Israel warns Gaza residents to ‘get out now’ and says it will stop supplying electricity, fuel and goods, vowing unprecedented retaliation
Guardian staff and agencies
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel is embarking on a “long and difficult war” after a surprise attack by Palestinian militants led to hundreds of deaths, the seizure of dozens of Israeli hostages, and sparked fears of a regional escalation.
Gunbattles continued well after nightfall, and militants held hostages in standoffs in two towns. Militants occupied a police station in a third town, Sderot, where Israeli forces struggled until Sunday morning to finally reclaim the building.
Backed by a barrage of rockets, an estimated 200-300 Hamas militants broke out of the blockaded Gaza Strip early on Saturday morning and moved into nearby Israeli towns shooting at civilians, in an attack that stunned Israel. Video footage showed several people being abducted by gunmen. In some places, militants roamed for hours, shooting civilians and soldiers as Israel’s military scrambled to muster a response.
In a televised address on Saturday night, Netanyahu, who earlier declared Israel to be at war, said the military would use all of its strength to destroy Hamas’ capabilities and “take revenge for this black day”. But he warned, “This war will take time. It will be difficult.”
“All the places that Hamas hides in, operates from, we will turn them into rubble,” he added. “Get out of there now,” he told Gaza residents, who have no way to leave the tiny, overcrowded Mediterranean territory of 2.3 million people.
Writing on X early on Sunday, he said the “first phase” of the counter-operation had ended, and that Israel had fought off the majority of Hamas militants inside its territory. He vowed to continue the offensive “without reservation and without respite.”
His office released a statement saying Israel will stop supplying electricity, fuel and goods to Gaza. Much of Gaza was already thrown into darkness by nightfall after electrical supplies from Israel, which supplies almost all of the territories’ power, were cut off earlier in the day.
The Israeli prime minister’s office said the security cabinet had approved steps to destroy the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad “for many years”.
After nightfall, Israeli airstrikes in Gaza intensified, flattening several residential buildings in giant explosions, including a 14-storey tower that held dozens of apartments as well as Hamas offices in central Gaza City. Israeli forces fired a warning just before, and there were no reports of casualties.
Soon after, a Hamas rocket barrage into central Israel hit four cities, including Tel Aviv and a nearby suburb, where two people were seriously injured. Throughout the day, Hamas fired more than 3,500 rockets, the Israeli military said.
At least 250 Israelis have died in the Hamas attacks, Israeli officials have said. Senior military officers were among those killed in fighting near Gaza on Saturday, the Israeli military said. More than 1,590, Israelis have been wounded in by far the deadliest day of violence in Israel since the Yom Kippur war 50 years ago, Israel’s health ministry said.
At least 230 Palestinians have been killed and 1,610 wounded in Gaza by Israeli retaliation.
Israelis across the centre and south of the country were woken by the thud of missile fire and wailing of air raid sirens from about 7am on Saturday, the last day of the Jewish high holidays. Simultaneously, an unknown number of Hamas operatives blew up or used bulldozers to tear down several parts of Israel’s hi-tech separation fence on the Gaza boundary, from there making their way into neighbouring Israeli towns and villages.
Hundreds of people who attended a rave in Kibbutz Re’im were filmed fleeing across the fields as booms and thuds could be heard in the background. The Israeli news website Ynet reported that contact had been lost with the partygoers.
Israel declared a state of war and scrambled reservist forces. On Saturday Netanyahu said “We will take mighty vengeance or this wicked day”.
“Hamas launched a cruel and wicked war. We will win this war but the price is too heavy to bear,” he said. “Hamas wants to murder us all. This is an enemy that murders mothers and children in their homes, in their beds. An enemy that abducts elderly, children, teenage girls.”
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said the assault that had begun in Gaza would spread to the West Bank and Jerusalem.
In a speech, Haniyeh highlighted threats to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, the continuation of the blockade on Gaza and Israeli normalisation with countries in the region.
“How many times have we warned you that the Palestinian people have been living in refugee camps for 75 years, and you refuse to recognise the rights of our people?”
Bodies of Israeli civilians were strewn across the streets of Sderot in southern Israel, near Gaza, surrounded by broken glass. The bodies of a woman and a man were sprawled across the front seats of a car.
“I went out, I saw loads of bodies of terrorists, civilians, cars shot up. A sea of bodies, inside Sderot along the road, other places, loads of bodies,” said Shlomi from Sderot.
Esther Borochov, who fled a dance party attacked by the gunmen, told Reuters she survived by playing dead in a car after the driver trying to help her escape was shot point blank. “I couldn’t move my legs,” she told Reuters at the hospital. “Soldiers came and took us away to the bushes.”
The Hamas incursion fell on Simchat Torah, a normally joyous day when Jews complete the annual cycle of reading the Torah scroll.
Several airlines have cancelled flights into Israel and the Federal Aviation Association issued a warning to US pilots to use caution over Israeli airspace.
US president Joe Biden said from the White House that he had spoken to Netanyahu to say the United States “stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop.”
An emergency United Nations security council meeting has been called for Sunday afternoon.
Saudi Arabia, which has been in talks with the US about normalising relations with Israel, called on both sides to exercise restraint. The kingdom said it had repeatedly warned about the danger of “the situation exploding as a result of the continued occupation [and] the Palestinian people being deprived of their legitimate rights”.
Hamas’s operation is likely to have been months, if not years, in the making, and is likely to have involved regional cooperation with Iran, which sponsors both Hamas and the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah. The failure of Israel’s security and intelligence agencies to predict this attack has come as an enormous shock to a society that had come to believe that the increasing use of surveillance and automated technology had turned the 56-year-old occupation of the Palestinian territories into a sustainable, manageable project.
The security situation across Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank, volatile at the best of times, has been steadily deteriorating for a year and a half. But no one on either side foresaw the scale and ferocity of what Hamas has dubbed “Operation al-Aqsa Deluge”, an unprecedented sea, air and ground offensive by Hamas that has opened a frightening new chapter in the decades-old conflict. The Israeli security establishment’s failure to foil the attack could reverberate for decades to come, in much the same way as the Yom Kippur war that began 50 years ago this week.
Asked by reporters how Hamas had managed to catch the army off guard, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli army spokesperson, replied, “That’s a good question.”
With Associated Press and Reuters