Israel’s deadliest ever war in Gaza, sparked by the October 7 Hamas attacks, entered its second month on November 7 as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed there would be no ceasefire until the militant group releases its 240 hostages.
Mr. Netanyahu also said Israel would assume “overall security” in Gaza after the war ends, while allowing for possible “tactical pauses” before then to free captives and deliver aid to the besieged territory of 2.4 million people.
The Gaza death toll has soared above 10,000, mostly civilians, said the Hamas-run health ministry, as UN rights chief Volker Turk decried a month of “carnage, of incessant suffering, bloodshed, destruction, outrage and despair.”
In pictures | One month of Israel-Hamas war
Rockets are launched by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, in Gaza, on October 7, 2023. The militant Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip carried out an unprecedented, multi-front attack on Israel at daybreak on Oct. 7, firing thousands of rockets as dozens of Hamas fighters infiltrated the heavily fortified border in several locations by air, land, and sea and catching the country off-guard on a major holiday.
Palestinians wave their national flag and celebrate by a destroyed Israeli tank at the Gaza Strip fence east of Khan Younis southern on October 7, 2023.
An IDF soldier walks past a house that was shot at and destroyed in an attack by Hamas militants on this kibbutz near the border with Gaza on October 17, 2023 in Kfar Aza, Israel. The Hamas militants broke out of Gaza and rampaged through nearby Israeli communities, taking captives.
Smoke rises following Israeli strikes in Gaza on October 7, 2023. Israel began its retaliatory efforts against the Hamas.
People stand outside a mosque destroyed in an Israeli air strike in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip on October 8, 2023.
A Palestinian sits on the rubble of a building destroyed in Israeli strikes, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on October 9, 2023.
Israeli soldiers walk through a tunnel discovered near the Israel-Gaza border on October 13, 2013.
Rockets are fired from Gaza towards Israel, on October 10, 2023.
The first flight carrying 212 Indian nationals from Israel, as part of Operation Ajay landed at Indira Gandhi International airport in New Delhi on October 13, 2023.
Palestinians check the place of the explosion at al-Ahli hospital, in Gaza City, on October 18, 2023. The Hamas-run Health Ministry said an Israeli airstrike caused the explosion that killed hundreds at al-Ahli, but the Israeli military said it was a misfired Palestinian rocket.
Wounded Palestinians sit in al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, central Gaza Strip, after arriving from al-Ahli hospital following an explosion there on October 17, 2023.
A man carries the body of Palestinian girl who was killed in an Israeli strike as her relatives mourn in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.
U.S. President Joe Biden is greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after arriving at Ben Gurion International Airport, in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2023.
The U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the Rafah border crossing, Egypt on October 20, 2023.
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, as seen from Ashkelon, in southern Israel October 20, 2023.
Judith Tai Raanan and her daughter Natalie Shoshana Raanan, U.S. citizens who were taken as hostages by Palestinian Hamas militants, walk while holding hands with Brig.-Gen. (Ret.) Gal Hirsch, Israel’s Coordinator for the Captives and Missing, after they were released by the militants on October 20, 2023.
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egyptian NGOs drive through the Rafah crossing from the Egyptian side on October 21, 2023. These were the first aid trucks to bring urgent humanitarian relief to the Hamas-controlled Palestinian enclave that was suffering what the U.N. chief labelled a “godawful nightmare”.
Protesters take part during a demonstration organised by the “National Collective for a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis” in Paris on October 22, 2023.
Voting results are displayed as the United Nations General Assembly voted on a non-binding resolution calling for a “humanitarian truce” in Gaza and a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers, on October 27, 2023 at U.N. headquarters. It was the first U.N. response to the conflict.
Israeli tanks and troops move near the border with Gaza, in Sderot, Israel on October 28, 2023. On the evening of October 27, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a large scale invasion inside the Gaza Strip with the stated intent to “destroy” Hamas and overthrow it.
A man reacts as Palestinians search for casualties a day after Israeli strikes on houses in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on November 1, 2023.
Citizens with foreign passports wait to travel through the Rafah crossing,in Rafah, Gaza on November 2, 2023. For the first time since the outbreak of war, the crossing at the Gaza-Egyptian border opened to allow a small number of foreign passport holders and seriously wounded to enter Egypt.
Palestinians gather to collect water, amid water shortages in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on November 2, 2023.
Palestinians check the damages after a convoy of ambulances was hit, at the entrance of Shifa hospital in Gaza City on November 3, 2023.
Druze men attend the funeral of Druze Israeli Lieutenant colonel Salman Habaka in the village of Yanuh Jat, northern Israel. Habaka was killed during a ground operation in the Gaza Strip.
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Israel has vowed to destroy the Islamist militants over their unprecedented attack which claimed 1,400 lives in Israel, including entire families slain inside their homes and young people killed at a music festival, according to Israeli officials.
Orit Meir’s 21-year-old son Almog was at the festival near Gaza and apart from a brief Hamas-posted video of hostages showing him since then — the family has had no updates.
“Our life became a nightmare but this nightmare is our reality,” she told reporters at an event in Athens focused on bringing the hostages home.
Since the attack, Israel has relentlessly hammered targets in Gaza with more than 12,000 air and artillery strikes and sent in ground forces that have effectively cut the strip in half, with soldiers and tanks tightening the encirclement of Gaza City.
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The Israeli army said that in the latest battles its “troops secured a military stronghold belonging to the Hamas terrorist organisation in the northern Gaza Strip. Anti-tank missiles and launchers, weapons and various intelligence materials were located in the compound by the troops.”
The suffering in Gaza has been immense, with entire city blocks levelled and bodies in white shrouds piling up outside hospitals where surgeons have had to operate on bloodied floors by the light of their phones.
“These are massacres,” said one bereaved Gaza resident, Mahmud Meshmesh, in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, looking at the devastation of yet another strike that left bodies buried under rubble and debris.
“They destroyed three houses over the heads of their inhabitants — women and children.”
House-to-house battles
Israel has air-dropped leaflets and sent text messages ordering Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to head south, but a US official said Saturday at least 350,000 civilians remained in the worst-hit areas.
Military analysts warned of weeks of gruelling house-to-house fighting ahead in Gaza, from which Israel withdrew in 2005 and where it launched its last land incursion in 2014.
“Hamas has had 15 years to prepare a dense ‘defence in depth’ that integrates subterranean, ground-level and above-ground fortifications,” said Michael Knights of the Washington Institute think tank.
The operation is hugely complicated for Israel because of the hostages, including very young children and frail elderly people, who are believed to be held inside a tunnel network spanning hundreds of kilometres.
Israel’s top ally, the United States, has backed it in its war on Hamas but also urged restraint and facilitated some aid deliveries and the flight of several hundred refugees with second passports through the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
Fresh departures from Gaza were announced Tuesday, with Romania saying 103 of its citizens and their family members have received permission to leave via Rafah.
‘Little pauses’
Mr. Netanyahu, speaking to ABC News on Monday, stressed that the war would continue until Israel had restored overall control of Gaza.
“Israel will, for an indefinite period,… have the overall security responsibility,” he said. “When we don’t have that security responsibility, what we have is the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we couldn’t imagine.”
He stressed that “there will be no ceasefire — general ceasefire — in Gaza, without the release of our hostages.
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“As far as tactical, little pauses — an hour here, an hour there — we’ve had them before.
“I suppose we’ll check the circumstances in order to enable goods — humanitarian goods — to come in or our hostages, individual hostages, to leave,” he added.
Israeli troops stationed near the Gaza border told AFP they felt proud to protect their country but also nervous as the war intensifies.
Stationed near Gaza, a 20-year-old soldier who could not be identified said he was “a bit scared to go” into Gaza because “you don’t know if you can come back alive”.
Around 30 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the offensive, the latest on Monday, according to a report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, citing Israeli sources.
Protests around the world
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, after a Middle East tour of crisis diplomacy, arrived in Japan on Tuesday for a meeting of G7 foreign ministers set to seek a common line on Gaza as calls mount for a ceasefire.
As the war rages on, Mr. Blinken has also discussed options for who will control Gaza after fighting ends.
In a visit to the occupied West Bank on Sunday, he suggested the Palestinian Authority under president Mahmud Abbas should retake control.
Mr. Abbas said the PA could return to power in Gaza in the future only if a “comprehensive political solution” is found for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hamas said it would never accept a puppet government in Gaza, and the senior Hamas official in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, vowed that “no force on Earth could annihilate” it.
Pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protest have been held around the world, with demonstrators voicing revulsion at the spiralling human suffering in Gaza.
In one of the latest demonstrations, hundreds of US Jewish activists peacefully occupied New York’s Statue of Liberty to demand a ceasefire.
One of them, photographer Nan Goldin, said that “as long as the people of Gaza are screaming, we need to yell louder, no matter who attempts to silence us”.
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