Israel said on Tuesday that its military had regained control over towns near Gaza, four days after Palestinian gunmen launched a devastating cross-border assault, as the country girded for the next phase of what Israeli officials have warned will be a crushing campaign against Hamas militants.

Israel’s government approved the call-up of an additional 60,000 reservists, raising the total number mobilised over the last three days to 360,000, the most in such a short period since the country’s founding. The call-ups have touched nearly every corner of the country of 10 million, already awash in grief and anger over the deaths of more than 900 people in the attacks that began on Saturday.

With the border nearly secured, the scale of the horror unleashed on towns and villages near Gaza was slowly coming into grim focus: In one kibbutz a mile and a
half from Gaza, New York Times journalists saw Israeli soldiers carrying slain residents on stretchers, and more than a dozen bloated bodies lying on the ground.

It is not yet clear if or when Israel will order a ground invasion of Gaza, an impoverished coastal enclave ruled by Hamas. But the Israeli military said on Tuesday that its airstrikes against the coastal strip would be “bigger than before and more severe” because of the scale of the Palestinian incursion. The Israeli military said it had recovered the bodies of around 1,500 Palestinian assailants since Saturday morning, offering one of the first clear indications of the size of the assault.

Hamas confirmed that two of its senior officials have been killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza. The strikes continued a day after the militant group, which is believed to have taken around 150 Israeli hostages since Saturday, threatened to kill a captive each time Israel strikes Gaza without warning. Health officials in Gaza said on Tuesday that 830 Palestinians had been killed and 4,250 others wounded in the last four days, though it was unclear how many were civilians.

US President Joe Biden, in a televised address to the American people on Tuesday afternoon, said that 14 US citizens — three more than previously known — had been killed, along with more than 1,000 others, in the Hamas attack on Israel, actions he called “pure unadulterated evil”.

The United Nations’ top human rights official condemned the “horrifying mass killings” and executions allegedly committed by Palestinian armed groups. At the same time, Volker Türk, the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, warned that Israel’s announcement of a “complete siege” of Gaza would exacerbate the “already dire” humanitarian conditions there.

At least one senior officer in the Israel Defence Forces was killed in a skirmish on the Lebanon border on Monday, according to a military spokesman. At least 120 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the conflict.

Israel has asked the US for more weapons, including precision-guided munitions for combat aircraft and interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defence system. Hamas has fired thousands of rockets at Israel since Saturday, putting a strain on Israel’s defences. Israel has struck more than a thousand targets in Gaza in retaliation.

New York Times News Service