Israel has declared a “complete siege” on Gaza and launched hundreds of strikes on the Palestinian enclave as Hamas claimed Israeli bombings had killed Israeli hostages being held there.
Palestinian militants are believed to have abducted more than 100 people during a surprise multi-front attack in which they killed more than 700 – making Saturday the deadliest day in Israel’s history.
In response, Israel has launched hundreds of strikes from the air and sea, killing more than 500 Palestinians in Gaza, an area home to 2.3 million people with nowhere to flee.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, formally declared war on Sunday and called up 300,000 reservists for duty, signalling a possible ground assault into Gaza – a move that in the past has always brought further bloodshed.
However, Israeli forces face the unprecedented task of fighting an urban war while dozens of hostages are likely to be hidden in tunnels and basements across the Gaza Strip.
On Monday, Abu Ubaida, a spokesperson for the armed wing of Hamas, confirmed the worst fears for the Israeli public when he claimed that Israeli bombardment had already killed “four of the enemy’s captives and their captors”.
The Reuters news agency reported that Qatar, which has mediated between Hamas and Israel in the past, was urgently working to negotiate freedom for Israeli women and children in exchange for the release of 36 Palestinian women and children from Israeli prisons.
The negotiations, which Qatar has been conducting in coordination with the US since Saturday night, were “moving positively”, according to a source who Reuters said had been briefed on the talks. “There has been no agreement on logistics or a mechanism for the release,” the unnamed source was quoted as saying.
The captives are known to include civilians, including women, children and older adults – mostly Israelis but also people of other nationalities – and soldiers. Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, has said dozens of American citizens, largely dual nationals, are among those held captive.
Hamas’s attack, in which assailants rampaged through the heavily fortified frontier and shot unarmed civilians as they encountered them, has left the Israeli military scrambling to regain control of its territory. Palestinian militants have continued to fire hundreds of rockets deep into Israel.
The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said he had instructed the military to put Gaza under siege, a word rarely uttered in public by Israeli officials.
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
It was not immediately clear if Egypt, which shares a southern border with Gaza, would keep its land crossing open. Inhabitants of Gaza require permission to enter Egypt, which can sometimes take days or even weeks to be approved.
Saturday’s attack caught Israel’s vaunted military and intelligence apparatus off guard, bringing gun battles to Israel’s streets for the first time in decades and shaking the country to its core. Once across the frontier, militants moved several miles into Israel and killed civilians indiscriminately. (The Guardian)
