Israel-Gaza War: Israel Orders ‘Siege’ of Gaza; Hamas Threatens to Kill Hostages

The U.N. humanitarian agency said that Israeli airstrikes have damaged water, sanitation and hygiene facilitates affecting more than 400,000 people in Gaza. Two schools run by the U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees have been hit by strikes, according to the United Nations.

The violence was very much on the mind of participants of a scholarly conference in Rome examining the Vatican’s response to the Holocaust. One its organizers from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem was unable to attend because of the conflict, and the three-day meeting opened with a minute of silence.

In his address, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, spoke of the “terrible and despicable attack” that awakened “many Israeli brothers and sisters” two days ago, adding that the Holy See was “following with deep and grave concern the war that has been provoked,” which has also killed, displaced and wounded many Palestinians. “Unfortunately, violence, terrorism, barbarism and extremism undermine the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis,” he said.

About 800 Israelis have been killed and more than 2,600 others have been wounded since the start of the assault on Saturday, the Israeli Government Press Office said on its social media pages.

Israel’s military has called up 300,000 members of its reserve force over the past 48 hours, the largest mobilization in such a short period since the country was founded, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief military spokesman, said on Monday.

Many reservists are already in the south on the border with Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave now being pounded by Israeli airstrikes as Hamas continues to fire barrages of rockets at Israel. Many others have been sent north to bolster the border with Lebanon, where there are concerns of a second front opening up.

Israel has been at war with Gaza since hundreds of Hamas gunmen surged across the border from Gaza on Saturday, overrunning Israeli border towns and villages, killing civilians in their homes, massacring partygoers at an open-air music festival and taking scores of people, young and old, back to Gaza as hostages.

More than 800 Israelis have been killed so far, according to officials, at least 85 of them soldiers.

Most Jewish 18-year-olds are drafted for compulsory military service in a country of 10 million people, and many continue to volunteer for reserve duty into middle age. That means that most families would have someone, or know someone, taking part in the war.

Yaacov Ben Yaacov, 57, a tech entrepreneur, knows many. His three sons, two nephews and a son-in-law are all in uniform now. The youngest son, 20, is performing his obligatory service and his older brothers, in their late 20s, have been called up for reserve duty. One son is a medic in a combat unit and two are in commando units.

One nephew, also in his late 20s, came back early on Monday from a trip to the United States to report for duty and was on his way down south, Mr. Ben Yaacov said.

“As they say, it hits close to home,” he said.

Still, he said it was good to have a country with an army that can protect its people “and not go into gas chambers,” referring to the Jews during the Holocaust.

“So with all the hardship and emotional stress, we have no alternative,” he said. “The alternative is to have more of what happened on Saturday. To tell you as a father or grandfather am I happy to see my kids in harm’s way? No, but we have no choice.”

The spokesman for Hamas's military wing, Abu Obeida, has threatened to execute a civilian hostage every time an airstrike hits “our civilians in their homes without warning.” Hamas is believed to be holding about 150 Israelis hostage.

The Palestinian militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad who launched an assault on Israel on Saturday, and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that fired shots across the border, came from different organizations, even different countries. But they share at least one major commonality: they are all backed by Iran.

The Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister, Ron Dermer, said Israel believes there was some evidence that the Iranians might have known about the attack. “Our working assumption a couple of days ago was that they hadn’t known about it directly,” he told Bloomberg TV. “Now it is unclear, and we’ll have to wait to verify it.”

Nasser Kanaani, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, on Monday denied Tehran’s involvement in the attack, according to the IRNA state news agency, calling it a “political attempt to justify support for Israel.”

But Iranian backing, logistics and funding have been critical to both Hamas and Islamic Jihad for years, analysts said.

Hamas has publicly acknowledged receiving support from Iran. On Sunday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi spoke with both the Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah and the Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh.

Top Iranian officials — like Esmail Qaani, a senior commander in the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — have occasionally met with senior officials of the three organizations. Senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials regularly travel to Tehran to consult with the leadership.

Islamic Jihad is a relatively small organization with limited capabilities in Gaza, and some analysts say the group is almost entirely dependent on Tehran’s backing. Hezbollah is a Lebanese political movement, but also an Iranian-backed militant group.

Hamas is also a popular Palestinian movement and the de facto ruler of the Gaza Strip. But there are sharp divisions within the Hamas leadership over how closely to dive into Iran’s orbit, with other factions in the movement backing closer ties with the Sunni Gulf states.

U.S. officials have said they have yet to see clear evidence of direct Iranian coordination. In an interview with CNN, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken noted the “long relationship between Iran and Hamas.”

“In this specific instance, we have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack,” Mr. Blinken said.

For Iran, its alliance with Hamas is a key point of leverage. Tehran, according to current and former officials, wants to derail the emerging peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Any war between Israel and Hamas that causes significant civilian casualties on both sides would make any such public truce incredibly difficult.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel did not receive a warning from Egypt of Hamas’s plans for an attack on Israel, according to his office, which called reports of a warning “absolutely false.”

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy held a 35-minute news conference at the Capitol, laying out a five-part plan for the United States to rush to Israel’s aid. “Now is the time for action,” he said. McCarthy called for resupplying weapons and operations to rescue American hostages. The House is currently leaderless after McCarthy was forced out of his job last week, and he said lawmakers are unable to respond until a new speaker is chosen. McCarthy said he was open to returning to the job if his fellow Republicans would reinstate him.

Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the U.N, said he recognized the legitimate grievances of Palestinians but that it did not justify violence against civilians. He also urged Israel to conduct its raids in Gaza according to international rules of conflict and refrain from attacking residential targets. He noted the conflict had a long history. “The reality is that it grows out of a long-standing conflict, with a 56-year long occupation, and no political end in sight," he said. "It’s time to end this vicious circle of bloodshed, hatred and polarization."

Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, said on Monday that his in-laws were trapped in Gaza by the war with Israel. Mr. Yousaf told the BBC that the parents of his wife, Nadia El-Nakla, had traveled last week to Gaza to visit a sick grandmother and were there when Hamas militants launched a series of attacks on Israel. Yousaf issued an unyielding condemnation of Hamas for the deadly attacks. “There can be no equivocation about that condemnation, and the Scottish government is strong in its condemnation,” he said.

Israel’s news sites are compiling their own lists of the dead and the missing. Funerals are taking place all around the country. After a weekend of attacks, confusion and chaos, the scale of the tragedy that has befallen Israel was coming into sharper focus on Monday.

The main television channels were broadcasting the latest news around the clock, interspersed with the harrowing stories of people who had escaped with their lives after hundreds of heavily armed Hamas fighters surged across the border from Gaza in a surprise attack on Saturday morning. The gunmen overran villages along the border, killing soldiers and civilians in their path and took dozens of others, including infants and grandmothers, back into Gaza as hostages.

As the death toll on the Israeli side rose to over 700, many in the country were describing the events that unfolded on Saturday as their country’s 9/11, or Pearl Harbor. It was a day of dark records: the worst attack on civilians in Israeli history and the deadliest single day in the country’s 75-year history.

Politicians and military officials have tried to deflect the tough questions — how they could have been caught so off-guard and unprepared, why families under siege were left to fend for themselves for hours, why official information about hostages has been elusive — saying that now is the time to focus on fighting back.

But flashes of anger are visible among some Israelis over the absence of the state. And the widespread feeling of shock among Israelis over the obvious intelligence failure was compounding the fear of what might yet be to come. Israeli officials have said the country is at war with Gaza — launching punishing airstrikes on the blockaded enclave — and on Monday battles against Hamas fighters in border towns were still underway.

As sirens wailed to warn of incoming rockets on Monday afternoon, mourners at the funeral in Jerusalem of Netanel Young, a soldier who was killed on Saturday hit the ground or ran for cover.

Thousands of Israelis have channeled their nervous energy into initiatives to help the war effort. Food and clothing collections have been organized for soldiers and for survivors evacuated from their communities along the Gaza border to hotels and hostels around the country. Mothers have been donating breast milk to feed the baby of a mother whose whereabouts is unknown.

Shay Lee Atari cradled her own infant as she spoke to Israeli television from her hospital bed, describing how her partner had helped her and their daughter escape when gunmen tried to enter their home in the small village of Kfar Aza.

She said she had found shelter in a neighbor’s safe room and waited for 27 hours without food for the baby until they were rescued. Ms. Atari said her partner, Yahav Wiener, is now missing.

“I really don’t know where our state was,” she said.

“They abandoned us. They were on Twitter,” she added bitterly.

Telephone and internet service were cut off in many parts of the Gaza Strip on Monday after an Israeli strike hit the building housing the Palestine Telecommunications Company in the city center.

Ajay Banga, the World Bank president, said on Monday that if the Israel-Gaza war expands into a regional conflict, it could pose a threat to the global economy. “If this were to spread in any way, then it becomes dangerous,” Banga said in an interview with The New York Times. He said such a developmnent would be “a crisis of unimaginable proportion.”

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Nasser Kanaani, said that, if attacked, Iran would defend itself “forcefully, definitively and in a way that would make others regret it.” Kanaani made the comments in relation to U.S. officials saying anyone involved in the Hamas attack should be held accountable.

The European Union’s executive arm said on Monday that the bloc, the biggest international aid donor to the Palestinian people, would review part of its aid programs after Palestinian gunmen launched deadly attacks on Israel over the weekend, but that humanitarian aid would not be affected.

“In addition to the existing safeguards, the objective of this review is to ensure that no E.U. funding indirectly enables any terrorist organization to carry out attacks against Israel,” the European Commission said in a statement late Monday. “The Commission will equally review if, in light of the changed circumstances on the ground, its support programs to the Palestinian population and to the Palestinian Authority need to be adjusted.”

The statement, which said it would conduct the review “as soon as possible” and would coordinate with member states, was aimed at clarifying the E.U.’s complicated and muddled response to the Palestinian attacks. The European Union provides financial aid to the Palestinian Authority and organizations that offer vital services to civilians. Any long-term freeze on assistance could have significant consequences for civilians affected by the latest violence.

Precisely which E.U.-funded programs would be put under review was not immediately clear.

E.U. foreign ministers will hold an emergency meeting on the conflict on Tuesday and are set to discuss aid, diplomats said. Long-term, permanent cuts to E.U. assistance would not be decided by the European Commission, but rather by the E.U.’s member governments. Any such moves would most likely be met with resistance by several member nations that have long called for preserving humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.

The European Union’s budgeted support to the Palestinians for 2021 to 2024 is 1.18 billion euros, or $1.24 billion. The bloc provides two types of assistance: development aid, which is usually longer-term investment in projects, and humanitarian aid, which normally provides relief to people affected by conflict or natural disasters.

According to the European Commission, more than 80 percent of the population in Gaza depends on humanitarian assistance.

Austria and Germany said on Monday that they were suspending aid worth tens of millions of euros while the programs were under review. On top of the joint support, countries in the bloc individually provide financial support to Palestinians, and the decision on whether to freeze that assistance rests with those governments.

The European Commission stressed that its aid to Palestinians was for civilian humanitarian needs and in no way supported Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza and mounted the attack on Israel on Saturday.

“It’s very clear that the European Union does not fund Hamas or any other terrorist organizations’ activities,” Ana Pisonero, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, said at a news conference Monday.

Some E.U. leaders stressed the need to distinguish between Hamas and Palestinian civilians when deciding on the future of aid to the population.

“I think we really have to make the distinction between Hamas, the terrorist organization, and very innocent Palestinians who are just as likely to be victims right now, and again, in the case of Gaza, have been for 16 years,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands told reporters.Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade, backed by Egypt, for at least 16 years, since Hamas seized control of the coastal strip in 2007. The blockade restricts the import of goods, including electronics and computer equipment, that could be used to make weapons, and prevents most people from leaving the enclave.

Germany’s development minister, Svenja Schulze, said on Sunday that the country had started reviewing its support to Palestinians.

“We have already paid strict attention to ensuring that our support for the people in the Palestinian territories serves peace and not terrorists,” Ms. Schulze said. “But these attacks on Israel are a terrible turning point.”

Emma Bubola contributed reporting from London.