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JERUSALEM: Israel kept up its bombardment of Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday (Oct 11), as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a political rival announced an emergency government for the duration of the conflict that has killed thousands.
The veteran right-wing leader was joined by the centrist Benny Gantz, a former defence minister, in the government and war cabinet as both put aside bitter political divisions that have roiled the country and sparked mass protests.
The announcement came after Israeli soldiers sweeping battle-torn southern towns said they had found a total of 1,200 bodies, mostly civilians slain in the militants’ onslaught, the worst attack in Israel’s 75-year history.
Gaza officials reported more than 1,000 people killed in Israel’s withering campaign of air and artillery strikes on the crowded Palestinian enclave, where black smoke billowed into the sky and entire city blocks lay in ruins.
The United Nations said 11 of its staff had been killed in Gaza since Saturday, while the International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies said it had lost five of its members.
Israel has massed forces, tanks and other heavy armour around Gaza in its retaliatory operation against what Netanyahu labelled “an attack whose savagery … we have not seen since the Holocaust”.
US President Joe Biden pledged to send more munitions and military hardware to its close ally Israel and expressed revulsion at the “sheer evil” of the slaughter of civilians in the unprecedented assault Hamas unleashed from Saturday.
Amid the crisis that has been labelled “Israel’s 9/11”, Netanyahu struck the political deal with Gantz and pledged to freeze for now his government’s judicial overhaul plan that has sparked an unprecedented wave of mass protests since the start of the year.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid has not joined the temporary alliance, although the joint statement said a seat would be “reserved” for him in the war cabinet.
“Israel before anything else,” Gantz wrote in a social media post while the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote that he “welcomes the unity, now we must win”.
FEARS FOR HOSTAGES
As the war has raged, fears mounted in Israel for the fate of at least 150 hostages – mostly Israelis but also including foreign and dual nationals – being held in Gaza by Hamas.
The group has claimed that four captives died in Israeli strikes and threatened to kill other hostages if civilian targets are bombed without advance warning from Israel.
Concern rose over the worsening humanitarian crisis in war-torn Gaza, where Israel had levelled over 1,000 buildings and imposed a total siege, cutting off water, food and energy supplies for 2.3 million people.
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