The terrorist group Hamas has fired more than 500 rockets aimed at Israel but that failed to reach their target, instead falling on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, according to Israel’s military.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said that since the start of the war on Oct. 7, it has “identified about 550 failed launches fired by Hamas that landed inside the Gaza Strip.”
“The Hamas terrorist organization uses the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields, and launches rockets from civilian infrastructure, areas, and buildings in the Gaza Strip,” the IDF said in a statement on Saturday.
In its online statement, the IDF shared video footage showing some of the failed launches, as well as an infographic showing the Gazan impact sites of Hamas’s failed rockets.
It is unclear how many of the 3,785 Palestinian deaths reported by the Hamas-backed Gaza Health Ministry on Oct. 19 are a result of Hamas’s faulty rockets.
Since Oct 7, the IDF has identified about 550 failed launches fired by Hamas that landed inside Gaza.
The Hamas terrorist organization launches rockets from civilian infrastructure, areas and buildings in Gaza, injuring their own civilians. pic.twitter.com/qDmiKGD0bx
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 21, 2023
The latest figures come after the IDF said Hamas has fired more than 6,900 rockets at Israel since the start of the war.
Besides continuing to launch rockets at Israel, Hamas is holding more than 200 hostages who their terrorists kidnapped from Israel.
Hamas on Friday released the first hostages—two people who are dual citizens of the United States and Israel. The pair, a mother and daughter, had been staying at an Israeli kibbutz, Nahal Oz, near the Gaza border when Hamas kidnapped them on Oct. 7.
The terrorist group said the hostages were released “for humanitarian reasons” and “to prove to American people and the world that the claims made by Biden and his fascist administration are false and baseless.” It added that the release was made in response to Qatar’s mediation efforts.
Israel, however, provided a counterpoint.
“Hamas presents itself to the world as having returned the women they took hostage on humanitarian grounds, while Hamas is in fact a murderous terrorist organization that right now is holding infants, children, women, and elderly people hostage in the Gaza Strip, and continuing to commit crimes against humanity,” Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the IDF said in a statement Friday.
Hellish Scenes
An Israeli emergency responder with two decades of experience in recovering bodies previously told Epoch Israel he found it difficult to deal with what he witnessed in communities ravaged by the onslaught of Hamas terrorists, a picture that could only be described as hellish.
“Do you want me to tell you about the hardest sights? Bodies of babies tied up,” said Mendy Haviv, a commander of non-governmental rescue and recovery organization ZAKA.
He and his ZAKA volunteers entered Be’eri, a kibbutz near Israel’s border with Gaza. It was home to more than 1,000 people before Hamas carried out its brutal attack.
“At the end of the kibbutz, in a house that was completely destroyed, they [the babies] are sitting on a fence outside of the house,” Mr. Haviv recalled. “Their bodies are burned. Their parents, sitting in front of them, are slaughtered.”
He described even more harrowing scenes: a pregnant woman with her stomach cut open and a woman burned in a wheelchair.
“Burnt bodies, burnt houses everywhere. Decapitated heads of children of several ages,” he added. “The smell of rotting corpses [is so bad] that you can’t even breathe.”
In kibbutz Kfar Gaza, a little more than five miles north of Be’eri, he said the volunteers encountered booby traps placed under the victims’ bodies.
When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel on Oct. 12, he said he saw photos of victims of Hamas that showed “depravity in the worst imaginable way.”
“It’s beyond what anyone would ever want to imagine, much less actually see and, God forbid, experience. A baby, an infant, riddled with bullets. Soldiers beheaded. Young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms,” he said.
“To me, it, in the most immediate future, hearkens back to ISIS and some of the very things we saw when it was on its rampage that, thankfully, was stopped.”
Morgue Worker Describes Hamas’s Barbarism
An exclusive report from the Daily Mail on Friday detailed an account of an Israeli morgue worker, Shari, who had been cleaning the bodies of Israeli soldiers who died in fighting the Hamas terrorists. She and her team has helped identified at least 800 bodies.
“I am a mother from New Jersey. I moved to Israel 20 years ago. I’m a normal person. I never expected to be confronted by what I have seen,” the woman, who did not provide a surname for safety reasons, told the publication.
“What these barbarians did to these people is beyond words,” she said. ‘There is evidence of mass rape of so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis—women, grandmothers, children.”
Multiple victims were decapitated, Shari said. She also provided gory, vivid descriptions of other victims: “Women standing in their night dresses woken up and shot. Faces blasted off. Heads smashed and their brains spilling out.
“A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded … Women and children burned to charcoal. Bodies murdered with their hands tied behind their backs.”
“I heard stories about Auschwitz as a child growing up in New Jersey. But what I have seen here with my own eyes is worse than the Holocaust,” she said.
Many residents in northern Gaza are heading south as Israel gears up to carry out a ground invasion into Gaza to vanquish Hamas.
Meanwhile, there’s rising concerns about a broader conflict, notably along Israel’s Lebanon-facing northern border with Iran-backed Hezbollah extremists.
Israel has been evacuating its residents living at its northern border in anticipation of allowing the IDF to “expand its operational freedom to act against the Hezbollah terrorist organization,” Mr. Hagari said.
Aldgra Fredly and Bill Pan contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times