According to reports by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and the Palestinian Health Ministry around 900 Israelis and 700 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been killed since Saturday.
Hamas militants launched a multi-pronged air, ground, and sea offensive and penetrated into Israeli territory on Saturday at dawn, resulting in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration the following day that the country was “embarking on a long and difficult war.”
This marks the bloodiest escalation of the longstanding Israel-Palestine conflict in decades, fifty years since the Yom Kippur War.
Since Saturday, Israeli warplanes have been ceaselessly pummeling Gaza with air strikes.
"I was asleep when suddenly the house shook and the windows shattered in my face and on my head," Fayez Abu Hindi, a Gaza resident, told Mohammed Salim, Rudaw's reporter on the ground.
Hindi sustained minor head injuries.
"I fell on my cousin, who was sleeping next to me. When we stood up, I saw all of my cousins were running outside,” he recalled, adding that the relatives who spent the night in his home, including women and children, had left the area of Shujaiya, east of Gaza’s city center, due to the fear of Israeli bombardments.
"After we fled to the street, we found everything had been destroyed, and then the fire trucks and ambulances came."
UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Monday that the continued bombardment of Gaza since Saturday has internally displaced more than 120,000, with a total of 137,000 currently being sheltered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in 83 schools across the strip.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Monday afternoon ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, saying that electricity, food, and water would be cut off after the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) announced that they had recaptured territories surrounding the besieged Hamas-controlled enclave.
“No electricity, no food, no water, no gas … it is all closed,” Gallant said in a video message.
In a joint statement, the US, the UK, France, Italy, and Germany expressed support for Israel and labeled Hamas's sudden offensive on the country as “acts of terrorism.”
Hamas has called on “resistance fighters” in Arab countries to join its campaign against Israel, dubbed “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” while the US has reiterated its support for Israel, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announcing that Washington would be sending equipment and munitions to Israel.
