Israel hammered the Gaza Strip on Tuesday with the fiercest air strikes in its 75-year conflict with the Palestinians — as Hamas fired off barrages of rockets at Ashkelon outside Tel Aviv.
The devastation came as the death toll soared to more than 1,100 — including 14 Americans — in Israel and 830 in Palestinian territory.
The Israeli warplane strikes reduced entire Gaza neighborhoods to rubble and sent people scrambling for safety — carrying out their attacks as Hamas terrorists threatened to execute a captive for every home hit without warning of an impending bombing by Israel.
In what appeared to be a new tactic, the Israelis were in fact giving warnings to Palestinian civilians to leave certain areas before pummeling those regions with unprecedented intensity.
As for Hamas, it issued its own warning to the residents of the Israeli city of Ashkelon on Tuesday afternoon. Hamas sent rockets flying toward the city that evening. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The thunderous strikes on Gaza continued into Tuesday night, sending plumes of smoke and flames into the sky.
The Israeli military said it had struck hundreds of targets in Rimal — an upscale region that’s home to Hamas-run government, university and media organizations and aid agency offices.
Residents there found buildings torn in half or demolished to mounds of concrete and rebar after warplanes bombarded the area for hours the night before.
“The whole district was just erased,” said Radwan Abu al-Kass, a boxing instructor and father of three, to Reuters after evacuating his Rimal apartment building.
Ala Abu Tair, 35, who had sought shelter with his family after fleeing Abassan Al-Kabira near the border, said, “No place is safe in Gaza, as you see they hit everywhere.”
Two members of Hamas’ political office, Jawad Abu Shammala and Zakaria Abu Maamar, were killed in an air strike in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, a Hamas official said.
As Israel placed Gaza under total siege and called up hundreds of thousands of reservists in an unprecedented move, its soldiers went home to home in its hardest hit towns to collect the bodies of the men, women and children murdered when Hamas terrorists unleashed bloody terror in their shock weekend attack.
The southern Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Aza was ravaged by Hamas terrorists over the weekend, with at least 40 babies and young children there murdered — including some reportedly found beheaded.
The stench of bodies wafted through the air as soldiers went from house to house to take away the slain.
The bodies of Israeli residents and Hamas terrorists were scattered among the burned out houses and torched cars.
“You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms and how the terrorist kills them. It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre,” said Israeli Major General Itai Veruv as he escorted journalists through the scene.
“It is something that I never saw in my life. It’s something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places. It’s not something that happens in new history,” he said.
One soldier shouted to the media: “Tell the world what you saw here.”
In the town of Be’eri, where more than 100 bodies have been retrieved, volunteers in yellow vests and face masks carried the dead out of homes on stretchers.
With Post wires