Israel bombed Hamas targets in Gaza on Tuesday and claimed that 1,500 dead of Islamic militants had been discovered in southern cities that had been taken back by the army after bloody clashes close to the Palestinian territory.
Israel’s military offensive after Saturday’s unexpected mass assault, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is only the beginning of a long fight to eliminate Hamas and “change the Middle East.”
Fears of a regional conflagration have soared amid expectations of an Israeli ground assault into the packed Palestinian Gaza Strip from which Hamas launched its land, air and sea offensive on the Jewish Sabbath.
In contrast to Gaza’s official death toll of 687, Israel’s death toll from the bloodiest strike in the nation’s 75-year history has risen to 900.
Netanyahu contrasted the systematic killing of Israeli people to the crimes the Islamic State, better known as ISIS, carried out while it ruled significant portions of Syria and Iraq.
“Hamas terrorists bound, burned and executed children,” a seething Netanyahu said in a televised address to the grieving nation late Monday. “They are savages. Hamas is ISIS.”
The veteran leader at the helm of Israel’s hard-right coalition also called for an “emergency government of national unity” after years of political crisis and bitter societal divisions.
For its “Swords of Iron” campaign, the Israeli army has activated 300,000 reservists and massed tanks and other heavy armor both close to Gaza and on the country’s northern border with Lebanon.
The military stated that after bloody engagements with stubborn Hamas fighters in a number of cities and kibbutzim, Israeli forces had mostly recaptured the beleaguered south and the border area surrounding Gaza.
“Around 1,500 bodies of Hamas (fighters) have been found in Israel around the Gaza Strip,” said army spokesman Richard Hecht.
