Israel has retaken the border towns that were overrun by Hamas terrorists over the weekend and continues to ramp up airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military announced Tuesday.
The IDF has killed roughly 1,500 Hamas terrorists since they stormed across the border Saturday morning, the Israeli military announced, and the Israeli Air Force is preparing to increase the tempo of its bombing campaign against Gaza as tens of thousands of Israeli troops mass on the border.
“Israel is going to respond very severely and aggressively and there will be more loss of life,” Hecht, a spokesman for the Israeli military and a lieutenant-colonel, told journalists in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. “The dynamic right now in Gaza is that the scope of this is going to be bigger than before and more severe. We should all change the paradigm here. This is not tit for tat.”
While the IDF has not yet issued the order for a ground invasion into Gaza, the military has called up a record 360,000 reservists in recent days and is building a base along the Gaza border to accommodate the large troop presence.
“We are building infrastructure for future operations,” Hecht said. The last IDF incursion into Gaza occurred in 2014 and ended after seven weeks with dozens of Israeli soldiers and some 2,000 Palestinians dead.
The military spokesman also said that the Air Force does not have the ammunition to fire warning shots known as “roof knocks” to warn Palestinian civilians to vacate a given building before it’s destroyed by a follow-up strike.
“Because we have right now this very, very big-scale event,” Hecht said, “we are stretched with our aerial assets, we’re stretched with our munitions.”
In the past three days, over 900 civilians in Israel, including at least 11 Americans, have been killed by Hamas terrorists. At least 765 people have reportedly been killed in retaliatory strikes in Gaza while thousands more have been injured on both sides.
Earlier Tuesday, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denied Tehran had anything to do with Hamas’s attack on Israel, despite Iran’s long history of supporting the group.
“Supporters of the Zionist regime and some from that usurping regime have said some nonsense these past days that the Islamic Republic of Iran was behind this act. They are mistaken,” he said in a televised speech. “Those who say the acts of the Palestinians come from non-Palestinians don’t have a true understanding of the Palestinian people and make wrong calculations.
“The Zionist regime’s own actions are to blame for this disaster,” Khamenei added, while praising the militant group’s assault on Israel.
White House spokesperson John Kirby said Monday that Iran was “complicit” in the Hamas attack, although he conceded there was no “specific evidence” tying Iran to it.
However, Iran reportedly backed Hamas last Monday, according to the Wall Street Journal, and has even helped train Palestinian fighters for the highly coordinated invasion of Israel since August.