The Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza are Breaking Israeli Society, and Israel’s First Planned Explanation of the Disruption
The Israel Defense Forces announced Friday night that it was expanding its operations in Gaza after the territory was struck by an air and ground assault.
Fewer than 100 trucks of aid have been allowed into Gaza since the conflict began. Israel will allow more trucks to enter through Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, but only if they are for people in the southern half of the territory.
Around sundown Friday, phone calls from Gaza and text messages from there had stopped. The company, which is a major telecommunications company, said that the airstrikes had cut their communications infrastructure.
The company said in a statement that all remaining international routes linking Gaza to the outside world have been destroyed by the intense bombing in the last hour.
Aid groups had lost contact with their teams in Gaza and decried the risk to civilians, health workers and other noncombatants.
“Hospitals & humanitarian operations can’t continue without communications, energy, food, water, meds. … Wars have rules. Lynn Hastings, United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in Gaza, wrote on X.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society is deeply concerned about the ability of the teams to continue providing emergency medical services because of the disruption in the central emergency number “101”.
Hamas accused Israel of plans to commit more massacres and genocides away from the eyes of the press and the world.
Harel Chorev, a Palestinian affairs expert at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, says Hamas’ goal is to break down Israeli society, which it sees as a colonialist people without real roots in the land.
“They always believe that all of us should go back to Germany and Poland and whatever, even if we are from Morocco,” Chorev says. “It’s really to break our spirit.”
Israel’s islamic-jihad militants: What they did during the October 7 terror attack sparked a new war with Israel
There is Israel’s strict policy toward Gaza, leading to a travel and economic blockade on the territory for the last 16 years. Israel says it is to contain attacks by Hamas after it took over the Gaza Strip from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu’s longtime policy was to preserve this political division between the territories to prevent them from uniting into one Palestinian state.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing for people to hate the Jews or the occupier, but I think that’s part of the learning process for people who belong to Hamas,” says Palestinian political analyst Mkhaimar Abusada. That’s the reason why there was brutality on the 7th of October.
There are around 20,000 to 25,000 militants in Hamas’ Qassam militant wing, according to Gaza experts Samir Ghattas of the Cairo-based Middle East Forum for Strategic Studies and National Security, and Harel Chorev of Tel Aviv University. Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds brigades are thought to have between 5,000 and 6,000 members.
Rooms were torn apart in the massacre and an elderly man’s walker was strewn over the floors. In one house the smell of a blood-soaked mattress lingers.
The Israeli army said it collected terabytes of footage from the attacks, from the recovered cameras, as well as victims’ phones and neighborhood security cameras.
What were the extremists who killed more than 1,400 men, ladies and children in Israel on October 7?
“We want to get the attention of the world, as far as we can,” said one of Hamas’ members. “Please, look at the Palestinians. We are subjected to torture andcollective punishment all the time. Our message is to the world.
The men claim in the videos that they were ordered to kill and take many hostages back to Gaza. Someone claimed that those who took hostages were going to get an apartment.
The Jihadist Brotherhood in Gaza: Mohammed, a 30-year-old Palestinian Mock Soldier and the Birth of a New War with Israel
Both his neighbor and his father spoke on condition of anonymity, and referred to Mohammed only by his first name, out of concern Israel could target them.
Father asked if God would be fair with his son. “To be a martyr is a huge thing, and this is what he pursued. I hope God will accept him as a martyr.
He said Mohammed had made it a mile or two inside Israel when an Israeli aircraft shot him — five bullets to the chest, one near the neck — and recited the shahada, Islam’s affirmation of faith, before he died from his wounds.
Mohammed disappeared on the day of the attacks, his neighbor said. His family only discovered what happened the next day, when a fellow militant returned from Israel back to Gaza with Mohammed’s cellphone and personal effects, and told Mohammed’s family what had happened.
Everyone in the family and neighborhood knew he belonged to the militant wing of Islamic Jihad, a smaller Palestinian militia in Gaza that is closely aligned with Iran.
Mohammed’s neighbor in Gaza said he had led an ordinary life. He didn’t finish his high school exam. His business started after he worked as a taxi driver, had a big wedding party with friends, and family, and started selling food products.
They were young at the time. They were well-trained. Specific orders were made by them. They had a mix of motivations, tied to the unique conditions and ideologies that permeate life in Gaza.
Source: New details emerge about Hamas-led fighters who sparked a new war with Israel
The Hamas Attack on Gaza Revisited: Hezbollah and the Israel-Jewish Forces in the Gaza Strip
The videos also capture the men’s heavy breathing, nervous pacing and shouted instructions. In one of the most gruesome scenes screened to foreign media, a man calls out for a knife and calls to cut off a wounded man’s head, before attempting to behead him with a garden hoe.
Ghattas, the Gaza expert in Cairo, believes elite combatants in Gaza traveled on false passports to countries like Lebanon or Iran where they learned the combat methods of the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah. He believes they returned to Gaza to train the squads who carried out the attacks.
The question of Iranian involvement in foreign training was not answered by the Israeli army. Iran denies there was prior coordination.
images of pamphlets that Israel said were found with the Hamas fighters and released interrogation video of some of the attackers it has been detaining, are all available on Israel’s website.
Hamas said that the operation was a failure and that Israel took heavy losses. There were no casualties in Friday night’s fighting. Both claims could not be independently confirmed.
There were a number of Hamas operatives killed in the strikes on the 150 underground targets in the northern Gaza Strip. Among those killed was Asem Abu Rakaba, the IDF said, describing him as an official who had helped to plan the Oct. 7 attack in which hundreds of Hamas fighters flooded across Gaza’s border and killed more than 1,400 Israeli soldiers and civilians. Hamas used drones andgliders that day, which was carried out by Abu Rakaba.
The Hosts and Missing Persons Families Forum (HOSTF), a group of families of hostages and missing persons
“Their death and assassination leads to a good advancement in the war’s stages and allows the forces on the ground to battle a weaker enemy,” Hagari added.
We are not in touch with our staff or health facilities. I’m worried about their safety,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, in a Saturday post on the social media site X, previously known as Twitter.
NPR was also unable to reach local staff in Gaza. The United Nations’ top humanitarian official said that they only were able to reach their staff in Gaza by satellite phone.
“Even some of the doctors’ medical staffs, they are saying, what is the benefit of the help that we are doing now? We are not able to help patients anymore. “We can’t do anything for them,” said Dr. Matar, who spoke to NPR before the blackout.
“Whoever will be in this area, which is a protected area, will receive food, water and medicine,” Hagari said. Israel has attacked southern Gaza many times with airstrikes, particularly in Khan Younis and Rafah.
Israeli officials stated that nearly 230 hostages are still being held by Hamas. A group of families of hostages and other missing people demanded a meeting with Israel’s war cabinet for assurances that the operation would not endanger the lives of the hostages.
“This night was the most terrible of all nights. It was a long and sleepless night, against the backdrop of the major IDF operation in the Strip, and absolute uncertainty regarding the fate of the hostages held there, who were also subject to the heavy bombings,” said Liat Bell Sommer, a spokesperson for the group, which is called the Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum.