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Israel has vowed to completely destroy Islamist group Hamas on the eve of U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s expected visit Thursday as Washington underscores support for the Jewish state in a war that has seen the death toll spiral into the thousands.
Just ahead of Blinken’s trip, Washington urged its ally to show restraint in its response to Hamas’s surprise attack — the worst in the country’s 75-year history — which Israeli forces said killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
In Gaza, officials have reported more than 1,200 people killed in Israel’s uninterrupted campaign of air and artillery strikes, while the UN said more than 338,000 people have been displaced.
“Every Hamas member is a dead man,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised statement on Wednesday, likening the militants to the Islamic State group and promising: “We will crush them and destroy them as the world has destroyed Daesh.”
For days, black smoke has billowed into the sky above the impoverished Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people, where entire city blocks have been razed.
As the war rages on, fears are growing over the fate of at least 150 hostages — mostly Israelis but also foreign and dual nationals — held in Gaza by Hamas.
The militants claimed that four captives died in Israeli strikes and threatened to kill the others if civilian targets were bombed without advance warning from Israel.
Hamas claimed Wednesday to have released an Israeli woman and her two children who it said had been detained during fighting with Israeli forces, but Israeli television networks rejected the announcement.
Families of those feared abducted described an agonising ordeal.
“I know he’s out there somewhere,” Ausa Meir said of her brother Michael, who was one of the organisers of a music festival where around 270 people were killed and dozens of others kidnapped.
“It’s very, very painful.”
Fears of multi-front war
Israel has massed forces, tanks and other heavy armour around Gaza after what Netanyahu called “an attack whose savagery… we have not seen since the Holocaust”.
US President Joe Biden pledged to send more munitions and military hardware to Israel, underscoring firm support for its ally in a conflict that has killed at least 22 US citizens.
Washington has diverted an aircraft carrier battle group to the eastern Mediterranean, and offered another carrier if needed.
But Biden has also called for restraint, telling Netanyahu it was “really important that Israel, with all the anger and frustration… they operate by the rules of war”.