More than 1,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, health ministry announces
The health ministry in the Gaza Strip has said Israeli attacks have killed 1,055 Palestinians and wounded 5,184.
The French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said 20 arrests had been made in France over antisemitic acts and threats since the weekend. Visiting a Jewish school in Sarcelles, north of Paris, on Wednesday morning, he said: “It’s important that all French Jewish people know they are protected.”
France has stepped up security around 500 sites including Jewish schools, synagogues and cultural centres. Darmanin said police protecting those sites had reported 50 antisemitic attacks, “which shows both the efficiency of the measures, but also the threat which weighs on French Jewish people.”
He had previously said the antisemitic attacks in France since the weekend included people gathering in large numbers in front of synagogues shouting threats, drones with cameras entering school playgrounds, and graffiti, verbal abuse and threatening letters.
Here is our full report on the killings in Kfar Aza:
In Kfar Aza, no one was too old, too young or too weak for slaughter. It took the Israeli army half a day to reach the kibbutz of 750 people in southern Israel, and fighting continued there for three days. In that time, Hamas gunmen killed and mutilated dozens of civilian residents.
“Mothers, fathers, babies, young families killed in their beds, in the protection room, in the dining room, in their garden,” Maj Gen Itai Veruv, of the Israel Defence Forces, told the BBC as his troops searched homes for bodies of victims. “It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.”
The kibbutz was one of the first Israeli settlements reached by Hamas militants when they launched an assault early on Saturday morning.
The community had a security team, and houses had safe rooms, but they – like the highest echelons of the Israeli army and government – were not prepared for the wave of attackers racing out of the breached Gaza.
