Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country was at war after Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack Saturday on Israel.
Israel’s national rescue service said at least 22 people had been killed in the surprise attacks from Gaza. Others reports said as many as 500 people were wounded. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Hamas attack included the launch of 5,000 rockets in a coordinated attack by land, sea and air.
Israel Defense Forces, in a series of posts on X, the former Twitter, said the military was “initiating a large-scale operation to defend Israeli civilians against the combined attack launched against Israel by Hamas this morning.”
“We are at war, not in an operation, not in rounds of fighting—at war,” Netanyahu said in a statement via video. “I instructed a wide-scale call for reserves to respond militarily at an intensity and scale that the enemy has not known before. The enemy will pay a price they have never paid before.”
Hamas called the attack “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”
“We decided to put an end to all the crimes of the occupation (Israel), their time for rampaging without being held accountable is over,” Hamas said in a statement, according to Agence France Presse, adding it launched more than 5,000 rockets.
Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s secretive military chief, blamed an unspecified Israeli desecration” of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Journal reported. The site is the most sacred site for Jews, and the third holiest site in Islam.
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