Israel is a nation in arms. On Tuesday, October 10, some 300,000 reservists responded to the "fastest ever" mobilization announced by the army the day before. Contacted by Le Monde via telephone, reserve commanders, former officers of the Southern Command and the Gaza division, politely hung up one by one, after confiding that they had donned the uniform, were already in the vicinity of the enclave or were on their way there, and that they were now subject to silence.
All were joining forces concentrated around Gaza, in the area where the army had completed the evacuation of Israeli residents on Monday. After three days of tracking Hamas members down, the army claims that there are none left in the area. On Tuesday morning, the army claimed that "approximately 1,500 bodies of Hamas (fighters)" had been found on the Israeli side. On Sunday, a commando team had still managed to emerge from the north of the enclave. The army now intends to enforce a full siege on Gaza: "There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed," said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. "We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly," he added.
In fact, the electricity had already been cut off, and nothing had entered the enclave since Palestinian commandos captured and damaged the regular crossing points in the early hours of the assault on October 7. The death toll from their attack continues to rise, reaching 900 on Tuesday. The sheer scale of the carnage has stunned Israel and prompted Gallant to make little distinction, in his statement, between the Hamas fighter "animals" and the 2 million Palestinian residents of Gaza. The massive campaign of Israeli strikes – which has accelerated since Sunday – has claimed almost 700 lives.
The minister's speech is helping to prepare Israeli opinion for the next phases of the war, which could be long and destructive. For the past two days, the army has been hammering home the same message: "Hamas is ISIS." Netanyahu repeated this phrase on Monday. He equated the massacres committed by the Palestinian movement and those perpetrated by the jihadists who brought terror to Europe from their strongholds in Iraq and Syria almost a decade ago.
Netanyahu has framed this new conflict in Gaza as a war of civilization against barbarism, which "will change the Middle East". "Just as the forces of civilization united to defeat ISIS, the forces of civilization must support Israel in defeating Hamas," he stated. He has sought to secure the strongest possible support abroad, despite civilian casualties which Israel acknowledges will be disproportionate, and which it hopes will forever act as a deterrent.
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