By Jonah Mandel with Mai Yaghi in Gaza City

JERUSALEM – Israel said it recaptured Gaza border areas from Hamas militants as the war’s death toll passed 3,000 on Tuesday (10), the fourth day of fierce fighting since the Islamists launched a surprise attack.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Israel’s military campaign following Saturday’s onslaught is only the start of a sustained war to destroy Hamas and “change the Middle East”.

Fears of a regional conflagration have surged ahead of an expected Israeli ground incursion into Gaza, the crowded, impoverished enclave from where Hamas launched its land, air and sea attack on the Jewish Sabbath.

The death toll in Israel has surged above 900 from the worst attack in the country’s 75-year history, while Gaza officials have reported 765 people killed so far, and Israel’s army said the bodies of roughly 1,500 militants had been found.

Hamas gunmen killed more than 100 people in the kibbutz of Beeri alone, said Moti Bukjin, a volunteer with the charity Zaka that recovers bodies in accordance with Jewish law.

Netanyahu compared the large-scale slaughter of Israeli civilians to atrocities committed by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, when they controlled vast swathes of Syria and Iraq.

“Hamas terrorists bound, burned and executed children,” Netanyahu said in a televised address to the grieving nation late Monday (9). “They are savages. Hamas is ISIS.”

The veteran leader at the helm of Israel’s hard-right coalition also called for an “emergency government of national unity” after his administration’s proposal for judicial reforms split the nation and even its military this year.

The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, began its operation saying it aimed to “end all the crimes of the occupation (Israel). Their time for rampaging without being held accountable is over.”

The Israeli army has called up 300,000 reservists for its ‘Swords of Iron’ campaign and massed tanks and other heavy armour both near Gaza and on the northern border with Lebanon, where exchanges of fire continued.

The military said its forces had largely reclaimed the embattled south and the border around Gaza, and dislodged holdout Hamas fighters from more than a dozen towns and kibbutzim.

“Around 1,500 bodies of Hamas (fighters) have been found in Israel around the Gaza Strip,” said army spokesman Richard Hecht, adding security forces had “more or less restored control over the border” with the enclave.

Key ally the United States – which reported 11 of its own citizens killed, and more missing – said it was taking seriously Hamas threats to execute hostages.

The White House said President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were to speak with Netanyahu Tuesday morning.

European Union foreign ministers were to hold an emergency meeting. Ahead of their talks, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called on the Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank, to “distance yourself from this terror,” after the Hamas assault.

Western powers and many other nations have reported citizens killed, abducted or missing. These include: Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, Nepal, Panama, Paraguay, Russia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Ukraine.

Hamas has held around 150 hostages since its ground incursion, among them children, elderly and young people who were captured at a music festival where around 270 died.

On Monday, Hamas warned it would start killing hostages every time Israel launches a strike on a civilian target in Gaza without warning.

Fear and chaos reigned among the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the coastal territory that has been hammered by thousands of Israeli bombs.

For the third time in 24 hours an Israeli air strike hit Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s only one not controlled by Israel, an AFP photographer and an NGO said.

A distraught man was seen carrying the shrouded body of a child in Khan Yunis, in the south of the enclave, where other remains were piled onto the back of pickup trucks.

There were similar scenes in the kibbutz of Kfar Aza, where Israeli soldiers carried away the dead in black body bags.

The tension was felt on the deserted streets of Jerusalem, after it was targeted by Hamas rocket fire.

“Israeli people they are scared of the Arabs and the Arabs are scared of the Jews… everybody is scared of each other,” said Ahmed Karkash, a shop owner in the Old City.

In Gaza City, aerial footage shot by AFP showed the scale of the destruction, with entire building blocks reduced to rubble.

One resident, Muhammad Najib, 70, said he fled his home Monday after receiving an Israeli warning to evacuate and returned on Tuesday to a “terrifying scene” in his Al-Rimal neighbourhood.

“The entire area was devastated, a large number of houses were completely destroyed,” he said. “What is the fault of the children and the women?”

Four Palestinian journalists were killed in Israeli air strikes on Gaza City, media unions and officials said.

Israel on Monday imposed a total siege on Gaza, which it has blockaded for years, cutting off the water supply, food, electricity and other essential supplies.

UN human rights chief Volker Turk said Tuesday that imposing “sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival is prohibited under international humanitarian law”.

The United Nations said more than 187,500 people had been displaced inside the Gaza Strip, with most taking shelter in UN schools.

Israel has been left reeling by Hamas’s unprecedented ground, air and sea assault that began with thousands of rockets, likening it to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

In the aftermath, soldiers who were on guard duty along the hi-tech security barrier around the Gaza Strip have recounted how the massive attack began with an effort to cripple observation cameras and communications.

“They took us by surprise and we weren’t ready for it… and (there was) no intelligence at all,” a lookout soldier said in testimony posted on Instagram.

Washington has pledged to send more munitions and military equipment to back Israel. It deployed an aircraft carrier group to the eastern Mediterranean, amid fears of a wider war.

The White House said there was no intention to put US boots on the ground, while also condemning the “ISIS-level savagery” of the Hamas attack.

Israel faced the threat of a multi-front war after three days of clashes with militants from the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement on the northern border with Lebanon

Mourners in the southern Lebanese village of Khirbet Selm carried two caskets, draped in yellow Hezbollah flags, with the bodies of two fighters it said were killed in Israeli strikes a day earlier. A third fighter was also killed, the Iran-backed group said.

On Tuesday, a fresh salvo of rockets was fired from south Lebanon towards Israel, Lebanese state media said. Israel retaliated with artillery fire, its army said.

“It’s like a state of war,” said Yaakov Regev, sipping coffee at a petrol station in northern Israel, a few kilometres from the Lebanon border.

Unrest has also surged in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where 15 Palestinians have been killed since Saturday.

Iran – openly committed to Israel’s destruction — has praised the Hamas attack but repeatedly denied playing any role in it.

Global powers and regional governments including Egypt, Turkey and Gulf states have engaged in frantic diplomacy seeking to prevent any further escalation.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas that the kingdom was working to ensure the conflict does not spread across the region, state media said.

– Agence France-Presse