Israel-Palestine conflict: Death toll in Israel touches 1200, 900 killed on Gaza

The Israeli military has said hundreds of thousands of troops are near the Gaza border.

The military said troops are "ready to execute the mission we have been given," BBC News reported.

More than 123,000 people have been internally displaced in Gaza as a result of ongoing Israeli attacks, said the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Monday.

Four large residential towers in Gaza City were destroyed, along with houses and residential buildings as a result of Israeli airstrikes and shelling.

Six healthcare workers have been killed and four others injured, with seven healthcare facilities and nine ambulances damaged, said the office.

Damage to water, sanitation and hygiene facilities has undermined services to more than 400,000 people in Gaza. The Gaza Power Plant is now the only source of electricity and could run out of fuel within days, it warned.

What is Hamas in the context of Oct 7, 2023 attack on Israel

Hamas, the Palestine Islamist group which governs Gaza and attacked Israel on Oct 7, 2023, is an offshoot of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s.

The militant group defeated its political rival Fatah (which officially renounced violence) in the 2006 elections and took over the Gaza Strip, a  41-km-long and 10-km-wide territory between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, inhabited by about  2.3 million people in one of the most densely populated regions of the world. Since 2006, Hamas has been ruling the Gaza Strip without elections.

The United States and European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization which believes in violence as a means to liberate Palestinian territories from Israel and propagates the eradication of the state of Israel.

According to American think tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Iran provides it with material and financial support, and Turkey reportedly harbours some of its top leaders.

Organisations like Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and militant group with strong presence in southern Lebanon, also share a common goal with Hamas and hence during the ongoing conflict has fired a barrage of rockets into Israel inviting retalitaion from the latter. Hezbollah is also designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States and U.S.-allied Gulf Arab states including Saudi Arabia.

On Oct 7, 2023 (Saturday) when the Israelis were nearing the end of their seven-day-long Jewish festival of Sukkot, Hamas mounted a surprise attack on southern Israel launching over 5000 rockets decimating buildings, killing hundreds of people by the strikes and infiltrating on a festival across the Gaza border, taking innocent hostages of young women, men, children and families besides killing many.

Calling it their 9/11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a war on Hamas, launching a massive offensive that killed many Palestinians.

According to CFR, Hamas’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, said the group undertook its assault because of Israel’s long-running blockade of Gaza, its occupation of Palestinian lands, and its alleged crimes against Muslims, including the desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.