Three hundred thousand Israeli army soldiers are already deployed near the Gaza border waiting to receive the order to advance. Supported by artillery and cavalry, these men “are ready to execute the mission that the Government has entrusted to us and that is to ensure that at the end of this war Hamas does not have any military capacity,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Cornicus this morning.
As the hours pass and military forensic experts do their work, what for many Israelis is the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust emerges. The army confirms the death of 1,200 people, almost all civilians, including many women, children and the elderly.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speaks of beheadings and spokesman Cornicus of “unspeakable atrocities straight out of an apocalyptic movie, a zombie thing.”
The testimonies that we have collected these days among the survivors, the videos that they have shown us with their cell phones, as well as the evidence that the army is gathering in the twenty towns and kibbutz that Hamas attacked last Saturday morning, leave no room for doubts about the cruelty and cruelty of the guerrillas towards a defenseless population.
A military spokesperson tells us that half of its nearly 800 inhabitants may have died in the Kfar Azar kibbutz. In this community, located a couple of kilometers east of Gaza, terrorists appear to have murdered many families in their homes, including some 40 children and babies while they slept.
The task of recovering the bodies and understanding what has happened is slow and painful. In each house attacked – and there are dozens of them, many burned down – rescue teams collect evidence to document the crimes that have been committed there.
The army does not release images of Israeli victims. He does it out of respect for them and also for a population that remains shocked and disoriented by the magnitude of the Hamas attack. Thousands of men armed with rifles and grenade launchers, on motorcycles, vans and hang gliders, entering Israel to avenge their historical wrongs on the most vulnerable.
The tragedy that darkened the south of Israel on Saturday is now spreading over the urban fabric of the motley Gaza. There is no precedent for such an intense air offensive, with more than 2,300 targets hit in just four days.
The United Nations estimates that there are some 260,000 displaced people inside the strip, people who have left their homes, either because they have been destroyed or they fear what they will be.
Although the air force assures that the bombings are very precise, the truth is that there is no safe place within the strip. Dozens of schools have been destroyed even though they are a common place of refuge.
The Israeli army warns the Gazan population to leave a neighborhood that is going to be attacked, but the warnings overlap, from neighborhood to neighborhood, and it is impossible to know where it is best to take shelter from the projectiles.
Hospitals have exceeded their capacity to care for the injured. The Gaza Health Ministry says there are more than 4,500. Another 950 people have died. There is a lack of medicines and surgical materials. Soon there will be no electricity. The generators are running out of fuel and so is the only power plant within the strip. At two in the afternoon, local time, it will stop working. Gaza is preparing for the darkest night in many years.
The next few days will be even worse. Lieutenant Colonel Cornicus announces that “the fighting is going to intensify” and what we will see in Gaza “will be difficult to understand and assimilate.”
This war began with the cruelty of Hamas and continues with the cruelty of the relentless Israeli attack against a territory – one of the most densely populated in the world – where it is impossible to distinguish the civilian from the guerrilla, the innocent from the terrorist.
Gazans suffer and will continue to suffer collective punishment for the atrocities committed by Hamas militias in Israel.
