Operation Iron Swords - Day 4 - 10 October 2023
Palestinian armed group Hamas launched thousands of missiles at Israel and deployed its militants to infiltrate Jewish settlements near the country’s border with Gaza on 07 October 2023. The 700 Israelis killed on the first day would be the equivalent of 21,000 Americans killed in an attack, as a proportion to Israel’s population of 9.3 million people (compared to 332 million in the USA). Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated: “Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed in one day".
By the fourth day over 900 Israelis had been killed, 2,700 wounded. Israel's UN envoy said 100-150 kidnapped to Gaza, including dozens of foreign nationals kidnapped. Palestinians said 830 had been killed in Israeli airstrikes, and at least 4250 were wounded. IDF said it was holding 1,500 bodies of terrorists.
Kibbutz Kfar Azza is a farming community in southern Israel, located between Netivot and Sderot, about 2 kilometers from the Gaza strip. It was a nice place to live – in stark contrast of course to the living conditions in the Gaza Strip. Kfar Azza was home to about 800 Israelis. Many of them were families with young children. Hamas militants overran Kfar Azza on 07 October 2023, when many Israelis were killed and taken captive. According to reports, at least 40 babies were killed and beheaded. Women, children, toddlers, and elderly people were also brutally butchered. The military was unable to give any death toll yet, the bodies still being recovered from the homes where these Israelis were killed.
Israeli forces said they had taken control of areas in the south of the country that had been infiltrated by members of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and others. The Israeli military continued heavy airstrikes against Hamas, which effectively controls the Gaza Strip, in retaliation for the group's massive cross-border attacks.
In an impassioned speech, US President Joe Biden has declared unequivocal support for Israel, but failed to directly reference Palestinians living in the besieged enclave of Gaza. US President Biden has pledged unwavering support for Israel as its military bombards Gaza in the wake of an unprecedented attack from the Palestinian group Hamas over the weekend. In a White House speech, Biden said Washington will provide additional military assistance to Israel, which has declared war on Hamas. “There are moments in this life – I mean this literally – when a pure unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world,” he said in a televised speech. “This is an act of sheer evil.”
In a fiery national address, Biden doubled down on what he called “crystal clear” US support for Israel, adding the US would make sure Israel has what it needs to “take care of its citizens, defend itself or respond to this attack”. Biden said “Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination,”, saying the group offers nothing but “terror and bloodshed with no regard who pays the price”.
He said the US has enhanced its military force posture in the region to strengthen deterrence. He added, “I’ve directed my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise” Israel’s hostage recovery efforts. He added 14 US citizens were among those killed in Israel. “Let there be no doubt, the United States has Israel’s back. We’ll make sure the Jewish and democratic state of Israel can defend itself today, tomorrow as we always have,” he said.
Commenting on Biden’s speech, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara said: “Having followed Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, who’s a very slick speaker with excellent English and an incredible reservoir of sound bites, having read his books, all of his speeches for the past 30 years, I tell you every single word Biden said is a Netanyahu word. “I think the prime minister of Israel has once again brainwashed the American president.”
Critics argued that the rhetoric from the White House has amounted to a “green light” in Israel’s continuing bombardment of Gaza. That comes as Israel has said its operations against Palestinian fighters in Gaza will be like nothing ever seen before. Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett pointed to “what you might call hypocrisy on the part of the US president”.
“He talked about the United States in alliance with Israel, saying that the distinction between them and what he called the terrorists is that they believe they uphold the rules of international law. He said that only terrorists would attack civilians,” she said. “But clearly that is not entirely accurate because what we’ve seen in recent days, obviously, is the Israeli military having cut off not only food, but electricity and water to the Palestinians in Gaza. We’ve certainly seen attacks that have been not surgical, but in fact, [hitting] large swathes of apartment complexes that we know have allowed for women, children, [and the] elderly to be caught up in this.”
National security spokesperson John Kirby defended the distinction Biden made between killings perpetrated by Hamas fighters and the ongoing bombardment of Gaza by Israel, which observers say has so far killed 260. The US president said Washington and Israel “uphold the laws of war”.
“Nobody wants to see any more innocent life taken or hurt as a result of the events over the past weekend and I think it’s important to remember that Hamas deliberately struck out at innocent civilians, slaughtering them and I mean up close and visceral with knives, torture, rape, gunshots – that’s pretty visible,” Kirby said.
“And that’s why it was important, I think, for the president to talk about setting up the difference, making clear the difference between Hamas – whose actual goal is to take human life, to take innocent human life – and the Israelis who are doing everything they can to preserve their way of life and to defend themselves,” he said.
v Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized the United States for moving a carrier strike group closer to Israel, saying that it would commit “serious massacres” in Gaza. “What will the aircraft carrier of the US do near Israel, why do they come? What will boats around and aircraft on it will do? They will hit Gaza and around, and take steps for serious massacres there,” Erdogan said in a joint press conference with Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer in Ankara.
Israeli opposition leader and former prime minister Yair Lapid reacted to Hamas's surprise attack on Israel from Gaza. Asked how he saw the situation playing out, Lapid said "the endgame is, there will be no Hamas in Gaza". Lapid said "If you want to look at sad statistics, apparently this (October 7) is the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust". While acknowledging that the "vicious terror" attacks amounted to a major intelligence failure for Israel, he said Israel's priority was to focus on "eliminating all terror capabilities that Hamas have".
Lapid added: "My view would be that the Palestinian Authority should take over Gaza as it did before (...) but there are still many unknowns. Right now, what we are determined to do is just making sure there will be no Hamas and no Hamas capabilities in Gaza because they will not make us future victims. Enough is enough. What happened will not happen again." Lapid concluded by saying: "We need a two-state solution (...) I still believe it is possible and this is also in the best interests of the State of Israel."
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of supporting Hamas in its conflict with Israel. “We are certain that Russia is supporting, in one way or another, Hamas operations”, Zelenskyy said in an interview with the France 2 television channel. “Russia is really trying to carry out destabilising actions all over the world.” Zelenskyy added violence engulfing Israel and Gaza threatened to distract the focus from the war in his own country. “There is a risk that international attention will turn away from Ukraine, and that will have consequences.” The tragedies affecting Ukraine and Israel “are different but both are immense”, he said.
The United States has no evidence of direct Iranian involvement in the Hamas attack on Israel, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said, noting however that Tehran has backed the group for years. “But in this particular instance, we don’t have any evidence that there was direct involvement in the planning or the execution of this attack,” Austin told journalists.
That assessment was echoed by the US State Department, which emphasised that it could change. “Our experience in these matters tells us that it’s premature to draw any final conclusions about this issue,” spokesman Matthew Miller said. “We’ll be looking at additional intelligence in the coming weeks and days to inform our thinking on this issue, including whether at least there were some in the Iranian system who either had a clearer sense of what was coming or even contributed to aspects of the planning.”
Iraqi politician Hadi al-Amiri leads the Badr Organisation, which comprises a large part of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), the state paramilitary organisation that contains many Iran-backed groups. Al-Amiri threatened to target United States interests if Washington intervenes to support Israel in its war on Gaza. “If the Americans intervened openly in this conflict … we will consider all American targets legitimate … and we will not hesitate to target it,” al-Amiri said during a gathering in Baghdad. Al-Amiri’s comments come as the US announced on Sunday that it would provide additional munitions to Israel and was moving a carrier strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean.
David Khalfa, co-director of the North Africa and Middle East Observatory at French think tank the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, said Hamas was taking advantage of Israel's vulnerability to carry out its deadly "Operation Al-Aqsa Storm".
"The attack is unprecedented both in terms of its scale and its sophistication. Since the Yom Kippur War [on October 6, 1973, an Arab coalition of Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur – the Jewish holy day of atonement, Ed.], Israel has never been confronted with a full-scale ground invasion [like this].
"We are talking about Hamas commando forces – special forces operating deep inside Israeli territory – with a modus operandi of a real army. Hardened by battle, they are trained and equipped with modern tactical resources and fight in several places at a time. They sent eight pickup trucks with around eight Islamist Hamas gunmen [in each] patrolling the streets of towns and villages into southern Israel, killing civilians at point-blank range and taking entire families hostage, including women and children.
"This situation is completely unheard of. It is a massive surprise attack, a coordinated attack that requires a level of intelligence and preparation on the part of Hamas. Probably some logistical support, too, from Islamic Jihad on the one hand and Hezbollah and Iran on the other. That would go a long way towards explaining what is happening now.
"This terrorist operation comes at a time when Israel is facing an unprecedented political and institutional crisis. But also a crisis of identity, with Israeli society becoming fractured and polarised on a massive scale. Hamas made no secret of its intention to capitalise on Israel’s vulnerability to carry out this kind of attack.
"A national crisis has been destabilising Israel for several months now, with protests taking place every week. And then there is the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, which began yesterday, on October 6. Hamas is clearly determined to follow in the footsteps [of the Arab coalition, Ed.] both symbolically and in terms of communication, with a determination to strike hard and strike fast. And Israelis are both in a state of shock and astonishment."
European Space Imaging (EUSI) partner, Maxar collected new satellite imagery on October 10th of Gaza that reveals some of the ongoing military response to the recent Hamas attacks. The images focus on the aftermath of recent airstrikes in and around Gaza City. Maxar is continuously monitoring the situation and will provide additional updates.
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