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The violence waged across Israel has shocked the country and intelligence services, which have been criticised for failing to warn of the Hamas assault. It marks the deadliest attack on Israeli soil in decades and the addition of more direct person-to-person fighting than rocket barrages.
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Some of the worst reports of violence have emerged from the southern town of Sderot, which lies about four kilometres from the Gaza border, where locals are never far from a bomb shelter and some locals carry guns on their belts.
In the town of about 30,000 people, residents have only seconds between a missile warning alarm sounding and an explosion, due to the proximity to the Gaza conflict zone.
Every home, every park has a bomb shelter. At children’s playgrounds the protective shells take the shape of brightly painted animals or cartoon characters.
Witness and local media accounts described civilians’ bodies strewn across streets where they had encountered advancing gunmen, including at least nine people gunned down at a bus shelter. Their bodies had been laid out on stretchers on the street, their bags still on the kerb nearby.
Graphic videos circulated on social media included scenes of Hamas gunmen dragging Israeli civilian and military hostages, parading some through the streets of Gaza. London’s Telegraph reported that a video too graphic to publish showed men spitting on a woman’s corpse.
Sderot mayor Alon Davidi pleaded with residents on Saturday to stay locked in their homes while Israeli security forces tried to locate the militants who had infiltrated the community.
“Don’t open the doors, stay inside, close the windows … we’re still searching the area,” Davidi told a local TV station, calling for Israel’s leadership to deal a significant blow to Hamas.
The death toll in Sderot is unknown. However, the many killed so far are believed to be victims of Hamas gunmen on foot, rather than rocket fire which has rained across Israel since Saturday morning.
Hundreds of young Israelis are still believed to be missing from the festival near Urim, which started late on Friday night and continued into Saturday morning, while the Times of Israel and local television said dozens of bodies were being removed from the site.
Israel said the number of hostages taken by Hamas militants across the country since the beginning of the onslaught was “substantial”, and included children. It has not provided specific figures.
Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri said the group was holding dozens of Israelis hostage, including senior officials, indicating that Hamas wants to trade its hostages for militants imprisoned in Israel.
Natan Sachs, the director of the Centre for Middle East Policy and a senior fellow in the foreign policy program at think tank the Brookings Institution, said capturing civilians and soldiers was aimed at achieving two things.
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“The first is they can serve as human shields in the Gaza Strip. Now, Hamas would hope that they would stop some of the Israeli strikes, and the second … is as bargaining chips in exchanges in the future for prisoners that Israel holds both from Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” he told CNN.
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