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KFAR AZZA, Israel — Israeli commanders said Tuesday that they had gained control of the border around the Gaza Strip and were preparing major military action “to change the reality” there as fighting continued four days after Hamas militants launched devastating attacks in Israel.
The United States pledged its full support for the upcoming offensive as U.S. officials sought to play down the prospects for massive humanitarian consequences, despite growing concerns about civilians in Gaza losing access to food and water and becoming collateral damage in the intensifying conflict.
“Like every nation in the world, Israel has the right to respond and indeed has a duty to respond to these vicious attacks,” President Biden said an address Tuesday afternoon.
Biden said 14 U.S. citizens have been killed, and his aides said 20 Americans are missing, though it was unclear how many had been taken hostage. In total, about 150 people were taken prisoner in Israel by Hamas, setting up an ominous hostage standoff ahead of a widely expected Israeli ground incursion into Gaza.
The Israeli military has summoned 360,000 reservists to fight in the war with Hamas — the largest mobilization since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Nearly 4 percent of Israel’s population of 9.8 million, responding to military orders, left their regular jobs and their families to join the fight.
Hamas’s surprise attacks, during which gunmen hunted civilians in their homes and cars throughout border areas, left at least 1,000 dead and 3,400 wounded in Israel. Israel responded with a major bombing campaign that has killed more than 830 people in Gaza and wounded 4,250 more, Palestinian authorities said.
The Hamas attacks, the bloodiest day in Israel’s 75-year history, have spread fear throughout the region as Palestinians braced for reprisals, and the specter of renewed conflict along mostly dormant fronts loomed once again.
Israeli authorities have been unable to explain how so many Hamas militants were able to mount such an assault from Gaza, a territory they control, in what was the most serious challenge in decades to the presumption of Israeli military superiority.
“Before we go and ask ourselves tough questions, we have a mission,” Gen. Dan Goldfuss, who commands the country’s 98th Paratroopers Division, told reporters Tuesday. “We are moving into the offensive now with all kinds of capabilities and angles.
“The most important thing is that we teach the other side that there is no way that they can do this without us changing the reality.”
Outside Sderot, one of the largest Israeli towns near Gaza and the scene of some of the fiercest fighting, soldiers were still deploying to control areas considered under threat as rockets from Gaza arced overhead. Roads into the town were strewn with broken glass and abandoned vehicles.
In Kfar Azza, a village to the west that saw some of the earliest and heaviest fighting, bodies lay everywhere. The stench of death was heavy, and the corpses of Hamas infiltrators who had attacked the village were scattered every few hundred yards.
The Israeli military said Tuesday that it had recovered the bodies of 1,500 Hamas militants inside Israel.
One of the paragliders that militants used to cross the border lay abandoned near a house. The hazard lights on a shattered Hamas pickup truck were still blinking as the sounds of heavy machine gun fire and frequent explosions echoed nearby.
Israeli soldiers on the scene said they thought the area had been cleared of Hamas fighters but did not rule out the possibility of holdouts still hiding. They warned that booby traps and bodies still could be found in the damaged homes.
Morgue technicians wore masks and hazmat suits as they loaded the dead into a van. Body bags with the remains of slain civilians waited to be sorted nearby.
The scale and brutality of the Hamas attack early Saturday left Israel reeling. Funerals have been held across the country. The shocked and devastated families of more than 150 apparent hostages, whom Hamas militants claim to be holding in Gaza, have received no news of the fate of their loved ones.
A spokesman for the military wing of Hamas told Al Jazeera on Monday that the group would publicly execute a civilian hostage each time a Gazan home was hit by an Israeli airstrike “without prior warning.” The official, whose nom de guerre is Abu Obaida, said on his public Telegram channel that the group would not “exchange or negotiate” while hostilities continued.
Israel announced Sunday that it was imposing a “full siege” of the densely populated Gaza Strip — “no electricity, no food, no fuel,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said — as part of a campaign aimed at destroying Hamas’s military capabilities but which is also likely to cause enormous harm to Gaza’s civilian population.
Despite the defense minister’s announcement, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested that the tactics would not be as extreme as some feared, saying Israel won’t pursue “the concept of siege.”
“President Biden and Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu had the opportunity to talk through the difference between going full-bore against Hamas terrorists and how we distinguish between terrorists and innocent civilians,” Sullivan said.
He added that the United States was working with Egypt and Israel to facilitate Palestinian civilians leaving Gaza, as Israel is warning them to do.
In Gaza, more than 2 million people live in a space less than half the size of New York City. Most are civilians. Israel maintained a complete aerial and sea blockade of the area before the latest crisis, allowing only a small flow of goods and people through land crossings. They have now been closed. International law prohibits a full-scale siege of a civilian population.
“Cutting off water, electricity and fuel supplies is unacceptable, as it punishes the entire population and deprives them of their basic needs,” said Léo Cans, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in the Palestinian territories.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, said Israel has the right to defend itself but must do so while following international and humanitarian laws.
“Some decisions are contrary to international law,” he said in remarks to reporters Tuesday.
The United Nations says that more than 187,000 people have been displaced by the conflict. The number is expected to rise.
In a show of support for Israel, Biden dispatched his top diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to Israel. He will arrive Thursday to express solidarity and discuss how the United States can provide more military aid.
Biden said his administration had surged additional military assistance to Israel, including ammunition and interceptors to replenish the Iron Dome missile defense shield.
The Norfolk-based aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its support ships arrived Tuesday in the eastern Mediterranean Sea in a move that Gen. Michael Kurilla said sent a “strong signal of deterrence should any actor hostile to Israel consider trying to take advantage of this situation.”
The Israeli Defense Force said Tuesday morning that its fighter jets struck more than 250 targets in Gaza, mostly in Rimal and Khan Younis, over the previous 24 hours. Videos published on the army’s Facebook page showed explosions leveling buildings and thick smoke billowing across neighborhoods. Residents piled the wounded into ambulances.
Medhat Abbas, director of Gaza’s major hospital al-Shifa, told The Washington Post that these were the worst conditions he’d seen in Gaza “in my entire life, and I’m 60 years old.”
At least one hospital and one medical center were out of service after Israeli bombardment, the Health Ministry in Gaza said. About a dozen ambulances were hit and are no longer operational.
Strikes near al-Shifa hospital blew out windows and collapsed the ceiling in its nursery, said Mohammed Zaqout, director general of hospitals in the Health Ministry.
Ghassan Abu Sitta, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, wrote on social media that the blockade of Gaza had left his hospital so short on supplies that they were having to clean the burned body of a teenage girl with regular soap because antiseptics had run out.
Before this latest crisis, the only way out of Gaza was the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. The route required permits from Palestinian and Egyptian authorities and entailed a lengthy wait and high fees.
But Tuesday, Israel said that the crossing was closed. The IDF said it had struck the area, “including an underground tunnel for smuggling weapons and equipment.” The Post could not verify that claim.
Two strikes occurred in the Rafah border region Tuesday. The Gaza-based Interior Ministry said Egyptian authorities had asked the Palestinian side to evacuate the area Tuesday amid the threat of additional attacks by Israel.
Netanyahu on Monday warned that Israel’s response to the incursion was just starting. “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations,” he said in a televised address.
Netanyahu returned to office late last year as part of the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in Israel’s history. His term has been defined by domestic turmoil and increasingly perilous conditions for Palestinians and Palestinian citizens of Israel, as the governing coalition champions plans to weaken the country’s Supreme Court and expand unlawful settlements in Palestinian areas.
Since the government took office in December, violence has surged in the West Bank in particular as Jewish settlers there have stepped up attacks against Palestinian residents and Israeli security forces have carried out increasingly deadly raids targeting a new generation of Palestinian militants.
Netanyahu and Biden have known each other for decades, but their relationship has frayed over the past year as Netanyahu forges ahead with policies that Biden has repeatedly criticized. But since the Hamas attack, the message from the White House has been one of unity.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, a staunch ally of Netanyahu until Israel’s support for Ukraine caused the relationship to sour, blamed the crisis on Washington.
“Many will agree with me that this is a vivid example of the failure of U.S. policy,” Putin said. The solution, he said, is in establishing a Palestinian state. It was announced that Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas would be visiting Russia.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Tuesday urged “all states with influence” to defuse the rapidly growing “powder keg.”
“We know how this plays out, time and time again — the loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives and incalculable suffering inflicted on both communities,” Türk said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross urged Israel to spare critical infrastructure, including electricity and water systems on which civilians depend.
“Irrespective of any military siege, the authorities must ensure that civilians have access to basic necessities, including safe water, food and medical care,” said Mirjana Spoljaric, the organization’s president.
But the conflict was still escalating as footage of the atrocities committed Saturday by Hamas militants, recovered by authorities from surveillance and dash-camera videos in areas where attacks occurred, continued to emerge.
New surveillance video obtained by The Post shows two Hamas militants gaining access to Be’eri, a kibbutz in southern Israel, early Saturday by lying in wait and shooting at a car entering the small community in southern Israel. More than 100 bodies were later recovered from the site.
Surveillance video released by South First Responders shows the moment militants entered Be’eri early Oct. 7. (Video: South First Responders)
The footage, recorded shortly after dawn, shows the camouflaged pair slowly approaching the closed gate from the northwest side.
One fighter drops to his knees and peers underneath the gate. Then he walks across the road, breaks the glass of a security kiosk and climbs inside. Less than a minute later, a sedan carrying at least two people pulls up to the entrance. As the gate begins to open, both fighters shoot at the passengers. The car rolls forward through the entrance as the two fighters run into the kibbutz, one striking a camera that has been filming the incident.
Surveillance footage taken minutes later shows two fighters who match the appearance of the two at the gate walking through a courtyard in the kibbutz. The footage was provided to The Post by the Telegram channel South First Responders, which has uploaded videos taken from southern Israel in recent days.
Other footage analyzed by The Post shows what appears to be four civilians detained by militants. Later footage shows their bodies, identifiable by their physical appearance and clothing, sprawled on the ground, apparently slain.
Loveluck reported from London and Parker from Cairo. Ellen Francis in London; Noga Tarnopolsky and Miriam Berger in Jerusalem; Amar Nadhir in Bucharest, Romania; and Samuel Oakford and Meg Kelly in Washington contributed to this report.