Mapping the conflict in Israel and Gaza

Fighting in the Gaza Strip has escalated with what residents described as some of the most intense Israeli bombardment of the war, even as the enemies held what Washington called “very serious discussions” on a new truce.

According to analysis from the Institute for the Study of War and the AEI Critical Threats Project, Israeli forces had begun transitioning from clearing operations to holding operations in some areas of the northern Gaza Strip.

Bombing was at its most intense over the northern part of the Gaza Strip where orange flashes of explosions and black smoke could be seen as morning broke from across the fence in Israel. Planes roared overhead and the booms of air strikes thundered every few seconds, punctuated by rattling gunfire.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA said more than 60% of Gaza’s infrastructure was destroyed or damaged, with more than 90% of the 2.3 million population uprooted.

In the ground war, Israeli tanks advanced further into the southern city of Khan Younis and shelled a market area but met heavy resistance, residents said.

Thousands of Hamas fighters, based in tunnels, are waging guerrilla-style war against Israeli forces.

Since Israel’s bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to health officials in Hamas-ruled Gaza.

U.N. officials have warned of a humanitarian catastrophe. The World Food Programme says half of Gaza's population is starving and only 10% of the food required has entered Gaza since Oct. 7.

The pause in hostilities between Israel and Hamas — extended another two days on Monday — has given Gazans brief reprieve from seven weeks of near continuous Israeli bombardment across the Gaza Strip. More than 1.8 million people have been displaced from their homes since Israel’s campaign began in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

The bombardment has flattened swathes of northern Gaza and reduced entire neighbourhoods to rubble. Two-thirds of the enclave's population of 2.3 million have been displaced to the south.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 14,000 Gazans — roughly 40% of them under 18 — have been killed in Israel’s military operation.

After encircling northern Gaza with ground forces, the Israeli air force dropped leaflets in eastern areas of Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip telling people to evacuate to shelters for their own safety.

While the truce for exchanges of hostages and prisoners between Israel and Hamas still holds, a resumption of hostilities and an expected Israeli offensive in the south could compel hundreds of thousands who fled Gaza City to uproot yet again, along with residents of Khan Younis, a city of more than 400,000, compounding an already dire humanitarian crisis.

Khan Younis is located in the southern half of the Gaza Strip. Tens of thousands of people displaced from the north have already sought refuge there in schools and tents, causing severe overcrowding amid shortages of food and water.

The Nasser Hospital area in Khan Younis camp has become a focal point, housing numerous schools and facilities administered by the United Nations Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA).

Initially designed for educational purposes, these establishments have been repurposed as shelters since the war began.

The surge in displaced people seeking safety has led to overcrowding in these facilities. Those newly displaced from the northern regions and other areas affected by the conflict are finding refuge in makeshift tent camps positioned around the hospitals and schools.

U.N. shelters are accommodating far more people than their intended capacity and are unable to accommodate new arrivals. Overcrowding is contributing to the spread of diseases, including acute respiratory illness and diarrhoea, prompting environmental and health concerns.

On average, 160 people sheltering in UNRWA schools share a single toilet. In the Rafah logistics base, where more than 8,000 people have sought shelter, 400 people are sharing one toilet.

Shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicines have worsened in recent weeks as Israel allowed only some trucks of humanitarian supplies to cross into Gaza from Egypt.

Since the truce, some fuel has been distributed in the south to support food distribution and to restart generators at hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and shelters.

Two pipelines coming from Israel have been piping potable water into southern Gaza, according to the OCHA, but in the north, the main water desalination plant and Israeli pipelines have been out of service. Access to supply water to people in the north has been restricted for weeks. The risk of dehydration and of waterborne diseases from drinking unsafe water continues.

The start of the rainy season and the possibility of flooding increased fears that the densely populated enclave's sewage system will be overwhelmed and disease will spread.

Around 20 tons of solid waste is generated each day, with few if any facilities to process it. The U.N. reported sewage flowing in the streets in several areas in Rafah, in southern Gaza.

The lack of fuel has disrupted the collection of solid waste, which the World Health Organization said created an “environment conducive to the rapid and widespread proliferation of insects, rodents that can carry and transmit diseases”.

The United Nations human rights chief said that widespread outbreaks of disease and hunger seemed “inevitable” in Gaza after weeks of Israeli assault on the densely populated Palestinian enclave.

The World Health Organization has warned of “worrying trends” in disease spread in Gaza – where bombardments and a ground operation have disrupted the health system, access to clean water and caused people to crowd into shelters – saying there had been an unusually large number of cases of diarrhoea in the enclave. More than 33,551 cases have been reported since mid-October, the bulk of which among children under five years of age.

Israeli troops entered Gaza’s biggest hospital on Wednesday and were searching its rooms and basement, witnesses inside the complex said. The operation followed a days-long siege that caused global alarm over the fate of thousands of civilians trapped inside.

Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City has become the main target of the Israeli ground operation in northern Gaza. Israeli forces say the hospital sits atop tunnels housing a headquarters for the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas whose fighters are using patients as shields, a claim which Hamas denies.

The IDF has encircled the hospital complex on three sides, according to data from the Institute for the Study of War and AEI Critical Threats Project, a research group tracking IDF movements within Gaza. Witnesses described a situation that appeared calm, if tense, as Israeli troops moved between buildings carrying out searches.

The IDF said its operation in Al Shifa was “precise and targeted” in a “specified area” of the hospital. The complex includes many buildings, housing a maternity ward, chest and dialysis units, a surgery and an outpatient clinic.

In a post published Oct. 27, the IDF said Hamas had hidden underground military complexes beneath the hospital, including a command and control centre, used “to direct terrorist activities and rocket fire and to manufacture and store a variety of weapons and ammunition”.

The IDF has claimed Hamas uses hospitals throughout Gaza to conduct military operations and uses patients and medical staff as human shields or hostages, a claim Hamas denies.

On Monday, the IDF released video it said was taken within Rantisi Hospital in northern Gaza City, which it said showed weapons and explosives and a room where hostages may have been kept.

The IDF also released footage it said showed a group of men at the gates of al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, one of whom appeared to be carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Israel said it had killed “approximately 21 terrorists” at al-Quds in return fire after fighters shot from the hospital entrance.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Friday that one person was killed and 28 others, mostly children, were wounded in a shooting by Israeli forces at al-Quds. The group said a convoy sent to evacuate patients and staff had been unable to reach the hospital.

On Wednesday, a senior Israeli military official said soldiers had “already found weapons and other terror infrastructure” within Al Sharif hospital premises. “In the last hour, we saw concrete evidence that Hamas terrorists used the Shifa hospital as a terror headquarter,” he said.

Hamas denied this.

World attention has been focused on the fate of hundreds of patients trapped inside Al Shifa which lacks power to operate basic medical equipment, and the thousands of displaced civilians who had sought shelter there. Gaza officials say many patients including three newborn babies died in recent days as a result of Israel’s encirclement of the facility.

Israel has told civilians to leave and medics to send patients elsewhere. It says it has attempted to evacuate babies from the neonatal ward and left 300 litres of fuel to power emergency generators at the hospital entrance, but the offers were blocked by Hamas.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the Israeli military incursion into Al Shifa Hospital was “totally unacceptable”.

“Hospitals are not battlegrounds,” he told reporters in Geneva, adding that the WHO had lost touch with personnel at Shifa and more broadly had received no reports on the number of deaths and injuries in Gaza over the last three days.

Protests and public demonstrations — both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel — have rippled around the world over the war in Gaza, data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) shows, with fighting unabated in the sixth week since the deadly Hamas attacks on Israel.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have staged protests in London, Berlin, Paris, Ankara, Istanbul and Washington in the past weeks, calling for a ceasefire after Israel’s intense bombing and ground invasion that Gaza medical authorities say have killed more than 11,000 people, around 40% of them children.

Pro-Israel protestors have called for the release of hostages taken by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attacks across southern Israel, which killed around 1,200 people in the deadliest day in Israel’s 75 year history, according to Israel's tally. Another 240 were taken to Gaza as hostages.

ACLED’s data, which covers demonstrations between Oct. 7 and 27, records that most demonstrations have been peaceful, but about 5% have turned violent or been broken up by police or other security agencies.

The majority of demonstrations — about 86% — recorded by ACLED were pro-Palestinian, while a small minority were neutral, calling for peace and a ceasefire without taking an explicit pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian stance

The largest number of demonstrations it recorded globally were directly after Israeli defence forces ordered Gazans to evacuate the northern half of the enclave on Oct. 13 and after the controversial blast at the Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 17, which Hamas attributed to Israeli forces. Israel and many western nations have strongly disputed the claim Israel was responsible for the strike.

While protests in cities such as London, Berlin and Washington received most media attention in the West, most demonstrations recorded by ACLED were in the Middle East and North Africa, predominantly Islamic areas where protestors were overwhelming pro-Palestinian.

Demonstrations have been especially frequent in Yemen, Iran, Turkey and Morocco.

Across Europe, major cities have been rankled by protests and counter-protests between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel demonstrators, some of which turned violent.

In Berlin, ACLED reported hundreds of demonstrators were arrested during multiple protests during October, as pro-Palestinian protestors clashed with police.

In central Paris, thousands marched on Nov. 4 to call for a ceasefire with placards reading “Stop the cycle of violence” and “To do nothing, to say nothing is to be complicit.”

French authorities had banned some previous pro-Palestinian gatherings due to concerns about public disorder.

More than 300,000 pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched through central London on Saturday, with police arresting over 120 people as they sought to stop far-right counter-protesters from ambushing the main rally.

According to ACLED, the United States was “home to the highest number of counter-demonstrations involving opposing pro-Israel and pro-Palestine protestors.”

Pro-Palestinian marches in Washington have been among the biggest for any cause in recent years.

At U.S. universities, duelling groups of student protestors have faced each other in tense standoffs, and there have been reports of harassment and assaults of both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students.

Israel’s armed forces have encircled Gaza City — the largest city in the Gaza Strip — in their assault on Hamas, the military said.

The city in the north of the Gaza Strip has become the focus of the military campaign by Israel, which has vowed to annihilate the Palestinian Islamist militant group’s command structure.

On Monday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had reopened an evacuation route for Gazans fleeing south. IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus expressed hope that residents would do so, leaving northern Gaza relatively clear of civilians.

“Then we will continue to fight and take the fight to Hamas wherever they are,” Conricus said in a regular briefing. “Underground, above ground, we'll be less limited or restricted because of the presence of civilians, and we'll be able to dismantle Hamas.”

Since Israel ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza on Oct. 13, the IDF said they had dropped millions of pamphlets, conducted thousands of phone calls and used social media to tell Gazans to move south. Israel said at the time that more than 1 million people would be affected by the order. Hamas vowed to fight to the last drop of blood and told residents not to go.

Maps distributed by the IDF have directed Gazans to different areas of the southern part of the Gaza Strip. Pamphlets dropped in Gaza on Oct. 13 directed people to evacuate south of the Wadi Gaza, a coastal wetland in central Gaza. Other material shared by an IDF Arab media spokesperson on Oct. 16 showed a line far further south, near the northern border of the Khan Younis governorate.

Between those two lines is the Deir al-Balah governorate, an area that houses several U.N. refugee camps, including the Nuseirat, Bureij, Maghazi and Deir al-Balah camps. The camps housed more than 190,000 registered refugees in 2023.

Damage analysis of satellite images of refugee camps both north and south of the Wadi Gaza shows evidence of significant destruction since Israel’s bombing campaign began. In northern Gaza, Israeli air strikes last week devastated parts of Jabalia camp, flattening buildings in a densely populated area where, Palestinian authorities say, at least 195 civilians were killed and scores more are still missing.

Despite Israel’s call to evacuate the north of the enclave, Israeli warplanes have continued to hit sites in southern Gaza, spreading fear among the evacuees that they are just as vulnerable there as they were in their homes in the north.

The IDF has said that, even if Hamas’s main power centre is in Gaza City, it is nonetheless entrenched among the civilian population across the whole enclave.

“Wherever a Hamas target arises, the IDF will strike at it in order to thwart the terrorist capabilities of the group, while taking feasible precautions to mitigate the harm to uninvolved civilians,” the military said on Oct. 25.

On Monday, U.N. agency leaders demanded a humanitarian ceasefire, as health authorities in the enclave said the death toll from Israeli strikes now exceeded 10,000. Among those, 4,104 were children.

After over three weeks of heavy air strikes, Israeli ground forces have entered Gaza. Observers of Israel’s military strategy, including former commanders and combat veterans, say the approach taken is unlike previous assaults on Gaza, in 2008, 2014 and 2021.

Backed by helicopters and drones, dozens of tanks and armoured personnel carriers have pushed into the semi-rural area to the north of Gaza City but have proceeded slowly.

“It’s inch by inch, metre by metre, trying to avoid casualties and trying to kill as much as possible Hamas terrorists,” Amos Yadlin, former chief of Israel's military intelligence, told reporters.

The slow attack was aimed at securing Israeli forces’ flanks and the army also hoped they could bait Hamas militants to come out of tunnels or denser urban areas and engage Israeli forces in open areas where they could be more easily killed, said another former senior Israel military commander, who declined to be named.

Israeli forces have not yet confronted Hamas’ deep network of tunnels head-on, but have engaged with militants at entrances to the vast underground network.

On Oct. 29, the Israeli military said its forces operating adjacent to the Erez crossing confronted and killed “a number of terrorists exiting the shaft of a tunnel in the Gaza Strip”.

Security sources describe Gaza’s tunnel network as an underground city which includes rocket launching sites, command centres and attack paths targeting Israel forces.

Omri Attar, a reserve major in a special operations brigade, said ground troops were also trained to locate and seal off the openings to tunnels and other special units within the Combat Engineering Corps would deal with any fighting inside the tunnels.

Ben Milch, who was an Israeli commander in 2014 with the Combat Engineering Corps and tasked with destroying tunnels, said their mission at that time was not to go more than two kilometres into the network.

Although the military has refused to say exactly where troops are operating, images on social media appear to show Israeli tanks on the road south of Gaza City. This line may threaten Salah Ad Deen Road, the main transport artery that runs the length of the Gaza Strip. Cutting it off would effectively split Gaza in two and isolate Gaza City from the south.

The tanks met resistance on the road, according to militants and residents. The Israeli military said it would not detail the positions of their forces.

The Israeli Prime Minister on Saturday vowed to “destroy the enemy above ground and below ground” but stopped short of calling the ground incursion a full scale invasion.

In the three weeks since Hamas killed 1,400 people and took more than 200 hostages during an attack on Israel, retaliatory air strikes have pulverized large swathes of Gaza, killing more than 8,000 people including more than 3,000 children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, and cutting off most supplies of food, medicine and fuel.

The aerial bombardment of Gaza, which has caused extensive damage across the enclave, has continued with no signs of stopping.

Those bombardments and initial actions by the special forces units followed by broader incursions by ground troops in the past two days are aimed at keeping up the pressure on Hamas, while also keeping the door open for a deal over the hostages held by Hamas.

“The offensive activity will continue with determination and intensify according to the phases of the war and its goals,” Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told a regular briefing on Monday.

Severe water shortages in Gaza following Israel’s total blockade of the enclave have “become a matter of life and death,” according to the United Nations.

Following the deadly Hamas rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, which killed more than 1,300 people, Israel ordered an immediate cut-off of the country’s water supplies to the Gaza Strip.

Desperate to get some drinking water, some people in Gaza have begun digging wells in areas adjacent to the sea or were relying on salty tap water from Gaza's only aquifer, which is contaminated with sewage and seawater.

The U.N. relief agency for Palestinian refugees said on Monday a quarter of a million people had been moved to shelters in 24 hours, the majority of which are U.N. schools where “clean water has actually run out.”

On Sunday, Israel’s energy minister said that a decision to renew water supplies to parts of southern Gaza was agreed on between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden.

On Monday, Hamas said that Israel had yet to resume water supplies for the Gaza Strip despite pledging to do so, while an Israeli official responded that some water was being provided to an area in the south of the enclave.

Prior to the latest violence, Gaza’s water supply was already unable to meet the World Health Organization’s minimum requirement for daily per capita water consumption.

The Gaza Strip’s only natural source of water is the Coastal Aquifer Basin, which runs along the eastern Mediterranean coast from the northern Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, through Gaza and into Israel.

A 2020 study in the journal “Water” found the quality of the groundwater in the aquifer had “deteriorated rapidly,” in large part because it had been pumped out to meet the demands of Gaza’s large population quicker than it could be replaced by rainwater.

The aquifer is also polluted by untreated wastewater, leaving 96.2% of household water from the aquifer undrinkable, according to a 2020 report from B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

As a result, 97% of Gazans rely on unregulated private water tankers and small-scale, often solar-powered desalination plants for drinking water, according to figures from the World Bank.

Three major desalination plants in Gaza have all ceased operation due to power restrictions imposed by Israel’s blockade.

That still leaves some smaller desalination operations, but the quality of water treatment in those plants can be spotty. According to a 2021 study, 79% of desalination plants in Gaza are unlicensed and an average of 12% of desalinated water samples tested still showed dangerous levels of contamination.

The U.N. said Gaza desperately needed fuel to restart pumping and treatment plants.

“We need to truck fuel into Gaza now. Fuel is the only way for people to have safe drinking water. If not, people will start dying of severe dehydration … Water is now the last remaining lifeline,” the U.N. said.

While the Israeli military began raids into the Gaza Strip on Friday with tank-backed troops, violence along Israel’s border with Lebanon and within the West Bank has also been escalating.

In the West Bank, Israeli security forces killed nine Palestinians and wounded dozens in confrontations on Friday, according to reports from the Palestinian health ministry. The Israeli military has said it is prepared for an escalation in the West Bank and is on high alert.

Data from the Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project, which has been tracking incidents across the region, indicated multiple violent clashes and protest marches across the West Bank on Friday.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project reported clashes between the Israeli military and armed Palestinian groups, including Palestine Islamic Jihad affiliates, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Hamas, as well as between Israeli security forces and protesters, which had resulted in several casualties.

Along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, the Israeli military and Lebanese militia Hezbollah have been trading fire in border clashes.

Israeli shelling struck a Lebanese army observation post on Friday, three sources in Lebanon told Reuters. The Israeli military warned of a suspected armed infiltration and said it was responding with artillery fire. Israel later ruled out that any incursion had occurred.

On Friday, a Reuters video journalist, Issam Abdallah, was killed and six other journalists injured in southern Lebanon when missiles fired from the direction of Israel struck them, according to a Reuters videographer who was at the scene.

The Israeli army said on Saturday it was investigating.

“We are aware of the incident with the Reuters journalist,” army spokesman Lt Col Richard Hecht told a regular briefing. “We are looking into it. [...] It's a tragic thing,” he said.

Lebanon's Hezbollah on Saturday targeted five Israeli outposts in the disputed Shebaa Farms area on the Lebanese-Israeli border with guided missiles and mortar shells, the militia group said in a statement.

A Reuters witness had earlier reported heavy shelling of Israeli outposts in the area as well as the sound of gunfire. Residents of five northern Israeli villagers were ordered to shelters on Saturday due to a possible armed infiltration from Lebanon, Israel's Kan radio said.

On Friday, the Israel military ordered over a million civilians living in the northern half of Gaza to evacuate within 24 hours. Israeli forces have been massing at the border, and tanks and infantry units carried out the first ground attacks inside Gaza earlier on Friday.

The United Nations spokesperson said Israel's call for Gaza civilians to leave was impossible to carry out “without devastating humanitarian consequences.” The comments prompted a rebuke from Israel which said the U.N. should condemn Hamas and support Israel's right to self-defence.

The evacuation area includes the enclave’s biggest metropolitan area, Gaza City, which is home to over 645,000 people. The Israeli military told civilians to “evacuate south for your own safety and the safety of your families and distance yourself from Hamas terrorists who are using you as human shields.”

The order did not tell Gazans where they should go, and refugee camps in the south of the enclave are already much more crowded than those in the north.

According to projected population figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 1.19 million people live in the region now under evacuation order.

With power supplies cut and food and water in the Palestinian enclave running short after a week of retaliatory air strikes and a full Israeli blockade, the U.N. said Gaza's civilians were in an impossible situation.

“The noose around the civilian population in Gaza is tightening. How are 1.1 million people supposed to move across a densely populated warzone in less than 24 hours?” U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths wrote on social media.

In a post on social media site X Friday evening, the Israeli Defense Forces said “The IDF will protect the people of Israel. Hamas indiscriminately slaughtered innocent Israeli civilians. Now Hamas is hiding behind the people in Gaza. That's why we're asking them to move.”

There are only two major roads leading from northern Gaza to the evacuation zone. Israel announced overnight that it would guarantee the safety of Gazans fleeing the area on those roads until 4:00 p.m. Saturday. A perennial shortage of cars and dwindling fuel supplies under the blockade make it difficult for Gazans to travel.

Both crossing points out of Gaza have been closed since Israel’s blockade.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday local health authorities in Gaza had informed it that it was impossible to evacuate vulnerable hospital patients.

The WHO said hospitals in the south of the Gaza Strip were overflowing, while the two major hospitals in the north had exceeded their combined 760-bed capacity.

In defiance of the Israeli order, mosques in Gaza broadcast messages telling residents to stay put on Friday.

Hamas, which controls the territory, vowed to fight until the last drop of blood. The Israeli military said a significant number of Gazans had begun moving southwards “to save themselves”.

Several thousand residents could be seen on roads heading towards the evacuation zone on Friday, but it was impossible to tell their numbers. Many other Gazans said they would not go.

Following Saturday’s surprise attack by Hamas militants, Israel has retaliated by intensifying its siege of Gaza, cutting off water, food and power, while an intense new assault from the air may be a prelude for a wider ground invasion.

Conditions look worse than at any point since Palestinian refugees flocked to Gaza during the 1948 fighting when Israel was founded. More than 130,000 have fled their homes as air strikes pound the crowded enclave, killing at least 560.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. With over 2 million people living in an area of about 365 kms square, it is roughly as dense as London, England. The population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2020 from 1.1 to 2 million. There are over 2.2 million people living there today.

The majority of people in Gaza live in poverty. According to the World Food Programme, 63% are food insecure. The “total blockade” imposed by Israel this week has further threatened dwindling supplies of food and medicine.

The population is overwhelmingly young. The median age for both men and women is 18 years old and about 65% of the population is under the age of 24.

Since Saturday’s attack, Israel has cut off electricity supplies into Gaza. A looming fuel shortage means private generators as well as the enclave's own power station, which provides about four hours of electricity a day, will struggle to function.

For years, Gaza has had insufficient energy supplies to meet demand.

Further energy cuts mean residents cannot recharge phones, so are cut off from news of each other and events.

Data from NetBlocks showed overall internet connectivity in Gaza has slumped since the attack amid Israeli disruptions to power and communications in the region.

By Tuesday, Israel had reclaimed control of the Gaza border by pounding the enclave with the fiercest air strikes in the 75-year history of its conflict with the Palestinians. The Israeli Air Force had posted dozens of videos of strikes against what it claimed were military targets in Gaza.

In his address to the nation Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told residents of Gaza, “Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”

Israeli military phone messages have warned people to leave some areas, indicating a new ground attack that could eclipse previous bouts of destructive warfare in the dense concrete townships that grew up in Gaza's original tented refugee camps.

“Where should we go? Where should we go?” asked 55-year-old Mohammad Brais.

He had fled his home near a possible front line to shelter at his shop – only for that to get hit in one of the hundreds of air and artillery strikes already pounding Gaza.

A careful campaign of deception ensured Israel was caught off guard as the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched a devastating attack at dawn on Saturday during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah.

The assault - the worst breach in Israel's defences since Arab armies waged war in 1973 - saw Hamas gunmen kill hundreds of Israelis after breaching security barriers under the cover of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza.

Here is how the attack and Israel’s response unfolded:

At about 6:30 a.m. (0430 GMT), Hamas fired a huge barrage of rockets across southern Israel, with sirens heard as far away as Tel Aviv.

The militant group said it had fired 3,000 rockets in a first barrage. Israel's military said 2,500 rockets were fired.

Smoke billowed over residential Israeli areas and people sheltered behind buildings as sirens sounded overhead. At least one woman was reported killed by the rockets, which reached cities as far as Jerusalem.

The barrage served as cover for an unprecedented, multi-pronged infiltration of fighters, with the Israeli military saying at 7:40 a.m. (0540 GMT) that Palestinian gunmen had crossed into Israel.

Israeli TV channels said on Monday that the death toll from the Hamas attack had climbed to 900.

Hamas deployed a force of about 1,000 fighters, organising them into specialised units, a source close to the group told Reuters.

Most fighters crossed through breaches in land security barriers separating Gaza and Israel. But at least one was filmed crossing on a powered parachute while a motorboat was filmed heading to Zikim, an Israeli coastal town and military base.

Video issued by Hamas showed fighters breaching the security fences, with the dim light and low sun suggesting it was at around the time of the rocket barrage.

Hundreds of Hamas fighters were killed inside Israel and dozens more captured.

The Israeli air force said it had targeted thousands of locations in Gaza since the invasion, including three rocket launchers directed at Israel, a mosque in Shejaiya where militants were operating and 21 high-rise buildings that served militant activity. Israeli air strikes also hit housing blocks, tunnels and homes of Hamas officials in Gaza, killing more than 400 people, including 20 children.

“The price the Gaza Strip will pay will be a very heavy one that will change reality for generations,” Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said in the town of Ofakim, which suffered casualties and had hostages taken.

By Monday afternoon, Hamas said more than 500 people had been killed, 2,700 wounded and 80,000 displaced in Gaza by the hundreds of strikes from Israeli warplanes, drones, helicopters and artillery cannon. Gaza has no protected shelters designated for times of war.

Beyond blockaded Gaza, Israeli forces and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah militia exchanged artillery and rocket fire, while in Egypt, two Israeli tourists were shot dead along with a guide.

Appeals for restraint came from around the world, though Western nations largely stood by Israel while Iran, Hezbollah and protesters in various Middle Eastern nations lauded Hamas.