Sickening footage released by Hamas allegedly shows the terrorists holding Israeli toddlers and children during the Saturday’s shocking massacre.
The video shows Hamas members holding the youngsters as they sit around a table. One is seen rocking a pram as an infant cries. Others are carrying the distressed children, rocking them and patting their backs.
The footage was recorded as Hamas gunmen carried out their mass infiltration of Israel last Saturday, according to Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post.
The attack saw Hamas, proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the US, burst through the heavily militarised border around the Gaza Strip and kill more than 1,300 people – most of them civilians – in an attack compared to 9/11 in the United States
The group took an estimated 150 Israeli, foreign and dual national hostages back to Gaza during its initial attack. Hamas said on Friday that 13 of them had been killed in Israeli air strikes. It has previously said four hostages died in bombardments.
Footage released by Hamas appears to show the terrorists holding Israeli toddlers and children during the Saturday’s shocking massacre
A Hamas gunman is seen carrying a distressed infant. The footage was recorded as Hamas carried out their mass infiltration of Israel last Saturday, according to Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post
The video shows Hamas members holding the youngsters as they sit around a table
A Hamas member pats an Israeli child’s back while holding the youngster
A Hamas member is seen rocking a pram as an infant cries
Another Hamas member is seen apparently helping a child with their socks or shoes
Israeli soldiers have swept the southern towns and kibbutz farming communities since Saturday.
They said they found the bodies of 1,500 terrorists, as well as large numbers of civilians killed by Hamas fighters.
Israeli ground forces have made ‘localised’ raids into Gaza in the last 24 hours to ‘cleanse the area of terrorists and weaponry’ and try to find ‘missing persons’, the army said.
Israel has called up 300,000 reservists while forces, tanks and heavy weapons have been moved to the southern desert area around Gaza.
In fields along the border, artillery fires like clockwork with a deafening noise every 30 seconds towards barely visible targets in Gaza, shaking the earth.
But any ground offensive is complicated by the presence of hostages, whom Hamas has threatened to kill one by one if bombardments are carried out without warning.
Yossi Landau, who has 33 years’ volunteer experience with Zaka, which recovers the bodies of people who suffered unnatural deaths, said in Beeri, just east of Gaza, he found a dead woman with her stomach ‘ripped open, a baby was there, still connected with the cord, and stabbed’.
They were among more than 100 people killed in Beeri, while around 270 were gunned down or burned in their cars at the nearby Supernova music festival.
Hamas has denied that its fighters killed infants.
Pictured: A Hamas gunman walking around the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert in southern Israel on Saturday
Pictured: Footage shared on social media appears to show Hamas terrorists parading victim Shani Louk’s naked body on the back of a pick-up truck
Pictured: An armed Hamas terrorist leading a man during the Supernova music festival
A distressing image, shared in a pixellated form on the Israeli government’s official Twitter page, showed scores of victims placed in body bags underneath a tent at the festival site
Israel’s military sent one evacuation order directly on Friday morning, telling the 1.1 million people living north of an area called Wadi Gaza to move south. This would mean the entire population of Gaza City and its surroundings fleeing their homes
Israel has been massing troops along the Gaza border since last Saturday’s deadly incursion by Hamas.
It came as Palestinians began a mass exodus from northern Gaza today after Israel’s military told some one million people to evacuate towards the southern part of the besieged territory, an unprecedented order ahead of an expected ground invasion against the ruling Hamas militant group.
The United Nations warned that so many people fleeing en masse – almost half the Gaza population – would be calamitous, and it urged Israel to reverse the order.
Families in cars, trucks and donkey carts packed with blankets and possessions streamed down a main road out of Gaza City, the biggest city, even as Israeli strikes hammered neighbourhoods in southern Gaza.
Hamas, which staged a shocking and brutal attack on Israel nearly a week ago and has fired thousands of rockets since, called on people to stay in their homes, saying the order was ‘psychological warfare’ to break their solidarity.
The Palestinian envoy to the UN says his people’s mass exit from northern Gaza under Israeli military orders may compare to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians amid the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation – an event that Palestinians call the ‘nakba,’ or catastrophe.
Ambassador Riyad Mansour called the current flight ‘potentially a second nakba’ as he spoke to reporters at UN headquarters on Friday before a meeting of Arab countries’ ambassadors.
While the evacuation order involves the northern part of the territory, Mr Mansour said ‘there is no place in Gaza that is safe’.
He called for a ceasefire to allow food, medicine and water into the territory.
In Jordan, after a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, King Abdullah II called for ‘humanitarian corridors’ to be opened urgently.
Israeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack by terrorists from Gaza at Kibbutz Kfar Aza
Pictured: Photographs of some of the British Israelis who have been captured by Hamas on display in London
Gunshots and blood stains are seen on a door and walls of a house where civilians were killed days earlier in an attack by Hamas on this kibbutz near the border with Gaza on Tuesday
A baby’s seat and child’s dress is seen covered in blood in the aftermath of a Hamas attack
Smoke and fire rise from an explosion after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, near the southern border. 70 were reported to have died in strikes while fleeing south at an undisclosed location
Israel has given Palestinians 24 hours to leave the northern Gaza Strip ahead of an expected ground offensive
Palestinian militants fire rockets towards Israel from Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip this evening
Egypt’s Foreign Ministry in a statement today condemned the Israeli army’s decision to tell people in Gaza to evacuate.
It said the move ‘constitutes a grave violation of the rules of international humanitarian law, and will expose the lives of more than a million Palestinian citizens and their families to the dangers of remaining in the open without shelter’.
In the statement, Egypt called on the UN Security Council, which was scheduled to meet on Friday, to stop the evacuation.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has shifted its Gaza centre of operations and some staffers to the territory’s south, but many of the world body’s 13,000 Gaza workers have chosen to remain in the north to continue helping people there, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Friday.
The world body earlier warned of ‘devastating humanitarian consequences’ after the Israeli military told the entire population of northern Gaza to leave.
Mr Dujarric said secretary-general Antonio Guterres and other UN officials have been working to try to get humanitarian aid into the sealed-off territory and to ensure that civilians are protected.
Asked what it would take for aid to start flowing, the spokesperson said: ‘What we need is the green light from the Israelis.’
Hospitals are also struggling to cope with the dead and wounded from the relentless bombardment, and the health system was already ‘at a breaking point’, the World Health Organization said.
Ashraf al-Qudra, from the Gaza health ministry, said hospitals were ‘starting to lose capacity’ and medicine was running out.
This aerial view shows a house hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon on Friday
Palestinians evacuate a wounded youth after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza Strip on Friday
Smoke plumes billow during Israeli air strikes in Gaza City on Thursday, October 12
Some 22,600 residential units have been destroyed in Gaza under Israel’s bombardment
Meanwhile, Israel faces a potential second front in the north after the Iran-backed Hezbollah group in Lebanon said it was ‘fully prepared’ to join Hamas in the war when the time was right.
There has been cross-border fire in recent days, sparking concern about regional stability and prompting the United States to send additional munitions and its largest aircraft carrier.
US President Joe Biden has warned other regional powers not to get involved. Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin told Israel Friday US support was ‘iron-clad’.
Israel’s arch foe Iran has long financially and militarily backed Hamas and praised its attack, but insists it was not involved.
