More of 250 Israelis dead, 1,600 injured and dozens kidnapped is the not yet definitive balance of the bloodiest armed attack that has been suffered Israel since the war 1973. The offensive launched this Saturday by the Islamist group Hamas under the name of “Storm At Aqsa” and the subsequent Israeli military retaliation called “Iron Swords” They lead all parties to agree on one word: “War.”
50 years and 15 hours after the surprise attack of Egypt and Syria that started the War of Yom Kippur, the armed wing of Hamas broke the calm of Shabbat In Israel. The biggest offensive by the fundamentalist group since it took control of Gaza in 2007 it began at half past six in the morning with the launching of thousands of projectiles against large areas in Israel, including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and as a dramatic differential factor, with the infiltration of dozens of militiamen in numerous Israeli towns near the Palestinian enclave.
Israel, which until this morning was fighting with some of the terrorists infiltrated in cities and kibbutzim who have not yet been killed or have not managed to return to Gaza, launched its first retaliatory air strikes against Hamas at noon, which, along with the fighting, left a balance of more than 200 Palestinians killed. According to the army, most of them were from Hamas.
“Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Hamas terrorists invaded our territory and murdered innocent citizens, babies and elderly people in their homes. It is an enemy that murders babies and mothers in their homes, in their beds,” declared the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after announcing “the broad mobilization of reservists and counterattacking with a force and reach that the enemy never knew.” In the evening, he announced revenge for “this black day” and asked Gazans to leave the places where Hamas operates.
Netanyahu, who brought together his mini-cabinet to study an unprecedented scenario due to the number of deaths in the rear and the kidnapping of dozens, He is facing the worst attack in decades precisely when his country is going through the biggest internal crisis in its history due to the judicial reform proposal launched in January by his ultra-conservative government inaugurated days before. The shock of the Hamas attack is so great in Israel that The probabilities grow for the creation of an “emergency unity government” between Netanyahu (Likud) and the centrist parties of Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz.