Israel said it recaptured Gaza border areas from Hamas militants on Tuesday, the fourth day of fierce fighting that has left thousands dead on both sides since the Islamists launched a surprise attack.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Israel’s military campaign following Saturday’s onslaught is only the start of a sustained war to destroy Hamas and “change the Middle East”.
Fears of a regional conflagration have surged ahead of an expected Israeli ground incursion into Gaza, the crowded, impoverished enclave from where Hamas launched its land, air and sea attack on the Jewish Sabbath.
The death toll in Israel has surged above 900 from the worst attack in the country’s 75-year history, while Gaza officials have also reported 900 people killed so far, and Israel’s army said the bodies of roughly 1,500 militants had been found.
Hamas gunmen killed more than 100 people in the kibbutz of Beeri alone, said Moti Bukjin, a volunteer with the charity Zaka that recovers bodies in accordance with Jewish law.
‘Sheer evil’
A day after his ally Netanyahu called Hamas “savages,” United States President Joe Biden condemned the Hamas attacks as “sheer evil.”
The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, began its operation saying it aimed to “end all the crimes of the occupation (Israel). Their time for rampaging without being held accountable is over.”
Netanyahu, the veteran leader at the helm of Israel’s hard-right coalition, has called for an “emergency government of national unity” after his administration’s proposal for judicial reforms split the nation and even its military this year, before the war brought the nation closer together.
Israel recalls reservists
The Israeli army has called up 300,000 reservists and massed tanks and other heavy armour both near Gaza and on the northern border with Lebanon, where exchanges of fire continued.
The military said its forces had largely reclaimed the embattled south and the border around Gaza, and dislodged holdout Hamas fighters from more than a dozen towns and kibbutzim.
“Around 1,500 bodies of Hamas (fighters) have been found in Israel around the Gaza Strip,” said army spokesman Richard Hecht, adding security forces had “more or less restored control over the border” with the enclave.
In Kfar Aza kibbutz, where Israeli forces say Hamas massacred more than 100 civilians, Israeli soldiers prepared to remove several of their compatriots in black body bags.
