Israel exchanges fire with Hezbollah as soldiers battle Hamas, claims 400 militants dead

Israeli soldiers fought to repel Hamas militants on Sunday (October 8) and exchanged fire with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, raising the prospect of a broader regional conflagration a day after an unprecedented surprise attack on southern Israel by Palestinian militants that killed at least 250 and left Israelis stunned and reeling.

The Israel Defence Forces said on Sunday that more than 400 Hamas fighters were killed in the ongoing violence in southern Israel and Gaza Strip. A top spokesperson said that dozens of militants were captured during the fighting that began yesterday.

The Hamas militants broke out of the blockaded Gaza Strip and rampaged through nearby Israeli communities, taking captives, including women, children and the elderly, while Israel's retaliation strikes levelled buildings in Gaza and its prime minister said the country was at war.

Hezbollah struck Israeli positions in a disputed area along the border with Syria’s Golan Heights, and Israel’s military responded with armed drone strikes on Hezbollah targets in a disputed area where the borders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria meet.

Flare-up at border

The flare-up on Israel’s northern border threatened to draw into the battle a fierce enemy of Israel’s which is backed by Iran and estimated to have tens of thousands of rockets at its disposal.

In an assault of startling breadth, Hamas gunmen rolled into as many as 22 locations outside the Gaza Strip early Saturday morning, including towns and other communities as far as 15 miles (24 km) from the Gaza border, while Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israeli cities. They killed at least 250 people, including 26 soldiers, and took hostages as Israel’s military scrambled to muster a response.

The Israeli military on Sunday said it forces were fighting Hamas incursions in eight places. An Israeli military spokesperson said that two hostage situations had been “resolved”, but did not say whether all the hostages had been rescued alive.

Israel struck 426 targets in Gaza, its miltary said, flattening residential buildings in giant explosions. It included a 14-storey tower that held dozens of apartments as well as Hamas offices in central Gaza City. Israeli forces fired a warning just before. At least 256 people in the Gaza Strip were killed in Israeli strikes, including 20 children, and close to 1,800 wounded, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

Israeli media, citing rescue service officials, said at least 250 people were killed and 1,500 wounded in Saturday's attack, making it the deadliest in Israel in decades. Hamas fighters took an unknown number of civilians and soldiers captive into Gaza. The conflict threatened to escalate with Israel’s vows of retaliation, and attacks by Hezbollah.

Hezbollah offensive

Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets and shells on Sunday at three Israeli positions in a disputed area along the country’s border with Syria's Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel and Hezbollah are archenemies and have fought several wars in the past, the most recent a 34-day conflict in 2006 that left 1,200 dead in Lebanon and 160 in Israeli. Tensions have been simmering along Israel’s northern border for months.

Hezbollah said in a statement that the attack using “large numbers of rockets and shells” was in solidarity with the “Palestinian resistance”. It said the Israeli positions were directly hit. Israel's military fired back using armed drones at the Lebanese areas. By attacking Israeli positions in a disputed area rather than Israel proper, Hezbollah appears to be trying to avoid an all-out conflict with Israel.

In a televised address Saturday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military will use all of its strength to destroy Hamas' capabilities. “All the places that Hamas hides in, operates from, we will turn them into ruins,” he added. “Get out of there now,” he told Gaza residents, who have no way to leave the tiny, overcrowded Mediterranean territory.

Overnight, the Israeli military issued warnings in Arabic to communities near the border with Israel to leave their homes for areas deeper inside the tiny enclave. Gaza’s 2.3 million people have endured a border blockade, enforced to varying degrees by Israel and Egypt, since Hamas militants seized control in 2007. Previous conflicts between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers brought widespread death and destruction in Gaza and days of rocket fire on Israeli towns. The situation is potentially more volatile now, with Israel's far-right government stung by the security breach and with Palestinians in despair over a never-ending occupation in the West Bank and suffocating blockade of Gaza.

Israelis shocked

The strength, sophistication and timing of the Saturday morning attack shocked Israelis. Hamas fighters used explosives to break through the border fence enclosing Gaza, then crossed with motorcycles, pickup trucks, paragliders and speed boats on the coast. In an amateur video, hundreds of terrified young people who had been dancing at a rave fled for their lives after Hamas militants entered the area and began firing at them. Among those killed on Saturday was Col. Jonathan Steinberg, a senior officer who commanded the Israeli military's Nahal Brigade, a prominent infantry unit.

Before daybreak on Sunday, militants fired more rockets from Gaza, hitting a hospital in the Israeli coastal town of Ashkelon, said senior hospital official Tal Bergman. Video provided by Barzilai Medical Center showed a large hole punched into a wall and chunks of debris scattered on the ground of what appeared to be an empty room and a hallway. The military said patients had been evacuated from Barzilai before the strike. Schools have been shut across Israel.

Around 3 am, a loudspeaker atop a mosque in Gaza City blared a stark warning to residents of nearby apartment buildings: Evacuate immediately. Just minutes later, an Israeli airstrike reduced one nearby five-story building to ashes. After one Israeli strike, a Hamas rocket barrage hit four cities, including Tel Aviv and a nearby suburb. Throughout the day, Hamas fired more than 3,500 rockets, the Israeli military said.

The shadowy leader of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Deif, said the assault was in response to the 16-year blockade of Gaza, and a series of recent incidents that have brought Israeli-Palestinian tensions to a fever pitch. Over the past year, Israel’s far-right government has ramped up settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, Israeli settler violence has displaced hundreds of Palestinians there, and tensions have flared around the Al-Aqsa mosque, a flashpoint Jerusalem holy site.

Operation Al-Aqsa Storm

“Enough is enough,” Deif, who does not appear in public, said in the recorded message. He said the attack was only the start of what he called “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” and called on Palestinians from east Jerusalem to northern Israel to join the fight. The Hamas incursion on Simchat Torah, a normally joyous day when Jews complete the annual cycle of reading the Torah scroll, revived painful memories of the 1973 Mideast war practically 50 years to the day, in which Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, aiming to take back Israeli-occupied territories. Comparisons to one of the most traumatic moments in Israeli history sharpened criticism of Netanyahu and his far-right allies, who had campaigned on more aggressive action against threats from Gaza.

Political commentators lambasted the government and military over its failure to anticipate what appeared to be a Hamas attack unseen in its level of planning and coordination. Asked by reporters how Hamas had managed to catch the army off guard, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli army spokesman, replied, “That's a good question.” The abduction of Israeli civilians and soldiers also raised a particularly thorny issue for Israel, which has a history of making heavily lopsided exchanges to bring captive Israelis home. Israel is holding thousands of Palestinians in its prisons.

Hundreds abducted

Hecht confirmed that a “substantial” number of Israelis were abducted on Saturday. Associated Press photos showed an elderly Israeli woman being brought into Gaza on a golf cart by Hamas gunmen and another woman squeezed between two fighters on a motorcycle. AP journalists saw four people taken from the kibbutz of Kfar Azza, including two women.

In Gaza, a black jeep pulled to a stop and, when the rear door opened, a young woman stumbled out, bleeding from the head and with her hands tied behind her back. A man waving a gun in the air grabbed her by the hair and pushed her into the vehicle's back seat.

Thailand's government said that two of its citizens may have been abducted, though the Israeli government could not immediately confirm the details. Thousands of Thai citizens work in Israel, many of them in the agriculture sector. Israeli TV reported that workers from the Philippines were also among the captives. Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin has put the country's air force on standby to evacuate its citizens if needed. The Philippine government said it was still working to verify the reports.

A major question now was whether Israel will launch a ground assault into Gaza, a move that in the past has brought intensified casualties. Netanyahu vowed that Hamas “will pay an unprecedented price.” But, he warned, “This war will take time. It will be difficult.” Israel's military was bringing four divisions of troops as well as tanks to the Gaza border, joining 31 battalions already in the area, a spokesperson said.

Ready for war

Hamas said it had planned for a potentially long fight. “We are prepared for all options, including all-out war,” the deputy head of the Hamas political bureau, Saleh al-Arouri, told Al-Jazeera TV. “We are ready to do whatever is necessary for the dignity and freedom of our people.” In Gaza, much of the population was thrown into darkness after nightfall as electrical supplies from Israel — which supplies almost all the territories' power — were cut off. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that Israel would stop supplying electricity, fuel and goods to Gaza.

US President Joe Biden said from the White House that he had spoken with Netanyahu to say the United States “stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop.”

Saudi Arabia, which has been in talks with the US about normalising relations with Israel, called on both sides to exercise restraint. The kingdom said it had repeatedly warned about the danger of “the situation exploding as a result of the continued occupation (and) the Palestinian people being deprived of their legitimate rights.”

The attack comes at a time of historic division within Israel over Netanyahu's proposal to overhaul the judiciary. Mass protests over the plan have sent hundreds of thousands of Israeli demonstrators into the streets and prompted hundreds of military reservists to avoid volunteer duty — turmoil that has raised fears over the military's battlefield readiness.

Palestinians demonstrated in towns and cities around the West Bank on Saturday night. Palestinian health officials said Israeli fire killed five there, but gave few details.

False sense of security

Almost 50 years ago to the day, Israel had failed to anticipate the outbreak of the 1973 Yom Kippur war – a shock attack on its borders by a coalition of Arab states. Now, it appears the country’s intelligence apparatuses have fallen victim to a false sense of security once again.

The belief, widely shared across Israeli society, that the Hamas militant group would avoid a large-scale military confrontation with Israel to protect itself and spare further suffering and harm to the residents of Gaza was shattered by a surprise assault on Saturday morning by air, land and sea.

Now, Israel’s military reserves have commenced a massive mobilisation as aerial bombings of Hamas installations and command posts in Gaza are being carried out. As in the case of the Yom Kippur war, numerous analyses and investigations will be undertaken in the coming weeks, months and years on the intelligence, operational and political failures that allowed the Hamas attack to unfold.

The assault was apparently initially undetected by Israel, and then for hours met with either insufficient or unprepared Israeli forces. Similar to the 1973 war, the purposefully chosen timing of a Sabbath and the Jewish holiday of Sukkot provide initial, though very partial, clues to the breakdown. Hamas’ strategic calculations in launching the attack are uncertain at this stage.

Strategic calculation

However, the assured severity of Israel’s retaliation against the group – and as a consequence, the civilian population in Gaza – makes it likely that considerations beyond just tit-for-tat revenge were at play. Kidnapping Israelis for prisoner swaps with Hamas militants jailed in Israel, for instance, has been among the most highly desired objectives of the group’s military operations in the past. The reports of dozens of Israelis being taken captive in this weekend’s assault – many of them civilians – suggest this may have been a central motive behind the attack.

Another broader objective for Hamas may have been to undermine the ongoing negotiations between the US and Saudi Arabia on an agreement to normalise relations between the kingdom and Israel. Thwarting these talks would be a significant boon for Iran, a key backer of Hamas, and its allies. While Tehran has said it supports the attacks by Hamas against Israel, it remains uncertain at this point whether Iran or Hezbollah (the militant group in Lebanon that has a growing partnership with Hamas) would open additional fronts against Israel in the coming days. Any escalation in the conflict from either Iran or Lebanon would be highly problematic for Israel.

The same would apply if the war with Hamas further exacerbates the already high tensions and violent clashes between Israel and Palestinian militant groups in the West Bank.

It’s still too early to assess the likely many long-term impacts of the attack on Israelis and their sense of security. But one thing is clear: the already challenging prospects for the building of trust between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples have just suffered a devastating blow.(With agency inputs)