Defense Minister of Israel, Yoav Gallant has described the Hamas onslaught “the worst terror attack the world has ever seen.”
“Thousands of terrorists stormed in to destroy, murder, loot and slaughter.”
As a lifelong soldier who witnessed many awful things, he says, “I never saw anything like this.”
He cites “children bound together and murdered, people burned, barbaric deeds that the Jewish people has not suffered since 1945.”
And these acts were only halted by the “heroism of the fighters.”
He recounts various stories of officers and soldiers doing everything they could to try and stop the attackers, some dying in the fight, and others continuing to battle. He says they freed some of those who had been captured. He speaks of a female soldier in Ofakim with no ammunition who crawled over to a dead terrorist, grabbed his hand grenade and threw it into a room to kill a second terrorist. A single general killed 14 terrorists, he recounts. “These are the heroes who stopped the murders… We’ve cleaned the area and we’re on the attack.”
Israel has now constituted a new war cabinet which include, Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, who is the nation’s main opposition leader and a former defence minister; current defence minister Gallant; and two other officials, including a former defence chief of staff, as “observer” members.
Speaking with an angry intensity in a televised statement alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and National Unity leader Benny Gantz, he says the Hamas terror group will be “obliterated.”
“Hamas — the Islamic State of Gaza — will be wiped from the face of the earth,” he says. “It will not continue to exist.
“There will be no situation in which Israeli children are murdered and we all go about our business,” he adds.
“Every Hamas member is a dead man,” Netanyahu said in the televised address.
In a social media post on Wednesday evening, Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz reportedly said electricity and fuel supplies would not return to Gaza until Israeli hostages were handed back.
“Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home,” Katz said. He added that no one would “preach us morals” on the issue.
“The Jewish nation is unified, and today its leadership is also unified,” Netanyahu said.
“We put aside every other consideration because the fate of our nation is at stake.”
Fabrizio Carboni, regional director of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Crescent, said: “As Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power, putting newborns in incubators and elderly patients on oxygen at risk.
