Rehovot (Reuters) – Jamal Warraqi was among the first emergency rescuers to reach kibbutz Be’eri after Hamas gunmen rampaged through the community in southern Israel on Oct. 7, and the sight of slaughtered families and children is still seared into his memory.

More than a month later, the volunteer first responder remains visibly shaken as he recounts his rush to Be’eri in an ambulance and the bodies lying in the streets along the way.

Unlike most emergency workers called out that day, Warraqi is a Muslim Israeli Arab. He found his experience of Oct. 7 profoundly distressing, but says it also strengthened his belief that human beings must “stop hatred” and learn to live together.

Warraqi is a volunteer for Zaka, a non-governmental rescue and recovery service. Founded in 1995, Zaka is comprised mostly of ultra-religious Jews committed to ensuring that as much of the human body of every victim is buried in accordance with Jewish law. It also has Christian, Druze and Muslim volunteers.

“I saw families, they were slaughtered, a lot of families,” Warraqi told Reuters, standing next to his ambulance.

“I saw a father and mom with three kids, they were tied hands up, hands back … as they were put on their knees in front of each other, then they got shot in the head.”

“When you see such a thing… you just start imagining what happened in there, what, how did they react, who was got killed first, the kids or the parents.”

In the peaceful and leafy Be’eri community, houses were burnt to the ground and families killed in their own houses with a brutality that Warraqi says “has nothing to do with Islam”.

“Our religion, as a proud Arabic Muslim Israeli guy, I’m saying that has nothing to do with our religion,” Warraqi said.

Be’eri was among the hardest hit communities by the Hamas assault on Oct. 7, which Israeli officials say killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians gunned down in their own homes, on the streets or at a dance festival. The attack was the deadliest in Israel’s 75-year-old history.

Surviving residents were eventually evacuated and Israel has since launched a devastating bombardment and ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza that has killed more than 11,500 people.

Warraqi said many Muslims were also killed in the assault, recalling how he took care of two Arab women wearing hijab, shot by the attackers, and three Arab bus drivers from East Jerusalem who got shot in the head.

“That means that they’re (Hamas) not doing this for the country or for religion, they’re just doing this for the hatred,” he said.

Warraqi is still hopeful that Jews, Arabs, Christians and Muslims can learn to live together in Israel, saying “we are all the same”.

“I think Israel learned today how to die together. Now it’s time to learn how to live together … We have to take care of this and we have to stop hatred and start living together.”

Gaza/Jerusalem (Reuters) – Israel ordered civilians to leave four towns in the southern part of the Gaza Strip on Thursday, raising fears its war against Hamas could spread to areas it had told people were safe.

In the north of the Hamas-ruled Palestinian enclave, Israel said its forces were still present at Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al Shifa, but gave no further details of their operations since the previous day when they entered the facility culminating a days-long siege.

Reuters was unable to verify the situation at Shifa on Thursday morning, having lost contact with doctors inside it since Wednesday.

Leaflets dropped overnight from aircraft told civilians to leave the towns of Bani Shuhaila, Khuzaa, Abassan and Qarara, on the eastern edge of Khan Younis, the main southern city. The towns, collectively home to more than 100,000 people in peacetime, are now sheltering tens of thousands more who fled other areas.

“The acts of Hamas terrorist group require the defence forces to act against them in the areas of your residence,” the leaflets said. “For your safety, you need to evacuate your places of residence immediately and head to known shelters.”

Residents said the area came under heavy bombardment overnight.

Israel has already ordered the evacuation of the entire northern half of Gaza before sending in its ground forces at the end of October. Long processions of people clutching just a few possessions have made their way south each day under the eyes of Israeli soldiers during six-hour “tactical pauses” to allow residents to leave.

The United Nations says around two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless, most of them sheltering in towns in the south, since Israel began retaliation against Hamas for a deadly rampage in southern Israeli towns.

Hamas militants burst through the fence around Gaza on Oct. 7 in an assault that Israel says killed 1,200 people in the deadliest day in its history. Around 240 hostages were dragged back to Gaza.

Since then, Israel has pounded Gaza with air strikes and cut off food and fuel. Gaza health authorities deemed reliable by the United Nations say more than 11,000 people have been confirmed killed, more than 40% of them children, with many more feared trapped under rubble of bombed out homes.

Communications Cut

The situation on the second day of Israel’s operation in Al Shifa hospital was impossible to confirm, with communications cut off since Wednesday afternoon.

The plight of the hospital had drawn international alarm, with hundreds of patients and thousands of other displaced civilians trapped inside without fuel, oxygen or basic supplies.

Medics said dozens of patients had died in recent says as a result of Israel’s siege, including three newborn babies in incubators that lost power.

A day after entering Shifa, Israel had yet to produce evidence showing what it had claimed was a vast Hamas headquarters in tunnels beneath the facility, which it had said justified treating it as a military target.

Israel released a video in which a soldier toured a hospital building, showing three bags with guns and flak jackets he said had been found stashed there, as well as several other rifles in a closet, and a laptop computer.

Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch who now works as a visiting professor at Princeton, said on social media platform X: “Israel will have to come up with a lot more than a handful of ‘grab and go’ rifles to justify shutting down northern Gaza’s hospitals with its enormous cost for a civilian population with urgent medical needs.”

Hamas said the video was staged. Other Palestinians said that even on its face it depicted nothing like the vast underground militant headquarters complex that Israel had claimed was inside the compound.

“These are weak pretexts. There is nothing for the resistance inside medical institutions,” said Dr Nahed Abu Taaema, the director of the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, who said medics were alarmed for their colleagues at Shifa after losing contact with them since Wednesday.

The Israelis “claimed that there were command centers in Al Shifa and when they then didn’t find anything they stood up ashamed in front of the world, so they had to make some pretexts for the lies they previously published,” he said.

He said he was very concerned about his colleagues and patients in Shifa because they were exposed to “imminent danger”.

“The smell of death is everywhere as martyrs’ bodies are scattered everywhere in the yards and no one can bury them,” he

said.

Attention was focused anew on Thursday on Israel’s future plans for Gaza after its president, Isaac Herzog told Britain’s Financial Times newspaper that a “very strong force” may need to remain there for the near future to prevent the Hamas militant group re-emerging after the war.

U.S. President Joe Biden warned on Wednesday that occupying Gaza would be “a big mistake” for Israel.

Jerusalem (Reuters) – The families of Israeli hostages and thousands of their supporters arrived in Jerusalem on Saturday at the end of a five-day march to confront the government over the plight of those taken captive by Hamas in Gaza.

An estimated 20,000 marchers, including well-wishers who joined the procession along the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, want to put pressure on the government “to do everything they can to bring the hostages back”, said Noam Alon, 25, clutching a photograph of his abducted girlfriend, Inbar.

“We are expecting them to meet with us, we are expecting them to tell us how they are going to do it,” he said. “We cannot wait any longer, so we are demand(ing) them to do that now, to pay any price to bring the hostages back.”

Around 240 people – from babies to grandparents and including foreign nationals – are believed to be in the Gaza Strip after being taken hostage by the Islamist group during an Oct. 7 raid on southern Israeli villages and army bases in which 1,200 people were killed.

Many relatives and friends of the missing fear they will come to harm in Israeli attacks on Gaza designed to destroy Hamas. The government says the offensive improves the chances of recovering hostages, perhaps via a mediated prisoner exchange.

“I feel that people think that there is time, but for babies and for elderly people with difficult complex needs, there’s no time, time is running out rapidly,” said London-based artist Sharone Lifschitz, whose 83-year-old father was abducted.

Negotiations

Many Israelis blame their government for being blindsided by the Hamas assault.

Among those who marched to Jerusalem was centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid, who has been mostly supportive of the war but has demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Miki Zohar, a member of Netanyahu’s cabinet and party, was heckled on Friday when he visited the marchers at a rest stop.

Hamas, which in the early days of the war threatened to execute hostages in retaliation for Israeli air strikes, has since said some of the hostages have been killed in attacks on Gaza.

That has stoked the anxiety of campaigners and relatives calling on the Israeli government to speed up any prisoner swap, and frustration with Netanyahu’s insistence that discretion is required around the Qatari- and Egyptian-mediated negotiations.

“It’s impossible that there are 240 kidnapped people and the government — our government — isn’t talking to (the relatives), isn’t telling them what’s going on, what’s on the table, what’s on offer, what are the reasons for and against. Nothing,” said campaigner Stevie Kerem.

Despite the exhaustion and frustration on display, one marcher allowed herself a note of optimism.

“I’m happy with the fact that we have the whole of Israel around us,” said Meirav Leshem-Gonen, whose daughter Romi, 23, is among the hostages. “This is what will count in the end.”