AT least 1,200 people have died and 2,900 others have been injured in Israel after the militant group Hamas launched an unprecedented incursion from air, land and sea on Saturday, Israeli authorities said.
Hamas fired thousands of rockets toward Israel and an estimated 1,000 fighters crossed into the country from the neighboring Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials said at least 100 civilians and soldiers have been taken hostage.
The Israel Defense Forces has since declared “a state of alert for war” and launched retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza, a 140-square-mile territory where 2 million Palestinians have lived under a blockade imposed by neighboring Israel and Egypt since Hamas seized power in 2007.
Palestinian authorities said at least 1,055 people have died and another 5,184 have been injured in Gaza since Saturday. Unlike Israel, the Gaza Strip has no air raid sirens or bomb shelters.
The United Nations said Wednesday that there are now more than 263,000 people internally displaced in the Gaza Strip, as Israeli airstrikes destroy buildings and homes in response to Saturday’s attack by Hamas.
That figure includes at least 137,500 people who are currently sheltering in hospitals and schools in Hamas-ruled Gaza, according to the U.N.
US President Joe Biden condemned the attacks by Hamas on Israel as “sheer evil” in an emotional speech on Tuesday and said Washington is ready to deploy more military assets to the region to support its ally.
The Palestinian militant group had carried out atrocities including murders of entire families and rapes of women, an indignant Biden said from the White House, also mentioning “stomach-turning reports of babies being killed”.
“There are moments in this life – I mean this literally – when a pure unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world,” he said in a hushed voice during a televised speech.
“This is an act of sheer evil.”
Image (A Palestinian man carrying a dead body a kid in Israel, as war rages on following an attack by Hamas on Israel).
