Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Israel pounded the Gaza Strip and prepared for a ground invasion of the enclave, three days after an attack by Hamas triggered the bloodiest war on the country’s territory for decades.
The Israeli military said it had hit more than 1,300 targets in Gaza to date in response to Saturday’s deadly incursion by the militant group, while more than 4,500 rockets had been fired from the enclave.
As sirens warning of further rocket attacks sounded across Israel, with many missiles headed towards the city of Ashkelon, the military said it had found the bodies of “dozens” of civilians, including infants and children, at a kibbutz near the Gaza border in the south of the country.
An Israel Defense Forces spokesperson described the Kfar Aza site as “a massacre: children, women and elderly . . . were butchered”.
The kibbutz was one of the last sites where Israeli troops subdued armed Palestinian militants in fighting that continued into Monday morning. The spokesperson said that the casualties numbered in “dozens [and] we are still counting”.
The IDF said the area near the Gaza border was now “more or less secure”, adding that it had retrieved the bodies of 1,500 Palestinians who had stormed Israeli territory.
For the third successive day Israel shelled sites in Lebanon, its neighbour to the north — which is home to Hizbollah, the Iran-backed militant movement, and large numbers of Palestinians — in response to a cross-border volley of rockets.
The IDF also said late on Tuesday that it had identified “a number of launches from Syria aimed for Israel”, which entered its territory “and presumably fell in open areas”. It said it was “responding with artillery and mortar shells” aimed at the sites from which the launches had originated. There are various Iranian-backed Shia militant groups in Syria, where they have been fighting alongside the regime of Bashar al-Assad in the country’s civil war.
As Israel prepared for a prolonged Gaza war, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party said that efforts to form an emergency government were “advancing with great strides”.
The country has called up 60,000 reservists in addition to a record 300,000 already mobilised, and deployed 35 military battalions and four divisions as it builds up “an infrastructure for future operations” in apparent preparation for a widely anticipated land attack on Gaza.
Israel-Palestinian conflict
More than 2mn people live in the Hamas-controlled enclave and tens of thousands have already fled their homes to seek shelter from Israeli strikes from the air and sea. According to the UN, the bombardment has displaced at least 200,000 people.
Youssef al-Aqqad, director of the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis in the south of the enclave, said the area had been shelled every day since Saturday, with 87 killed, including women and children.
“Houses and apartment blocks have been bombarded,” he said. “We write ‘unknown’ on the bodies. We hear the bombing every second.”
Israeli targets in Gaza included what the IDF said was a Hamas operational command centre in a mosque, an entry point for a tunnel used by militants and other “operational infrastructure” inside a second mosque.
Israel accuses the Palestinian group, which took over Gaza in 2007, of embedding military infrastructure in civilian areas and religious sites.
The IDF also posted in Hebrew on X that it had killed Jawad Abu Shamala, Hamas’s finance chief, in an air strike.
The Financial Times could not independently confirm the claims.
Hamas has threatened to kill a hostage for each Israeli air strike that targets civilians in Gaza without prior warning.
The UN warned it expected that “a severe shortage of already scarce drinkable water” would affect more than 610,000 people in the territory. As part of a “complete siege”, Israeli authorities have cut off Gaza from water and electricity.
The IDF said more than 900 Israelis had been killed since Saturday’s incursion, with dozens more held hostage in Gaza. It added that 50 families had been notified that their relatives had been taken as hostages. Palestinian authorities said 830 of their citizens had been killed.
US president Joe Biden addressed the attacks in a speech from the White House on Tuesday, saying Israel has both the “right” and the “duty” to respond. He confirmed that Americans were among those held hostage by the terrorist group, and said that at least 14 Americans had been killed.
Describing the attacks by Hamas as “sheer evil” that brought back grim memories of “genocide and antisemitism”, Biden vowed that the US would “stand with Israel”. Flanked by vice-president Kamala Harris and secretary of state Antony Blinken, Biden called on Congress to help bolster aid to Israel as needed and said it was more broadly time for “the United States to come together”.
“There is no place for hate in America — not against Jews, not against Muslims, not against anyone,” he said. Blinken will travel to Israel later this week, the state department said.
On Tuesday, the EU, the world’s biggest provider of support to the Palestinians, said it would continue aid payments until it had completed a review into whether the funds would be channelled to Hamas. Like the US and Israel, the bloc considers the organisation to be a terrorist group.
EU neighbourhood commissioner Olivér Várhelyi had claimed a day before that “all payments [were] immediately suspended”. But Brussels said he had not consulted fellow commissioners before posting on social media.
Additional reporting by James Shotter in Jerusalem, James Politi in Washington and Max Seddon in Moscow
