Prime Minister Chris Hipkins gave a statement on the situation in Israel, stating the government's 'absolute condemnation' of Hamas' attacks.
Video / NZ Herald
Scenes of violence and destruction in the long-blockaded Gaza Strip have filled the world’s airwaves throughout four wars and countless rounds of hostilities between Israel and Hamas militants. But this conflict, Palestinians say, is different.
After a nightof intense bombardment, residents were struggling to grasp the sheer scale of damage inflicted on Gaza City’s upscale Rimal neighbourhood, with its shopping malls, restaurants, residential buildings and offices belonging to aid groups and international media far from the territory’s hard-hit border towns and impoverished refugee camps.
Israeli bombs blew out walls and ripped roofs off upper-class apartment towers. They toppled trees that had lined the sidewalks. They uprooted streets that had teemed with businesspeople hustling to work and vendors hawking roasted nuts. They levelled mosques and university buildings and wrecked high-rise offices of companies and organisations like Gaza’s main telecommunications company and Bar Association.
Among those broad boulevards full of beauty salons, falafel shops and pizzerias beat the heart of Gaza City. For many, the magnitude of the devastation there, affecting the territory’s middle and upper classes, had symbolic significance.
“Israel has destroyed the centre of everything,” said Palestinian businessman Ali al-Hiyak from his home near Rimal. “That is the space of our public life, our community.”
“These sounds are different,” Saman Ashour, 30, texted as she lay awake in a neighbourhood north of Rimal, listening to the roar of explosions. “It’s the sound of revenge.”
Residents said the Israeli military struck some buildings without first firing warning missiles. The civilian death toll has been rapidly rising. Overall, Gaza health officials have reported the airstrikes have killed more than 800 people and wounded thousands more. Israel has also cut off Gaza’s water supplies and electricity, worsening the territory’s already abysmal humanitarian conditions.
The Israeli military’s Arabic spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, said that Israel was trying to “evacuate civilian populations from areas where Hamas has a military presence” before unleashing “powerful destruction”.
Palestinians walk amid the rubble following Israeli airstrikes that razed swaths of a neighbourhood in Gaza City. Photo / AP
That tactic is evident from staggering drone footage that shows vast swaths of central Gaza City reduced to nothing but dirt craters and ruins from demolished buildings.
But most Palestinian civilians did not evacuate. There are no bomb shelters. Israel and Egypt tightly control the enclave’s borders and have not let anyone out. UN shelters are rapidly filling up.
After the militant group’s unprecedented attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers, which stunned and terrorised a country long seen as invincible, analysts said it was clear the group bet all its chips no matter the consequences. Israel was now waging a war not to repel Hamas, like in past rounds, but to destroy it.
“The strategic prospect is to annihilate, destroy and demolish the military capacity of Hamas,” said Kobi Michael, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank. “Hamas brought this on the heads of the Gazans.”
“If Israel is not aggressive enough,” he added, “that will only drag us to another front and to another conflict.”
But Palestinians in Gaza see the Israeli military’s wrath as collective punishment.
“We’re talking about damage to hospitals that can’t even run without fuel, the total demolition of homes and infrastructure,” said Iyad Bozum, spokesman for Gaza’s Interior Ministry. “At the end of this, there will be nothing left to even reconstruct. It will be impossible to live here.”
The strikes on Rimal early Tuesday killed ordinary residents like shopkeepers and journalists and destroyed dozens of homes.
Issa Abu Salim, 60, was seething as he stood amid the debris of his home, his clothes filthy with the dust of the destruction.
“Our money is gone. My identity cards are lost. The entire house, all four floors, is lost,” he said. “The most beautiful area, they destroyed it.”
