The Israeli military has deployed forces for a ground invasion of Gaza as Israeli officials warned of a long-winded and aggressive war ahead.
Israeli airstrikes blasted a specific Gaza City neighborhood in response to the Hamas terrorist group invading Israel over the weekend, killing more than 900 Israelis and kidnapping more than 100 hostages – some of those hostages and victims being American citizens.
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“We are at war. Not an ‘operation,’ not a ‘round,’ but at war,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, adding that “the enemy will pay an unprecedented price.”
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel will be cutting off electricity, food, water and fuel in Gaza after its military said that the country re-took control of towns in the south of Gaza, using aircraft and tanks “to force out remaining Hamas fighters still hiding there.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had hit a total of over 1,300 targets so far, including more than 200 overnight, and that 4,500 rockets had been fired from Gaza.
The Israeli strikes have reportedly killed more than 780 people, according to the Palestinian enclave’s health ministry and reported by the Wall Street Journal.
A WSJ reporter Dov Lieber stated: “One of the reasons it’s so difficult to clear out these communities of militants is because they’re embedded among the civilian population, so they have to go very carefully, surgically, through the different areas to try to find where they’re hiding.”
It wasn’t clear when the possible ground invasion in Gaza would begin, however, thousands of Israeli soldiers remain sweeping through southern Israel for possible Hamas members still in hiding. Soldiers are also working to seal the country’s border with Gaza, the military said on Tuesday.
The IDF added that the bodies of 1,500 Hamas militants have been found in Israeli territory and the area near the border with Gaza was now “more or less secure.”
“The scope of this is going to be bigger than before and more severe. It’s not going to be clean…We are going to go very, very aggressively against Hamas,” Israeli military spokesman Richard Hecht told reporters on Tuesday morning. “We should all change the paradigm.”
Israel is now preparing to engage in a war that can potentially be as risky as its 1982 invasion in Lebanon. The death toll is predicted to rise on both sides.
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