Israel kept pounding Hamas targets in Gaza, where entire city blocks lay in rubble Wednesday, as its soldiers sweeping battle-torn southern towns found more victims five days after the Islamist militants’ onslaught.
The army said a “staggering 1,200” bodies had been discovered, mostly of unarmed civilians, while Gaza officials reported more than 1,000 people killed in Israel’s withering campaign of air and artillery strikes on the crowded Palestinian enclave.
Israel has massed forces, tanks and other heavy armour around Gaza in its retaliatory operation against what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu labelled “an attack whose savagery … we have not seen since the Holocaust”.
US President Joe Biden has pledged to send more munitions and military hardware to its close ally Israel and expressed revulsion at the “sheer evil” of the slaughter of civilians in the unprecedented assault Hamas unleashed from Saturday.