“No electricity, no water, no gas”: Israel decided to drastically put pressure on Hamas by ordering, Monday October 9, through its Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, a “siege complete” of the Gaza Strip controlled by the Palestinian Islamist movement which launched an unprecedented attack on Saturday on the soil of the Hebrew state.

On the heels of Gallant’s announcement, Energy Minister Israel Katz ordered the “immediate cutoff” of the water supply to the Palestinian enclave, to which Israel supplies 10% of consumption annual.

Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers are now deployed around this thin coastal territory populated by 2.3 million Palestinians and controlled by Hamas since 2007.

Added to this blockade are incessant bombings by the Israeli army, which announced that it had regained “control” of the localities in the south of the country targeted during the assault launched two days earlier, even if “there “There are still attempts by Hamas and terrorists to cross the border to attack elsewhere in Israel,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an IDF spokesman. In forty-eight hours, “we mobilized more than 300,000 reservists, which has never been done before in such a short time,” he said.

” This is just the beginning “

“We are already at the heart of the campaign but this is only the beginning,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “What Hamas will experience will be difficult and terrible (…), we will defeat them with force, enormous force,” promised the head of government.

But Hamas warned Israel. “Every time our people are targeted without warning, it will result in the execution of one of the civilian hostages (…). The enemy does not understand humanitarian and ethical language, so we will speak to them in a language that they understand,” the Islamist movement threatened in a statement. More than a hundred people have been kidnapped in Israel by Hamas, according to the Israeli government.

So far, the war has left nearly 1,600 dead, according to official reports from both sides. On the Israeli side, more than 900 people have been killed since the start of the offensive. Israel’s health ministry also reported 2,616 injuries. On the Palestinian side, 687 people were killed and 3,727 injured, according to local authorities.

A number of nationals of other countries, some also having Israeli nationality, were killed in the Hamas offensive, including twelve Thais, ten Nepalese, eleven Americans, seven Argentinians, two Ukrainians, two Frenchmen, one Russian, one British, a Cambodian and a Canadian, according to the authorities of these countries.

The fear of a new front

The Israeli army also announced that it had killed “several armed suspects” who had infiltrated Israel from Lebanon. Lebanese Hezbollah, the bête noire of the Jewish state, claimed Monday to have bombed two Israeli barracks, in response to the death of three of its militants during bombings carried out on a border area in southern Lebanon. These clashes fuel fears of an escalation on a new front.

Germany, the United States, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, for their part, published a joint statement Monday evening, in which the five powers declared that they “will support Israel’s efforts to defend” and condemn “unambiguously Hamas”.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, warned Israel against an “indiscriminate” attack on civilians in Gaza, which “would only increase suffering and reinforce the spiral of violence in the region.”