Israel and the Gaza Strip are at war again this Saturday, October 7 after the launch of a surprise military offensive by Hamas, which fired thousands of rockets and infiltrated fighters into Israeli territory. This eruption of violence has already left 70 dead on the Israeli side, according to Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, and 198 dead on the Palestinian side, according to the Ministry of Health of Hamas, the Islamist movement in power on the Gaza Strip since 2007. This is the deadliest escalation since the May 2021 11-day war between Hamas and the Israeli army.
“We are at war, it is not a simple operation or a cycle of violence, but a war,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video message. Referring to “a surprise attack” by Hamas, he concluded his speech by asserting: “We are at war and we will win it.” The Hamas offensive comes on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot in Israel, when the country is living in slow motion and many pilgrims and tourists have flocked during this school vacation period. It also takes place fifty years and one day after the start of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war which took Israel completely by surprise in the middle of Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) and led to the deaths of 2,600 Israelis and at least 9,500 deaths. dead and missing on the Arab side in three weeks of combat.
The hostilities began before 6:30 a.m. (4:30 a.m. in France) with a deluge of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, towards neighboring Israeli towns but also deeper into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Taking advantage of the element of surprise, Hamas fighters aboard vehicles, boats and even motorized paragliders made use of the imposing security barrier erected by Israel around the Gaza Strip, attacking military positions or civilians in the street.
“Gates of Hell”
In Sderot, a town near the border with Gaza, an AFP journalist counted at least 8 civilian corpses scattered in the street. “Please send help,” implored a pregnant woman living in Kibbutz Soufa (a few kilometers from the Gaza Strip) in a testimony relayed by the daily Times of Israel. “They are shooting at our house, they are trying to break down the door of the secure room,” she added, indicating that she was speaking from a secure shelter where she was holed up with relatives. AFP journalists saw armed Palestinians gathered around a burning Israeli tank and others driving an Israeli Humvee through the streets of Gaza City.
At mid-morning, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, spokesperson for the Israeli army, announced that Israeli troops are engaged in ground fighting in Israeli territory in “several locations around the Gaza Strip” against undercover fighters described as “terrorists”. On Saturday evening, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the three buildings of the “Palestine Tower” in the Al-Rinal district of Gaza City, noted AFP journalists who saw the three towers of more than ten floors s collapse one after the other after explosions. The Israeli army said it had hit “two storey buildings” with airstrikes, accusing the “Hamas terrorist organization” of sheltering its military infrastructure “in the heart of the population” of the Palestinian enclave. The army says it warned residents before the strikes and “asked them to evacuate the area”. The UN has announced that an emergency meeting of the Security Council on the Middle East will take place on Sunday.
Around 11 a.m., the army announced its first airstrikes on Gaza in retaliation. These strikes continued until the afternoon, according to AFP journalists in Gaza. “Dozens of fighter jets are currently striking targets of the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip,” the army said in a statement. Israeli General Rassan Alian, head of COGAT, the Defense Ministry body overseeing civilian activities in the Palestinian Territories, claimed that Hamas had “opened the gates of hell” and that it ” would pay the consequences.
The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, claimed to have “captured several enemy soldiers” in a video showing at least three clearly frightened men in civilian clothes, detained by a squad of armed people with blurred faces. The al-Quds Brigades, the military branch of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also declared that it was holding “many” Israeli soldiers. In an audio message broadcast by Hamas television, the commander of the Al-Qassam brigades, Mohammad Deif, announced that he had launched the “Flood of Al-Aqsa” operation against Israel and said he had fired more than “5,000 rockets” as soon as the start of this offensive. “We have decided to put an end to all the crimes of the occupation,” he added. In response, the Israeli army launched Operation Steel Sabers.
The armed wing of Palestinian Hamas fired hundreds of rockets Saturday morning from the Gaza Strip.
© / Anadolu Agency via AFP
From early morning, hundreds of civilians fled their homes in the northeastern Gaza Strip away from the border with Israel, and some found shelter in UN Refugee Agency schools. Palestinians (UNRWA), according to an AFP correspondent. “Hamas made a grave mistake this morning by launching a war against the State of Israel,” Israeli soldiers “are fighting the enemy in every place,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said .
“Horrible violence”
The White House condemned “unequivocally the unjustified attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians,” and “we stand with the government and people of Israel.” The EU and several European capitals “strongly condemned” the attacks. “This horrible violence must stop immediately. Terrorism and violence solve nothing,” stressed the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell. French President Emmanuel Macron also condemned “the terrorist attacks currently hitting Israel”. Russia called for “restraint” and Turkey to avoid escalation.
In May, Israel launched an offensive against Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, triggering a five-day war between the Israeli army, Islamic Jihad and other armed groups in the territory that cost the lives of 34 Palestinians. and an Israeli. More than a thousand rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, most of them intercepted by the Israeli air defense system. Israel, for its part, had increased airstrikes on this territory. Hamas remained aloof from the conflict. Israel has imposed a strict blockade on the Gaza Strip since Hamas took control.