Israel pounded downtown Gaza City with relentless bombardments Tuesday and further expanded a massive mobilization of reservists as it vowed a retaliation that would “reverberate … for generations” against the Hamas militant group for its surprise weekend attack.
The war — which began after Hamas militants stormed into Israel on Saturday, bringing gunbattles to its streets for the first time in decades — has already claimed at least 1,600 lives.
It is only expected to escalate from here, with questions over whether Israel will launch a ground invasion and Hamas threatening to kill captured Israelis if strikes targeted civilians without warning. Israel said that Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza are also holding more than 150 soldiers and civilians hostage.
The bodies of roughly 1,500 Hamas militants, meanwhile, were found on Israeli territory, the military said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether those numbers overlapped with deaths previously reported by Palestinian authorities.
The military expanded the mobilization of reservists to 360,000, according to Israeli media. That, along with the airstrikes and a formal declaration of war on Sunday, pointed to Israel increasingly shifting to the offensive against Hamas, threatening greater destruction in the densely populated, impoverished Gaza Strip.
It remains to be seen whether that offensive will include a ground assault. The last such assault was in 2014.
The Israeli military said it struck hundreds of targets in Gaza’s City Rimal neighborhood, a densely populated, upscale district that is home to ministries of the Hamas-run government, as well as universities, media organizations and the offices of aid organizations.
After hours of nonstop strikes, some residents left their homes at daybreak to find some buildings torn in half by strikes, while others were reduced to mounds of concrete and rebar. Cars were flattened and trees burned out in moonscapes that had been residential streets.
“We have only started striking Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a nationally televised address late Monday. “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”
The devastation in Rimal signaled what could be a new Israeli tactic: warning civilians to leave certain areas and then hitting those areas with airstrikes of unprecedented intensity. If these types of bombardments continue, Gaza’s civilians will have fewer and fewer places to shelter as more neighborhoods become uninhabitable.
The heavy bombardments and Israel’s threats to topple the group sharpened questions about Hamas’ strategy and objectives. Hamas leaders have not spoken publicly about whether they anticipated Israel’s ferocious retaliation — and the potential risk of losing much of the group’s government infrastructure — when they launched the weekend attack.
In a briefing Tuesday, army spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht suggested Palestinians should try to leave through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
The U.N. said Tuesday that more than 187,000 of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have left their homes — the most since a 2014 air and ground offensive by Israel uprooted about 400,000.
UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, is sheltering more than 137,000 people in schools across the territory. Families have taken in some 41,000 others.
