by tyler | Oct 11, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
Gaza’s only power station has stopped working after the fuel needed for generating electricity ran out on Wednesday, Gaza officials said.
“Gaza is currently without power,” the head of the Gaza power authority, Galal Ismail, told CNN.
The power plant’s shutdown comes two days after the Israeli government said it would order a “complete siege” of the Palestinian enclave, closing off access to electricity, food, fuel and water in response to the surprise attack launched by Hamas on Israel that killed at least 1,200 people.
People in Gaza still use power generators for electricity, but with a blockade on all sides of the border, the fuel needed for generators to work is running out, Ismail said.
The Palestinian health ministry warned that hospitals are set to run out of fuel on Thursday, leading to “catastrophic” conditions.
The Hamas-controlled coastal enclave has been hammered by Israeli airstrikes that have killed 1,055 people and wounded 5,184 others, according to the health ministry. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says it is targeting Hamas terrorists, but the dense population of Gaza – 2 million people living in 140 square miles – means that civilians are often caught in the crossfire.
The result has been a humanitarian crisis that has displaced more than 236,000 Gazans, according to the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). That number is expected to rise further.
At least 11 employees working with the UN’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) have been killed in Gaza airstrikes since Saturday, according to the agency.
“Citizens need protection,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Wednesdau, adding “we want to see a humanitarian corridor.”
Israel also seems to have removed some of its previous guardrails on its rules of engagement meant to protect civilians. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday that he had “released all restraints” on the IDF in their fight against Hamas.
Further Palestinian casualties are feared as Israel maintains its bombardment for a fifth day and the “complete siege” ordered by Gallant on Monday takes effect.
Dozens of Israeli fighter jets struck more than 70 targets in the Daraja Tuffah area of Gaza Wednesday, where the IDF claimed “a large number of terror attacks against Israel are directed.” The IDF also said it had struck Hamas naval targets in Gaza early Wednesday, which it claimed were used to carry out attacks on the Israeli coastline.
The Palestinian Ministry of Interior Affairs said residential areas in the eastern part of Jabalia and the Qizan al-Najjar region of Khan Yunis had come under intense airstrikes, with attacks targeting civilians’ homes and roads, resulting in “direct injuries among citizens,” the ministry said.
OCHA said that imposition of sieges that endanger civilians by depriving them of essential goods “is prohibited under international humanitarian law.”
“These risks (are) seriously compounding the already dire human rights and humanitarian situation in Gaza, including the capacity of medical facilities to operate, especially in light of the increasing number of injured people,” spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said Tuesday.
Cutting off the water supply to Gaza “affects over 610,000 people and will result in severe shortage of drinking water,” UN OCHA’s Jens Laerke added.
Destruction of infrastructure and streets by Israeli bombs is also hampering efforts by medical teams to reach victims, according to the UN.
Officials with the UN’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said 11 of its employees had died as a result of airstrikes on Gaza and at least 14 of their facilities there have been damaged directly or indirectly.
The agency has been unable to bring any aid into Gaza since Saturday, according to UNRWA director of communications Juliette Touma.
Israel controls the movement of residents from Gaza into Israel through two crossings, Erez and Kerem Shalom, both of which have been shut.
The only border crossing between Gaza and Egypt was struck by Israeli warplanes Tuesday, the spokesperson for the Palestinian Interior Ministry Eyad al-Bozom said. The tightly controlled Rafah crossing is the only one available to Gazans looking to flee.
The IDF said it struck the Rafah area Tuesday, including an underground tunnel used for “smuggling weapons and equipment.”
by tyler | Oct 11, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
Israel has formed an emergency government and war management cabinet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz jointly announced Wednesday, in the wake of Hamas’ surprise attacks on border communities that killed at least 1,200 people and injured thousands more.
Gantz, a former defense minister, will join Netanyahu and current defense minister Yoav Gallant in a “war management cabinet.”
The government will not pass any laws or make any decisions that do not concern the conduct of the war, the announcement said.
Israel has stepped up its offensive in Gaza following Hamas’ October 7 onslaught, when armed militants poured over the heavily-fortified border into Israel, raiding homes, rampaging through farms and communities and taking as many as 150 hostages back to Gaza.
Since Israel began airstrikes on the Palestinian enclave Saturday at least 1,055 people have been killed in Gaza, including hundreds of children, women, and entire families, according to the Palestinian health ministry. It said a further 5,184 have been injured.
Israel has ordered a “complete siege” on the enclave, including halting supplies of electricity, food, water and fuel. On Wednesday, Gaza’s only power station stopped working after running out of fuel, the head of the Gaza power authority Galal Ismail told CNN.
People are still able to use power generators, Ismail said, but with a blockade on all sides of the border, the fuel needed for the generators to work is running out.
The Palestinian health ministry warned that hospitals are set to run out of fuel on Thursday, leading to “catastrophic” conditions.
Days after Hamas launched its large-scale surprise assault on Israel, horrifying details are still emerging.
In Kfar Aza, a kibbutz in southern Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN that militants carried out a “massacre” in which women, children, toddlers and elderly were “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action.”
Less than 20 kilometers (12 miles) away, the farming community Be’eri was among the worst-hit, with more than 100 bodies recovered and eyewitnesses describing assailants going door to door, breaking into homes and executing civilians.
In retaliation for the atrocities, Israeli jets have been pounding Gaza – the densely-inhabited coastal strip that Hamas controls – with hundreds of airstrikes, reducing homes and neighborhoods to rubble and trapping residents, with many cut off from food and electricity.
The IDF has also bolstered troops and tanks along the border as speculation of a possible Israeli ground incursion into Gaza grows. An IDF spokesperson said Wednesday that it has massed 300,000 reservists near the border.
Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said he has “released all restraints” for the IDF in their fight against Hamas, saying the response will permanently change Gaza.
“They will regret this moment – Gaza will never return to what it was,” Gallant said.
That has deepened fears that Palestinian civilian casualties will continue to rise in the days ahead as Israel responds to the worst attack on its territory in decades.
Dozens of Israeli fighter jets struck more than 70 targets in the Daraja Tuffah area of Gaza Wednesday, where the IDF claimed “a large number of terror attacks against Israel are directed.” The IDF also said it had struck Hamas naval targets in Gaza early Wednesday, which it claimed were used to carry out attacks on the Israeli coastline.
The Palestinian Ministry of Interior Affairs said residential areas in the eastern part of Jabalia and the Qizan al-Najjar region of Khan Yunis came under intense airstrikes, with attacks targeting civilians’ homes and roads, resulting in “direct injuries among citizens,” the ministry said.
US President Joe Biden on Tuesday pledged that the US would make sure Israel has the tools needed to defend itself and is surging military assistance to it.
Part of that includes ammunition and interceptors to replenish the Iron Dome anti-missile system. The first supply of US weapons since Hamas’ attack arrived in Israel late Tuesday evening, according to the IDF.
At least 22 US citizens have died in Israel, a State Department spokesperson said Wednesday. Biden also confirmed that American citizens are among those held hostage by Hamas. He called the attacks by Hamas “pure, unadulterated evil” that bring “to mind the worst rampages of ISIS.”
Civilians in Gaza are facing a deepening humanitarian crisis as Israel ramps up its bombardment for a fifth day and the “complete siege” ordered by Israeli Defense Minister on Monday takes effect.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said imposition of sieges that endanger civilians by depriving them of essential goods “is prohibited under international humanitarian law.”
“These risks (are) seriously compounding the already dire human rights and humanitarian situation in Gaza, including the capacity of medical facilities to operate, especially in light of the increasing number of injured people,” spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said Tuesday.
Cutting off the water supply to Gaza “affects over 610,000 people and will result in severe shortage of drinking water,” UN OCHA’s Jens Laerke added.
The strikes have already damaged Gaza’s medical infrastructure, say Palestinian officials, and have forced more than 263,000 Palestinians to flee their homes, the United Nations said.
Destruction of infrastructure and streets by Israeli bombs is hampering efforts by medical teams to reach victims, according to the UN.
Officials with the UN’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said 11 of its employees have died as a result of airstrikes on Gaza and at least 14 of their facilities there have been damaged directly or indirectly.
The agency has been unable to bring any aid into Gaza since Saturday, according to UNRWA director of communications Juliette Touma.
Israel controls the movement of residents from Gaza into Israel through two crossings, Erez and Kerem Shalom, both of which have been shut.
The only border crossing between Gaza and Egypt was struck by Israeli warplanes Tuesday, the spokesperson for the Palestinian Interior Ministry Eyad al-Bozom said. The tightly controlled Rafah crossing is the only one available to Gazans looking to flee.
The IDF said it struck the Rafah area Tuesday, including an underground tunnel used for “smuggling weapons and equipment.”
Several countries are evacuating their citizens from Israel as the conflict threatens to escalate. The US State Department said it has “been in conversation” with various airlines to “encourage them to consider resuming travel in and out of Israel” so that people can leave.
Mexico’s foreign ministry said 135 citizens were evacuated on a military flight from Israel on Tuesday evening. Germany said it will evacuate citizens from Israel on Thursday and Friday, and the French government is in contact with Air France to organize a flight Thursday to evacuate French citizens, according to the foreign minister.
There are also rising fears of the Lebanon-based Shia militant faction Hezbollah entering the conflict, potentially opening a second front in the war. The IDF said Tuesday that it has added tens of thousands of additional troops to its northern border with Lebanon in anticipation of an attack by the Iran-backed group.
Three Israeli soldiers were killed in an attack on the border with Lebanon on Monday, according to the IDF.
In a briefing on Wednesday, IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said that Hezbollah in southern Lebanon fired anti-tank missiles and rockets at Israeli positions and soldiers. “There has already been an attempt by Islamic jihad terrorists to infiltrate into Israel – that attempt was successfully thwarted by the IDF, sadly at the cost of the life of a senior officer and two additional soldiers,” he said.
On Wednesday, Hezbollah claimed that many Israeli soldiers had been killed and injured in an attack on an Israeli site on the Lebanon-Israeli border. The IDF did not immediately respond when asked by CNN about the casualties.
Rockets were also launched from Syria into Israeli territory, the IDF said Tuesday, adding that they landed in open areas.
Families in Israel are left with little information about their missing loved ones, as Hamas warned it will start executing hostages if strikes on Gaza continue.
Israel’s Ambassador to the US Michael Herzog on Tuesday strongly urged the international community to pressure Hamas to unconditionally release people taken as hostages.
He told CNN that they are still in the process of forming a complete understanding of the number of hostages, their identities, and their status. Herzog said he was not sure if any hostages had been killed.
Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the US has special operators who “are going to help” the Israeli military “with intelligence and planning” for potential operations regarding hostages taken by Hamas.
by tyler | Oct 11, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
Bodies of Israeli residents and Hamas attackers lay outside burned-out homes in the Israeli kibbutz Kfar Aza on Tuesday, days after the Palestinian militant group launched a large-scale surprise assault on Israel.
Hamas sent waves of heavily armed fighters pouring across the border from Gaza and rampaging through rural communities – Israel said it found 1,500 bodies of militants in the aftermath of the assault.
Houses in Kfar Aza were ransacked and set ablaze. Overturned mattresses, destroyed furniture, broken trinkets and unexploded grenades lay strewn across the grounds, along with bodies – a window into the scale of devastation wrought by Hamas in this area.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career, never in 40 years of service this something I never imagined,” Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv told CNN on Tuesday, just a few hours after Israeli troops secured the kibbutz from Hamas assailants.
In Kfar Aza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was going house to house, collecting the dead in body bags and loading them onto a truck. The IDF told CNN that women, children, toddlers and elderly were “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action.”
Kfar Aza is one of the several kibbutzim, small farming enclaves, that bore the brunt of Hamas’ ground assault on Saturday. A number of kibbutzim and towns were targeted, including Kfar Aza, Be’eri, Ofakim, Sderot, Yad Mordechai, Yated, Kissufim and Urim. Revelers at a music festival held in the desert outside of Be’eri were also gunned down and taken hostage.
At least 1,200 people have died in Israel since the conflict erupted, IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said in an update on Wednesday.
Israel has retaliated by pounding Gaza with a relentless aerial campaign that has flattened homes, schools, medical institutions and government buildings in the besieged strip.
The death toll in Gaza has risen to 1,055, with a further 5,184 people injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The kibbutzim go back to the time of the founding of Israel, when small groups of people set up communities based on the idea of communal living. About 125,000 people live across approximately 250 kibbutzim in Israel, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. For many, they were symbols of good life and safety.
What happened at the weekend destroyed that idyll.
Babies and toddlers were found with their “heads decapitated” in Kfar Aza, Tal Heinrich, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Wednesday. CNN could not independently verify that report.
Hamas said media reports about attacking children were false. This comes after the IDF told CNN Tuesday that the killings at Kfar Aza amounted to a “massacre.”
Maj. Gen. Veruv said his soldiers spent “about 48 hours” fighting “waves and waves of terrorists” on roads and in neighboring communities. He said he had started fighting militants in the Yakhini moshav (community) on Saturday, moving then “from battle to battle,” on the road to Sderot, before reaaching the Be’eri kibbutz on Monday evening.
“I saw hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, with all the equipment and all the ability to make a massacre, go from apartment to apartment, from room to room and kill babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms,” Veruv said.
Veruv said he had been retired from the IDF for eight years before rushing to join the counter-offensive efforts on Saturday morning, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.
“I have heard during my childhood about the pogroms in Europe, the Holocaust, of course. All my family came from Europe, they are survivors. But I never thought I would see…things like that,” he said about the scene in Kfar Aza.
More than 100 bodies were found in Be’eri on Monday. Civilians were killed and taken hostage in the kibbutz, which is home to about 1,000 residents, according to Israeli authorities and videos obtained and authenticated by CNN.
Heavily armed militants arrived in Be’eri on motorbikes around 7 a.m., just half an hour after they breached the typically high-tech, tightly guarded border fence between Gaza and Israel, videos show.
A bloodbath followed.
Footage shows militants pulling three bodies out of a car, before stealing the vehicle and driving north. The video, which first surfaced on Telegram, was taken by a surveillance camera in Be’eri. CNN has geolocated the video to an intersection in the northeastern part of the kibbutz.
Another video shows armed militants taking five Israeli civilians captive, with the bodies of four later seen lying on the ground nearby in another video verified by CNN.
Terrified residents told Israel’s Channel 12 television station that assailants went door to door, trying to break into their homes.
Of at least 107 bodies discovered in the aftermath, most were of local residents of the kibbutz, though some were of Israeli security forces, a search and rescue spokesperson told CNN.
The IDF acknowledged on Monday that Be’eri was “very badly hit.”
“We thought we would need more rooms (to house the evacuees). We didn’t need all the rooms,” said IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht.
The attack on Be’eri came around the same time as Hamas militants descended upon a music festival, known as Nova, just three miles south, shooting revelers at point-blank range and looting their belongings.
More than 260 bodies were later found at the festival site, with many attendees believed to have been captured and brought to Gaza, sparking a desperate search by family members and foreign governments.
In Urim, a kibbutz 10 miles south of Be’eri, residents awoke at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday to the sound of sirens and rushed to above-ground bomb shelters. The routine reaction to incoming rocket fire soon became more concerning, as the sirens continued sounding throughout the morning and they went in and out of hiding.
Members of the community, which is not far from where militants rampaged the Nova music festival, began to see reports of Hamas attacks on kibbutzim and towns near the border.
Wayne Lucas, a Virginia native who serves as a “lone soldier” in the IDF and lives in Urim, said that he spoke to several friends “who were hiding in their houses from the terrorists,” and, as the day progressed, he heard of attacks closer to home.
“We learned that someone from our kibbutz who I know very well, whose family also hosts lone soldiers was shot at the junction outside our kibbutz near the gas station. Luckily, he was only shot in the hand,” he told CNN.
There are over 7,000 lone soldiers currently serving in the IDF, according to the Lone Soldier Center, many new immigrants or volunteers from Jewish communities abroad.
On Sunday, after a restless night, residents in Urim heard gunshots close by.
“Shortly after 1:30 in the afternoon, we heard gunshots coming from inside the kibbutz. We all dropped everything. We ran as fast as we could to the shelters. We locked the doors, and we were barricading ourselves inside. People had knives and random things to use as weapons,” Lucas said.
All Israeli buildings erected after 1993 are required to have bomb shelters – reinforced rooms with concrete walls and heavy steel doors. But these safe rooms are designed to withstand a rocket attack, not an armed incursion. The doors are heavy, but they don’t have locks – they are not supposed to be lockable, for safety reasons.
Another soldier who lives in Urim said he heard gunfire but couldn’t make it to the shelter in time. “I heard a round of six bullets being shot right outside my room. I cannot tell you how scared I was. I didn’t know what I needed to do first: hide, lock my door, find a weapon, run to the nearest shelter?” the soldier, who asked not to be named, told CNN. “There was nowhere good to hide, and I ended up hiding in my closet.”
The soldier and Lucas said that when they were given the all-clear, an Israeli army unit was outside and had apprehended several militants who had tried to storm the kibbutz.
In Nirim, which lies less than a mile from the border with Gaza, residents had spent Friday – the day before the Hamas attack – celebrating the anniversary of the kibbutz’s founding. Guy, a 33-year-old painter, said he could not believe the horrors that began the next morning.
When he heard the alarm at 6.30 a.m., he did not think much of it. “Usually, it stops and starts after a few minutes then we get on with life,” he told a CNN team on the ground. But this time was different: The alarm did not stop, and rumors began to swirl. “Rumors started in the kibbutz that someone saw a terrorist in a car and heard Arabic,” he said. “It didn’t seem possible. We didn’t think it was happening.”
He had been waiting in the shelter with his wife, Tamar, and her mother. Tamar’s sisters had come to the kibbutz for Friday’s celebration, along with their husbands and three young children, who had stayed the night in another house in the kibbutz.
Although most houses in the kibbutz have shelters, they are designed to protect civilians from rockets – not armed intruders. “It’s impossible to lock from the inside. No one imagined there will be terrorists inside the kibbutz,” Guy said. He spent the next several hours holding the door “with my hand, with a knife in my pocket.”
“I was reading online: How can I fight with a knife?” he said. He had grabbed the only weapon he could find in his kitchen: “I could make a salad but I don’t think I could win against a gun.”
As he guarded the door, they heard gunshots and began to smell smoke. “Their strategy was to burn houses, to start fires so… people go outside,” he said. “Then they wanted to kill them or kidnap them.
“Finally, the military came at 7 p.m., something like that,” he said. Initially, they refused to open the door: They had been messaging others over WhatsApp all day, and had heard rumors “that the terrorists were also knocking on the door and saying they were military.”
He said his wife knew many people who had died. “They just slaughtered everyone. They killed kids, babies, grandmothers.”
Guy said everyone in the kibbutz was asking: “Where was our military?”
by tyler | Oct 9, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
When the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel over the weekend, Palestinians living in the besieged strip had mixed feelings.
Some celebrated, taking pride in what they perceived as a victory against Israel. Others, however, were afraid, dreading a deadly retaliation.
The militant group’s unprecedented incursion prompted vows of retribution from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who declared that his country was at war, pledging a “mighty vengeance for this black day.”
By Monday, the retaliation was in full swing, as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza.
“I have given an order – Gaza will be under complete siege. No electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything closed. We are fighting barbaric (terrorists) and will respond accordingly,” he said on camera, adding that water to the enclave would also be cut off.
More than 700 people were killed in Israel by Hamas fighters who breached the border from Gaza, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Maj. Ben Wahlhaus told CNN on Sunday.
In response, IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Sunday that Israel had destroyed around 800 targets in Gaza, including what he described as launching pads used by Hamas. At least 560 Palestinians have been killed and a further 2,900 injured, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said Monday. The ministry said on Sunday that the dead included 78 children.
No strangers to war with Israel, many Gazans are sheltering in their homes, with the vast majority lacking access to bunkers. The territory is one of the most densely populated places on earth, where some 2 million people live in an area of 140 square miles.
Those who venture out do so only to complete essential errands, or to look for their missing in the carnage of Israeli strikes. The streets are damaged and covered with rubble, and the air smells of dust and gunpowder.
Salim Hussein, 55, lost his home when his building was targeted in an Israeli airstrike. He lived on the first floor and told CNN that he and his family were given warnings by Israel just moments before the building was struck.
Hussein said he did not know why the tower was struck. He had moved in with his family just five months ago.
“We left (the tower) only with the clothes we had on,” he told CNN, adding that he and his family now have nothing left and nowhere to go.
Following Hamas’ incursion, Palestinians were also barred from leaving Gaza through the Erez Crossing, which has become the site of a battle between Hamas and Israeli forces.
Netanyahu declared over the weekend that Israel will stop the supply of “electricity, fuel and goods” into the Gaza Strip, although IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said Sunday only electricity had been cut. Since then, power is only available for an average of four hours per day, down from the usual eight hours. Israel supplies the majority of Gaza’s electricity. Internet connectivity has also been choppy.
Israeli opposition leader and former caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid told CNN on Monday that everything was on the table, including a ground incursion into Gaza, but that Israel must consider the fate of dozens of hostages that have been taken into the enclave. It is unclear how many people have been kidnapped – Israeli authorities have said “dozens” are being held in Gaza, while Hamas claims to have more than 100.
Later on Monday, the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said Israeli airstrikes targeted the al-Shati and Jabalia refugee camps, killing a “large number of people.”
“The occupation committed a massacre against an entire neighborhood by targeting the al-Sousi Mosque in al-Shati refugee camp,” Ashraf Al Qidra, a spokesman for the health ministry, said in a statement. “A large number of martyrs and wounded have arrived at al-Shifa Medical Complex.”
The health ministry added that bodies were still being recovered from under the rubble. It did not immediately release a death toll.
‘Panic and fear’
The Gaza Strip has been almost completely cut off from the rest of the world for nearly 17 years.
Governed by Hamas since 2007, the enclave is under strict siege by Egypt and Israel, which also maintains an air and naval blockade. It has been described by Human Rights Watch as the “world’s largest open-air prison.”
Gazans have seen Israeli strikes ravage the strip on several occasions since Israeli forces withdrew from the territory in 2005. Fighting regularly takes place between Israel and Palestinian factions in Gaza, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Over the weekend, Israel struck down at least 10 towers in Gaza that it said were used by Hamas, IDF spokesperson Hagari said Sunday, adding that tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers are operating on the ground around the Gaza Strip.
The IDF on Sunday said it is now focusing on taking control of the Gaza Strip, and urged civilians there to leave residential areas near the border immediately for their safety as Israeli military operations continued to target Hamas.
But most Gazans have no way of fleeing the besieged enclave. All crossings out of the territory are shut, with the exception of the tightly controlled Rafah crossing with Egypt.
Hani el-Bawab, 75, said he and his family of four had been up all night, fearing airstrikes. The tower adjacent to his home was hit by Israel overnight, collapsing onto his own house and rendering him and his family homeless.
“I don’t know what to do,” el-Bawab said. He now lives on the street, while his wife stays with an acquaintance.
Palestinians in Gaza, he said, are living in “panic and fear,” preparing each moment for a bomb to crash into a building. “I just want a house to live in with my kids. I just want shelter,” he told CNN.
Nevertheless, he doesn’t regret Hamas’ attack on Israel. “Every time, they (Israel) are the ones who attack us,” he said. “This time, the (fighters) are the ones who went in.”
by tyler | Oct 9, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
Gaza militants who attacked an all-night music festival in southern Israel shot and killed revelers at point-blank range, then looted their belongings, new car dashcam video verified by CNN reveals.
The video began circulating on social media on Sunday and – alongside footage of harrowing kidnappings from the same event – has been scrutinized by horrified families desperate for news of loved ones missing since a series of coordinated attacks triggered Israel’s declaration of war on Sunday.
Israeli officials counted at least 260 bodies near the site of the Nova festival, outside Re’im, where earlier footage showed carefree partygoers from Israel and overseas dancing in the desert soon after sunrise on Saturday.
Some survivors are among more than 100 hostages that the militant group Hamas claims to be holding in Gaza, according to friends and family members who have seen them in videos shared on social platforms.
The dashcam video verified by CNN gives a glimpse of the terror as militants took over the festival, preventing some partygoers from leaving with deadly force.
The first clip, begins at 9:23 a.m. according to its timecode, just under three hours after the first explosions were reported at the Nova festival.
The video has no audio, but a militant is seen yelling, then pointing his machine gun at a man taking cover next to the car. It’s unclear if the gunman is firing a warning shot, or if he’s just shot and injured the civilian, who is then seen being led away. His fate is unknown.
A second individual is seen in the video lying on the ground at the back of another car. The person begins to move and suddenly another militant appears on screen, aims at the person, fires and walks away. The person on the ground stops moving.
Another video from the dashcam, timestamped at 12:09 p.m., shows two militants approach the body of the second individual. They rifle through the person’s pockets, and one picks something off the body and puts it into his own back pocket.
Less than three minutes later, militants grab a woman out of the back of the car. She is led away, and the militants begin to open another car’s trunk and empty a suitcase on the ground to be pilfered.
The video picks up at 12:14 p.m., with the captured woman running back into view. Her hands in the air, she appears to be waving toward the festival grounds.
Dirt and dust are seen flying as bullets hit the ground around her. Next to the emptied suitcase and open trunk, she takes cover again. Her fate is unknown.
Ricarda Louk last saw her daughter Shani lying face down in the back of a pickup truck heading to the Gaza Strip, an isolated coastal enclave of almost 2 million people crammed into 140 square miles.
She last spoke to her after hearing rockets and alarms sounding in southern Israel, and phoned her daughter to see if she’d made it to a secure location. Shani told her mother she was at the festival, held in an open field with few places to hide.
Aerial footage posted on social media showed dozens of cars along the side of the road near the entrance to the festival grounds, some burned, others with windows missing and doors hanging open.
Shani was trying to reach one of those vehicles, her mother said.
“She was going to her car and they had military people standing by the cars and were shooting so people couldn’t reach their cars, even to go away. And that’s when they took her,” Ricarda told CNN.
The disturbing video of her daughter in the back of the pickup truck and attempts by someone to use Shani’s credit card twice in Gaza after the attack are the only hints she has of her daughter’s whereabouts.
In the video, she is seen motionless. One gunman, carrying a rocket propelled grenade launcher, has his leg draped over her waist and the other holds a clump of her dreadlocks. “Allahu Akbar,” they cheer – meaning “God is great” in Arabic.
Ricarda hopes she will see her daughter again, but the situation is bleak.
“It looks very bad, but I still have hope. I hope that they don’t take bodies for negotiations. I hope that she’s still alive somewhere. We don’t have anything else to hope for, so I try to believe,” she said.
Like Ricarda Louk, Yakov Argamani last saw his daughter on one of the cellphone videos that have emerged in the aftermath of Saturday’s raid.
Noa Argamani, 25, is seen pleading for help from the back of a motorcycle driven by Hamas militants at the festival site.
Her tearful father struggled to find words to convey his shock and grief on seeing the video: “I couldn’t believe it … I didn’t want to believe it,” Yakov told CNN.
Noa was attending the festival with her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, who is also seen being led away by militants.
Noa’s childhood friend Shlomit Marciano, who was helping comfort her family when they spoke to CNN, said the text messages they received suggest their friends were hiding for hours as militants rampaged through the festival site.
Or texted Noa’s father around 10 a.m. to say the couple were safe, almost four hours after the first reports of an attack. Other friends also texted, begging for help, Marciano said.
“Since that, no contact. We suppose they were abducted at 12. They probably were hiding for three, four hours begging for help. They started hiding after hearing the massacres and the shooting. And then (the militants) found them,” Marciano said.
Now Yakov is relying on his faith, Marciano said.
“He believes in God. He’s praying that she’s okay. And she will come back to him, to the family and to us safely. She’s their only child.”
by tyler | Oct 9, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
Israel has declared war on the Palestinian militant group Hamas after it carried out an unprecedented attack by air, sea and land on Saturday.
The large-scale surprise assault has left at least 900 dead in Israel, prompting a lethal volley of retaliatory Israeli airstrikes on Gaza that killed at least 560 people.
As they retreated into Gaza, the militants claimed to have taken at least 100 hostages with them. Israel has pledged that Hamas will pay a heavy price and may now be preparing a ground incursion into Gaza.
Here’s what we know so far.
Militants from Gaza fired thousands of rockets towards Israeli towns on Saturday morning, before breaking through the heavily fortified border fence with Israel and sending militants deep into Israeli territory. There, Hamas gunmen killed hundreds of people, including civilians and soldiers, and took hostages, sometimes from their homes.
It took Israeli troops more than two days to take back control as fighting raged in the streets. On Monday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had retaken control of all Israeli communities in Gaza’s vicinity on its southern border after fighting with Hamas ended.
The attacks were unprecedented in tactic and scale as Israel has not faced its adversaries in street battles on its own territory since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. It has also never faced a terror attack of this magnitude that has taken the lives of so many civilians. While Hamas has kidnapped Israelis before, it has never before taken dozens of hostages at once, including children and the elderly.
Hamas called the operation “Al-Aqsa Storm” and said that the assault was a response to what it described as Israeli attacks on women, the desecration of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the ongoing siege of Gaza.
In response to the attack, Israel has declared war and launched “Operation Swords of Iron,” striking around 500 Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza so far and killing hundreds in the process.
The IDF has urged civilians in Gaza to leave their residential areas immediately for their safety as Israeli military operations continue to target Hamas, and shut all crossings between Israel and Gaza, potentially setting the stage for a ground incursion into the enclave.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant said on Monday that he had ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza. “No electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything closed,” he said, adding that no water will be delivered either.
At least 560 had been killed in Gaza as of Monday, including at least 20 children, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said. Another 2,900 were injured.
Tensions between Israelis and the Palestinians have existed since before Israel’s founding in 1948. Thousands of people on both sides have been killed and many more injured over decades.
Violence has been particularly acute this year. The number of Palestinians – militants and civilians – killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces since the year began is the highest in nearly two decades. The same is true of Israelis and foreigners – most of them civilians – killed in Palestinian attacks.
Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war, then withdrew its troops and settlers in 2005. The territory, home to some 2 million Palestinians, fell under Hamas’ control in 2007 after a brief civil war with Fatah, a rival Palestinian faction that is the backbone of the Palestinian Authority.
After Hamas seized control, Israel and Egypt imposed a strict siege on the territory, which is ongoing. Israel also maintains an air and naval blockade on Gaza. Human Rights Watch has called the territory an “open-air prison.” More than half of its population lives in poverty and is food insecure, and nearly 80% of its population relies on humanitarian assistance.
Hamas and Israel have fought several wars. Before Saturday’s operation, the last war between the two was in 2021, which lasted for 11 days and killed at least 250 people in Gaza and 13 in Israel.
Saturday’s assault occurred 50 years almost to the day since the 1973 war, when Israel’s Arab neighbors launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, on October 6, 1973.
Hamas is an Islamist organization with a military wing that came into being in 1987, emerging out of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist group that was founded in the late 1920s in Egypt.
The group, like most Palestinian factions and political parties, insists that Israel is an occupying power and that it is trying to liberate the Palestinian territories. It considers Israel an illegitimate state and has called for its downfall.
Unlike some other Palestinian factions, Hamas refuses to engage with Israel. In 1993, it opposed the Oslo Accords, a peace pact between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that saw the PLO give up armed resistance against Israel in return for promises of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. The Accords also established the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Hamas presents itself as an alternative to the PA, which has recognized Israel and has engaged in multiple failed peace initiatives with it. The PA, whose credibility among Palestinians has suffered over the years, is today led by President Mahmoud Abbas.
Hamas has over the years claimed many attacks on Israel and has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel. Israel accuses its archenemy Iran of backing the group.
Israel is now on a war footing and has already started mobilizing troops for a potential ground operation in Gaza. It has said that it will exact a heavy price on Hamas for its attack and plans to retrieve Israeli hostages from the territory.
Israel has dealt with hostage situations before, but never at this scale. In the past, militants have mostly demanded the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails in exchange for captured Israelis. In 2011, Israel traded 1,027 Palestinians for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, and in 2004, it released more than two dozen Lebanese and Arab prisoners – including two senior Hezbollah officials – for Elhanan Tannenbaum, an Israeli businessman and army reserve colonel, as well as the bodies of three IDF soldiers. In 2008, Israel released five Palestinian prisoners, five Lebanese prisoners and returned the bodies of nearly 200 Arab fighters in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers.
It is unclear what the militants will demand for the 100 or more hostages Hamas says it has taken captive. Their presence in Gaza will undoubtedly complicate any Israeli military operation there.
In the meantime, the IDF says it plans to take control of the Gaza Strip. Its spokesperson, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, said the aim is to “end the Gaza enclave” and “control the entire enclave.”
Senior Hamas member Saleh al-Arouri told Al Jazeera Arabic on Saturday that Hamas is ready “for all options, including a war and an escalation on all levels.”
“We are ready for the worst-case scenario, including a ground invasion, which will be the best for us to decide the ending of this battle,” al-Arouri said.
Hamas’ operation was carried out in a sophisticated and coordinated manner and would have taken a significant amount of planning. Speculation has been rife that the group may have received assistance from abroad, which, if proven, could raise the specter of a wider regional war.
Israel says Iran supports Hamas to the tune of some $100 million dollars a year. The US State Department in 2021 said that the group receives funding, weapons, and training from Iran, as well as some funds that are raised in Gulf Arab countries.
“Of course Iran is in the picture,” one US official told CNN. “They’ve provided support for years to Hamas and Hezbollah.”
A senior Biden administration official said on Saturday that it was too early to say whether Iran was directly involved in the attack, but that Washington will be tracking the matter “very closely.”
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi spoke to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh by phone on Sunday and later congratulated the Palestinian people for their “victory” over Israel. On Monday, however, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said that the Islamic Republic was “not involved in Palestine’s response,” referring to the Hamas attack. “It is taken solely by Palestine itself,” it said.
The US has meanwhile sent a carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean Sea, according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. A US official told CNN that the US is also sending more fighter jets to the Middle East to deter any Iranian potential aggression or an expansion of the fighting beyond Israel’s borders.
Israel may also face the threat of new fronts opening in the war. Of its immediate neighbors, it is only at peace with Jordan and Egypt, and is officially in a state of war with Lebanon and Syria. Israel has said it is ready in case there are attacks from those two countries.
The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, has praised Hamas’ attack and said it is in contact with Palestinian militant groups “at home and abroad,” its Al Manar channel said. On Sunday, the group claimed responsibility for targeting three Israeli sites in an area known as Shebaa Farms using missiles and artillery. The area is considered by Lebanon as Israeli-occupied. Israel responded by firing artillery.
On Monday, the IDF said it killed a “number of armed suspects” who infiltrated into Israel from Lebanon and that soldiers were searching the area. Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Najib Mikati said on Monday that his country doesn’t want to be drawn into the conflict.
