Israel said its best soldiers were fighting Hamas inside the Gaza Strip on Saturday night, as Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the “second stage” of a long war against the terror group had begun.
Israel’s forces fought fierce street battles against Hamas in northern Gaza using tanks and infantry, with Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, the chief of the general staff of the Israel Defense Forces, saying his troops had killed “hundreds” of terrorists.
But Mr. Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Israel’s campaign to “abolish evil” was “only just beginning”. “This is a war with multiple stages, today we move to the next one,” Lt Gen Halevi said on Saturday. “The objectives of this war require a ground operation – the best soldiers are now operating in Gaza.”
A larger Israeli military operation against Hamas had been anticipated since it pledged to destroy the group in the wake of the Oct 7 attacks, but it appeared to have been delayed amid fears of a wider regional war involving Iran and its Middle East proxies.
The prime minister and military leaders stopped short of calling the country’s expanded ground offensive in Gaza an invasion, even as they confirmed that troops would remain in the coastal enclave.
Earlier on Saturday, the Israeli military dropped leaflets across Gaza City, which before the war had a population of half a million people, warning civilians to evacuate because it had become “a battlefield”.
“To the residents of the Gaza Strip: The Gaza governorate (Gaza City) has become a battlefield. Shelters in northern Gaza and Gaza governorate are not safe,” read one leaflet in Arabic.
The Israeli army claims Hamas runs an underground headquarters beneath the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Hamas denies that claim. On Saturday, the families of those held hostage in Gaza urged the government to tell them how it planned to rescue their loved ones as Israeli forces intensified their operations against Hamas.
Mr Netanyahu said it was hoped that the ground offensive would pile pressure on the terrorist group, making the release of its captives more likely.
As Israeli leaders braced for a regional escalation, Eli Cohen, the foreign minister, confirmed that he had recalled diplomats from Turkey, which has been a strong critic of the war on Hamas in Gaza because of the heavy loss of civilian lives.
At a rally in Istanbul earlier on Saturday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, likened Israel’s assault on Gaza to the Holocaust and took aim at the country’s Western backers. “The main culprit behind the massacre unfolding in Gaza is the West,” he told a crowd of hundreds of thousands of supporters.
