Jerusalem (Reuters) – Israeli forces have found 800 shafts leading to Hamas’ vast subterranean network of tunnels and bunkers since a Gaza ground operation began on Oct 27, and have destroyed more than half of them, the military said on Sunday.

The Palestinian Islamist group said before the now eight-week-old war in the Gaza Strip that it had hundreds of kilometres of tunnels – a network comparable in size to the New York subway system – to protect and serve as operational bases.

That has made them prime targets for Israeli air strikes with penetrating munitions and army engineers using mapping robots and exploding gel that can be poured into the passages.

“The tunnel shafts were located in civilian areas, many of which were near or inside civilian buildings and structures, such as schools, kindergartens, mosques and playgrounds,” the military said in a statement on Sunday.

The statement, summarising anti-tunnel operations so far, followed near-daily accounts to the media by troops who said they uncovered access shafts in civilian sites.

The war’s civilian toll has increasingly worried world powers. Washington urged Israel to use caution on Saturday.

Of some 800 shafts discovered, the military said, 500 had been destroyed using a variety of operational methods, including by “detonation and by sealing off”. It added that “many miles” of main tunnel routes had also been destroyed.

Jerusalem (Reuters) – Even as it tries to recover hostages through indirect talks with Hamas and army operations in the Gaza Strip, Israel has been declaring some of the missing as dead in captivity, a measure designed to grant anxious relatives a measure of closure.

A three-person medical committee has been poring over videos from the Oct. 7 rampage by Hamas-led Palestinian gunmen in southern Israel for signs of lethal injuries among those abducted, and cross-referencing with the testimony of hostages freed during a week-long Gaza truce that ended on Friday.

That can suffice to determine that a hostage has died, even if no doctor has formally pronounced this over his or her body, said Hagar Mizrahi, a Health Ministry official who heads the panel created in response to a crisis now in its third month.

“Designation of death is never an easy matter, and certainly not in the situation embroiling us,” she told Israel’s Kan radio. Her committee, she said, addresses “the desire of the families of loved ones abducted to Gaza to know as much as possible”.

Of some 240 people kidnapped, 108 were freed by Hamas in return for the release by Israel of scores of Palestinian detainees as well as boosted humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza.

Since the truce expired, Israeli authorities have declared six civilians and an army colonel dead in captivity.

This has not been confirmed by Hamas. It has previously said dozens of hostages were killed in Israeli airstrikes, has threatened to execute hostages itself and suggested that some hostages were in the hands of other armed Palestinian factions.

Hostages have been kept incommunicado despite Israel’s calls on the Red Cross to arrange visits and verify their wellbeing.

Mizrahi said she and her fellow panelists – a forensic pathologist and a physical trauma clinician – have been watching clips shot by the Hamas attackers themselves, cellphone video by Palestinian spectators and CCTV footage of the hostage-taking “again and again, frame by frame”.

That has allowed them to map out life-threatening wounds and spot any cessation of breathing or other essential reflexes.

Additional considerations have been hostages’ rough handling by captors, the reduced chances of them getting adequate medical care in Gaza and accounts of deaths by former fellow hostages.

Religious Expertise

The panel has been consulting with a religious expert, she said, given Jewish laws that prevent a widow from remarrying unless her bereavement is formally recognised by authorities.

“We assemble the overall picture,” Mizrahi said, adding that every determination of death has to be unanimously agreed upon.

The risk of getting it wrong was laid bare in the case of Emily Hand, who went missing on Oct. 7 and whose father Tom was initially informed “unofficially” that she had been killed. The girl had in fact been taken hostage and was freed in the truce.

Being denied a burial may pose a psychological barrier for grieving kin, however.

Last week, the Israeli military – which has rabbinical and intelligence units scouring Gaza battlefields for information about the fate of lost soldiers, as well as remains of hostages — declared dead Shaked Gal, a conscript missing since Oct 7.

His mother Sigalit said in a Facebook post addressed to the 19-year-old that she would not observe the traditional Jewish mourning period for him “until your body is returned”.

Mizrahi said her panel had yet to encounter a family that refused to accept its determination, but was prepared for that:

“We are here to provide the professional side. We do not, God forbid, debate or confront the families regarding their decision, and we accept their choices with understanding.”

The military has recovered the bodies of one captive soldier and two civilian hostages, and freed one soldier in a rescue operation.

Gaza (Reuters) – Israeli war planes and artillery bombarded the south of the Gaza Strip on Saturday, hitting mosques, homes and close to a hospital, after the collapse of a truce in the nearly two-month-old war between Israel and Hamas militants

Residents feared the barrages were a prelude to an Israeli ground operation in the south of the Palestinian territory which would bottle them up in a shrinking area and possibly try to push them into neighbouring Egypt.

The Gaza health ministry said at least 193 Palestinians had been killed and 650 wounded since the truce ended on Friday morning – adding to the more than 15,000 Palestinian dead since the start of the war.

Israel has vowed to wipe out Hamas once and for all, saying that the Islamist group poses a threat to its very existence and it is acting against foe bent on its destruction.

Throughout Saturday morning, a steady stream of wounded people were carried into the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, with some people even receiving treatment laying on the floor,

The head of the International Red Cross said the renewed fighting was intense.

“It’s a new layer of destruction coming on top of massive, unparalleled destruction of critical infrastructure, of civilian houses and neighbourhoods,” Robert Mardini told Reuters in Dubai.

With conditions inside the Hamas-ruled enclave reaching “breaking point”, in Mardini’s words, the first aid trucks since the end of the truce entered Gaza through the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing on Saturday, Egyptian security and Red Crescent sources said.

A senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza’s civilians as the fighting resumes.

The warring sides blamed each other for the collapse of the seven-day truce, during which Hamas had released hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

Israel said on Saturday it had recalled a Mossad team from Qatar, host of indirect negotiations with Hamas, accusing the Palestinian faction of reneging on a deal which entailed the freeing of all children and women hostages.

The conflict broke out on Oct. 7 when Hamas militants crossed into southern Israel and killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in a rampage against kibbutzim and other communities. More than 200 hostages were taken back into Gaza.

Israel responded with a bombing campaign and ground offensive in the north which has destroyed large areas of Gaza in what has become the bloodiest episode of the decades-long wider Israel-Palestinian conflict.

South Targeted

The southern part of Gaza including Khan Rounis and Rafah was taking a pounding on Saturday. Residents said houses had been hit and three mosques destroyed in Khan Younis. Columns of smoke rose into the sky.

Displaced Gazans have been sheltering in Khan Younis and Rafah because of fighting in the north of the densely populated enclave, but residents said they feared Israeli troops were preparing to move on the south.

“This is the same tactic they used before entering Gaza and the north,” said Yamen, who gave only his first name.

Yamen fled to Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza from the north after Israel destroyed several districts there.

“Where to after Deir Al-Balah, after Khan Younis? I don’t know where I would take my wife and six children,” he said.

On Saturday morning, Israeli air strikes hit areas close to the Nasser Hospital six times, according to medics and witnesses.

The hospital is filled with thousands of displaced and hundreds of wounded, including many of those who had been evacuated from north Gaza hospitals.

“A night of horror,” said Samira, a mother of four. “It was one of the worst nights we spent in Khan Younis in the past six weeks since we arrived here,” she said. “We are so afraid they will enter Khan Younis.”

Among the dead on Saturday was the president of the territory’s Islamic University, killed along with his family in a bombing of a house in the northern Gaza Strip, health officials said.

In Deir Al-Balah, nine Palestinians, including children, were killed in an air strike, health officials said.

Harris Speech

The Israeli military said that in the last 24 hours combined attacks by its ground, air and naval forces had hit 400 militant targets and killed an unspecified number of Hamas fighters.

These included many in northern Gaza, some in a gunbattle at a mosque used by Islamic Jihad militants as a command post.

Leaflets dropped by Israel on eastern areas of Khan Younis ordered residents of four towns to evacuate – not to other areas in Khan Younis as in the past, but further south to Rafah.

Residents took to the road with belongings heaped up in carts, searching for shelter further west.

In southern Israel, rocket sirens sounded early on Saturday in communities near the border with Gaza, but there were no reports of serious damage or casualties.

Reuters could not confirm the battlefield accounts.

The truce that started on Nov. 24 had been extended twice. But after seven days during which women, children and foreign hostages were freed as well as a number of Palestinian prisoners, mediators failed to find a formula to release more.

Mediator Qatar said Israel’s renewed bombardment of Gaza had complicated matters. An Israeli official in Washington said it was a “very high priority” to get as many hostages released as possible but said: “We can negotiate while we still fight.”

Meanwhile U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said in Dubai on Saturday that when the present war ended, the Palestinian people in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank should ultimately be reunified under one governing entity.

In talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi on the sidelines of the COP28 climate summit, Harris also said that “under no circumstances” would the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, the besiegement of Gaza, or the redrawing of Gaza’s borders, a White House statement said.

Harris also made clear that Hamas could not control Gaza, saying this was untenable for Israel’s security as well as for the well-being of the Palestinian people.