian, one British, a Cambodian and a Canadian, according to the authorities of these countries.

Since the Hamas attack, “Jerusalem has been a ghost town,” declares Mary Bahba, a Palestinian forty-year-old visibly very worried about what happens next. “People are afraid, they have to go to work, but they fear being mistreated in the Israeli streets because of the war.”

After crossing the border barrier that Israel considered impregnable, Hamas fighters rushed 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.

The Hamas offensive was launched 50 years and one day after the 1973 Arab-Israeli 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 major offensive 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.

Germany, the United States, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, for their part, published a joint statement Monday evening, in which the five powers declared that they “will support Israel’s efforts to defend itself » and condemn Hamas “unambiguously”.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Israel against an “indiscriminate” attack on civilians in Gaza, which “would only increase suffering and reinforce the spiral of violence in the region”.