Day: October 8, 2023

Israel declares war on Hammas one day after surprise attack. More than 700 Israelis killed and dozens taken hostage; Israel retaliates attacking Hammas command centers. The UN Securuty Council met on Sunday evening, VOA was there. Plus, the latest from Afghanistan following a deadly earthquake.

Hamas’ assault on Israel drove oil prices higher on Monday as markets priced in fears of a wider conflict in the Middle East, a day after Israel pounded the Palestinian enclave of Gaza in retaliation for one of the bloodiest attacks in its history.

Fighters from Islamist group Hamas killed 700 Israelis and abducted dozens more as they attacked Israeli towns on Saturday, the deadliest incursion into Is+raeli territory since Egypt and Syria’s attacks in the Yom Kippur war 50 years ago.

In response, Israeli air strikes hit housing blocks, tunnels, a mosque and homes of Hamas officials in Gaza on Sunday, killing more than 400 people, including 20 children, in keeping with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow of “mighty vengeance”.

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

The violence fuelled volatility on global markets on Monday, with concerns about possible disruptions to supplies from Iran, helping to drive Brent crude up $4.18, or 4.94%, to $88.76 a barrel by 0120 GMT in Asian trade.

Iran is an allay of Hamas and while it congratulated Hamas on the attack, its mission to the United Nations said Tehran was not involved in the attacks. read more

Any sustained rally in oil prices would act as a tax on consumers and add to global inflationary pressures, which weighed on equities as S&P 500 futures shed 0.7% and Nasdaq futures lost 0.6%.

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 Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi telephoned the Hamas chief to congratulate him for the “victory” and Hezbollah and protesters in various Middle Eastern nations lauded Hamas.

In southern Israel on Sunday, Hamas gunmen were still fighting Israeli security forces more than 24 hours after their surprise, multi-pronged assault of rocket barrages and bands of gunmen who overran army bases and invaded border towns.

“My two little girls, they’re only babies. They’re not even five years old and three years old,” said Yoni Asher who recounted seeing video of Palestinian gunmen seizing his wife and two small daughters after she took them to visit her mother.

Uri David told a news conference he spent 30 minutes on the phone with his two daughters, Tair and Odaya, during an attack until they no longer responded to him and that he did not know their fate.

“I heard shooting, shouting in Arabic, I told them to lie on the ground and hold hands,” he said, breaking down in tears.

Israel’s military, which faces awkward questions for not thwarting the attack, said it had regained control of most infiltration points along security barriers, killed hundreds of attackers and taken dozens more prisoner.

Israeli air strikes on Gaza destroyed Hamas’ offices and training camps, but also houses and other buildings. The Palestinian health ministry said 413 Palestinians, including 78 children, were killed and 2,300 people wounded since Saturday.

“As an occupying power, Israel has no right or justification to target the defenceless civilian population in Gaza or elsewhere in Palestine,” the Palestinian foreign ministry said, denouncing a “barbarous campaign of death and destruction”.

Hamas fired more rocket salvoes into Israel on Sunday.

The Israeli military said it had deployed tens of thousands of soldiers around Gaza, a narrow strip of land that is home to 2.3 million Palestinians, and was starting to evacuate Israelis around the frontier.

“This is my fifth war. The war should stop. I don’t want to keep feeling this,” said Qassab al-Attar, a Palestinian wheelchair user in Gaza whose brothers carried him to shelter.

Israel has not released an official toll but its media said at least 700 people were killed in Saturday’s attacks, children among them. Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari called it “the worst massacre of innocent civilians in Israel’s history.”

Several Americans were killed by Hamas attackers, a White House National Security Council spokesperson confirmed, saying the U.S. would continue to monitor the situation closely.

About 30 missing Israelis attending a dance party that was attacked by gunmen emerged from hiding on Sunday, Israeli media reported, putting the death toll at the outdoor gathering at 260.

Palestinian fighters took dozens of hostages to Gaza, including soldiers and civilians, children and the elderly. A second Palestinian militant group, Islamic Jihad, said it was holding more than 30 of the captives.

The capture of so many Israelis, some pulled through security checkpoints or driven bleeding into Gaza, is another conundrum for Netanyahu after past episodes when hostages were exchanged for many Palestinian prisoners.

“The cruel reality is Hamas took hostages as an insurance policy against Israeli retaliatory action, particularly a massive ground attack and to trade for Palestinian prisoners,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

U.S. President Joe Biden spoke to Netanyahu for the second straight day on Sunday, saying in a post on the social media platform X that he expressed “my full support for the people of Israel in the face of an unprecedented and appalling assault by Hamas terrorists.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he had ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean as a show of support to Israel and would also begin providing fresh munitions to Washington’s closest Middle Easy ally.

In Gaza, Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem condemned the U.S. announcement as “an actual participation in the aggression against our people” and said the group would not be intimidated.

The shocking flare-up may undermine U.S.-backed moves towards normalising relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia – a security realignment that could threaten Palestinian hopes of self determination and hem in Hamas’ main backer, Iran.

Tehran’s other main regional ally, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, fought a war with Israel in 2006 and said its “guns and rockets” stand with Hamas.

The escalation follows surging violence between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where a Palestinian authority exercises limited self-rule, opposed by Hamas that wants Israel destroyed.

Conditions in the West Bank have worsened under Netanyahu’s hard-right government, with more Israeli raids and assaults by Jewish settlers on Palestinian villages, and the Palestinian Authority called for an emergency Arab League meeting.

Peacemaking has been stalled for years, with Israeli politics distracted this year by internal wrangling over Netanyahu’s plans to overhaul the judiciary.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said the assault would spread to the West Bank and Jerusalem. Gazans have lived under an Israeli-led blockade for 16 years, since Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007.

“How many times have we warned you that the Palestinian people have been living in refugee camps for 75 years, and you refuse to recognise the rights of our people?” said Haniyeh.

The United States led Western denunciations of Hamas’ attack, with Biden issuing a blunt warning to Iran and others on : “This is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks.”

The U.N. appealed for the creation of humanitarian corridors to bring food into Gaza and said at least 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza are seeking shelter in schools it runs.

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This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.

Thousands of frantic Israelis called up for emergency military reserve duty while traveling abroad have been scrambling to find available seats on flights back to Tel Aviv.

With many international airlines cancelling their flights to Israel because of the security situation, Israel’s national airline, El Al, was in most cases their only option for getting back home.

El Al has not yet responded, however, to the unusual spike in demand by putting on extra flights.

Many of these reservists have therefore been mobilizing through WhatsApp groups to organize special charter flights to allow them join units that have been called up to fight in and around Gaza and provide reinforcements in other areas.

Others were hoping to find connections with El Al employees who might help them book seats on flights leaving within the next few hours.

Priority on El Al flights has been given to would-be passengers with the documentation known as a tzav shmoneh (literally meaning an Order 8), the term used for emergency call-up notices for reservists during wartime and special military operations.

By the beginning of this week, a WhatsApp created for reservists stranded in New York already numbered nearly 400 members. One young man begged members of the group to help him find a seat on a flight because his unit was already stationed on the Gaza border and he was desperate to join them.

Others exchanged tips on how to locate empty seats on flights that appeared to be full and what connections to avoid.

Members were discouraged from purchasing tickets on any airlines besides El Al, given the high probability of having their flights cancelled or ending up stranded in Europe.

The group also included Israeli expats stationed in the New York area for extended periods who wanted to volunteer for reserve duty despite not having been officially summoned for an emergency call-up.

Several group members complained that El Al was taking advantage of a captive audience by hiking up prices, with one noting that the cheapest one-way ticket he could find was $2,000.

The group administrator, a flight stewardess, notified members that she had been reaching out to possible donors who might be able to subsidize and pay for tickets and even charter a special flight back to Israel. She said she had received encouraging responses.

The New York WhatsApp group was one of many serving the Israeli reservists stationed abroad eager to fly back home immediately. Other WhatsApp groups have been organized for reservists stranded in France, Italy, Cyprus, Germany, Spain, Austria, Turkey, England and the Balkans.

An unusually large number of Israelis are vacationing abroad at this time of year, which coincides with the Jewish holidays and the summer break from Israeli universities.

The post Israeli army reservists stranded abroad scramble to find flights back to join their units appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Argentina’s Jewish community is reeling after at least four people with local roots were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel Saturday, while several others are missing and feared kidnapped or dead.

The distress is being acutely felt in Buenos Aires, which until Saturday held the ignominious record of being the site of the worst terrorist attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Eighty-five people died in the 1994 bombing of the headquarters of AMIA, Argentina’s umbrella Jewish organization. At least 700 people died in Saturday’s surprise attack by Hamas, which like the assumed perpetrators of the AMIA bombing is linked with Iran.

Meanwhile, four of five people running for president in Argentina expressed solidarity with Israel during a televised debate Sunday. The fifth, Myriam Bregman, a left-wing candidate and self-identified atheist Jew, said that while “lamenting the civilian victims,” she blamed “the occupation and apartheid” of Israel for the violence.

Argentina is home to an estimated 180,000 Jews, the sixth-largest Jewish population of any country in the world. A long-faltering economy coupled with the violence of the AMIA bombing and other attacks in the 1990s have fueled a high rate of emigration to Israel for decades.

The dead in Israel include Rodolfo “Rody” Fabián Skariszewski, 56, who lived in Ohad, a small agricultural community in southern Israel. A graduate of the ORT Jewish high school in Buenos Aires and the Hechalutz Lamerchav youth movement, he was the father of three.

“I don’t know who I am without you,” his daughter Danielle wrote on Facebook. “You are my heart.”

Silvia Mirensky, 80, was also confirmed dead. Mirensky moved to Israel more than 50 years ago with her husband and sons, moving to Ein Hashlosha, a kibbutz near Gaza that, like others in the region, drew many immigrants from South America. According to her sister, who also lived on the kibbutz, she died when militants breached her security room and set it afire.

Ronit Rudman Sultan, 55, was killed at Kibbutz Holit along with her husband Rolan. She had lived in Israel for 35 years since moving there from Buenos Aires and is survived by two sons and a grandson.

News of the death of Abi Korin, 56, traveled especially quickly because his father, Moshe Korin, is a prominent communal leader, an educator who directed the Ramat Shalom primary school in Buenos Aires and served as AMIA’s culture secretary. Abi Korin moved to Israel in the 1980s and had three children; he was also a resident of Kibbutz Holit. “He fell fighting,” his daughter Sara told local media.

Several other Argentinians in Israel remain missing, all from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a community of about 400 that was hard-hit in the violence. Brothers Eitan and Iair Horn disappeared from the kibbutz, where Iair lives and Eitan was visiting. Friends who launched a campaign for their release, “Free the Argentinean Hostages,” also highlighted another missing woman from Nir Oz, Ofelia Roitman.

Also missing is Jose Luis Silberman, born in Buenos Aires, who has been living in Israel for 40 years, and his wife Marguit, daughter Shiri, and two sons Kfir (9 months old) and Ariel (3 years old).

Friends and family of the missing are hoping that they are among the more than 100 people that Israel believes Hamas is holding captive in Gaza.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post 4 Argentine Israelis dead, others missing from kibbutzes after Hamas attack appeared first on The Forward.

The Tehran Stock Exchange saw a sharp decline on the second day of fighting between Israel and Hamas militants, with the overall index plummeting approximately 51,000 points.

According to the ISNA news agency prominent companies, including Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries, Esfahan Oil Refining, Parsian Oil and Gas Development, Bandar Abbas Oil Refining, and Mapna Group, were at the forefront of stock market transactions and all experienced a decline Sunday.

The over-the-counter market’s composite index also stalled with a 659-point drop, closing at 25,025 units.

Economist Siamak Ghasemi attributed the stock market’s decline to a “clear indication of a substantial surge in systemic risk in Iran.” In a message on the ‘X’ messaging platform (formerly Twitter), he said that Hamas’ attack on Israel and the onset of a new conflict are the most critical systemic economic risks in Iran, and possibly the entire Middle East, this year.

Following Saturday’s attack by Hamas, which enjoys the support of the Islamic Republic, the foreign currency exchange market in Iran saw an uptick, with the U.S. dollar reaching 52,250 Iranian tomans at the time of this report, up from 51,500 Iranian tomans a few hours earlier.

The dollar’s price surpassing 51,000 tomans broke the previous high of 49,000 tomans, which had been consistent in recent months despite assurances from Iranian  officials of a declining trend in the second half of the year.

According to Iranian domestic news sources, in Tehran’s gold and coin exchanges the price of Bahar Azadi gold coins surged from approximately 28 million tomans to over 30 million tomans.

Hamas’s attacks on Israel, which began Saturday morning, were planned weeks in advance with assistance from Iranian security officials, according to a Sunday report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report, citing senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, stated that the Iranian officials “gave the green light” for the attacks during a meeting between them and Hamas in Beirut last week.

IRGC officers worked with Hamas since August to plan incursions from the “air, land, and sea,” the report noted. Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were also at the meetings in Beirut.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had praised the attacks, posting on X earlier this week that the cancer of the usurper Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people and the Resistance forces throughout the region.” Formerly known as Twitter, X stated that Khamenei’s post violated the platform’s rules.

At least 700 Israelis were killed and around 2,300 injured in attacks by Hamas since Saturday morning, with the number expected to rise.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with the guests of the Islamic Unity Conference in Tehran, Iran October 3, 2023. (credit: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA/Handout via Reuters)

Hours earlier, Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad told the BBC that the terrorist group had direct backing and support from Iran, which also promised it would “stand by the Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem,” the report quoted him as saying.

This is a developing story.

Several U.S. nationals have died since the start of Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on Saturday, a National Security Council spokesman said Sunday, adding that U.S. officials remained in touch with their Israeli counterparts.

Official word of Americans killed in the conflict came as Israel retaliated for the incursion, one of the bloodiest in it history, launching attacks on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

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Israel’s U.N. ambassador demanded Sunday that the Security Council condemn what he said are Hamas war crimes against Israeli citizens.  

“Israel has one sole demand: Hamas’s war crimes must be unequivocally condemned,” Gilad Erdan told reporters. “This unimaginable atrocity must be condemned. Israel must be given steadfast support to defend ourselves.” 

He spoke ahead of a closed-door meeting of the 15-nation council, convened in the aftermath of a brutal surprise multi-prong attack Saturday morning by Hamas fighters on Israeli towns and cities. Hundreds of Israelis were killed, injured and kidnapped by the terrorist group in what Ambassador Erdan said is his country’s “9/11” – a reference to the al-Qaida terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 people.  

“They will not stop until they murder every single one of us,” Erdan said of Hamas, which has vowed the destruction of Israel. “This is precisely why this atrocity is Israel’s 9/11. From now, nothing will be as it was. I promise you.” 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government responded quickly to the attack that its intelligence and security agencies failed to prevent. He has said the country is entering a long war.  

Israeli airstrikes targeted buildings in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and several hundred Palestinians were reported killed in the first 24 hours of retaliation.  

The U.N. agency that assists Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said Sunday that one of its schools in Gaza that is sheltering more than 225 displaced people was bombed. No one was injured, but the building was severely damaged.  

UNRWA said nearly 74,000 displaced people are in 64 shelters it runs, with numbers likely to increase as civilian areas are hit. 

The U.S. representative at the meeting, Ambassador Robert Wood, told reporters after the council session that the situation in Israel is still fluid and dangerous.  

“We are working hard, as I know other countries in the region are, to try to prevent this conflict from spreading,” he said.  

Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour said the Palestinian Authority has requested an emergency meeting of Arab League foreign ministers later this week in Cairo. 

He said the Palestinian people have endured one deadly year after another under Israeli occupation.  

“Israel cannot wage a full-scale war on a nation, its people, its land, its holy sites, and expect peace in exchange,” he told reporters. 

But he urged a different path, one where neither Palestinians nor Israelis are killed. 

“Peace will save lives, because it is the only way forward,” Mansour said.  

The council did not release a formal statement after the meeting. Diplomats said none was put forward. They said during the meeting most council members expressed condemnation for Hamas’ attacks, the need for the unconditional release of hostages held by Hamas, and the need for de-escalation and a cease-fire.

When Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip carried out attacks in Israel on Saturday, resulting in thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilian casualties, it was the latest clash in a conflict with origins ascribed to biblical times. 

The modern battle between Israelis and Palestinians is primarily a territorial dispute, although there is a religious component as Israel is a Jewish state and the Palestinians are predominately Muslims in a land deemed holy by several religions, including Christianity. 

In Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism is known as The Temple Mount, because two ancient Jewish temples that were destroyed are located there. It is also the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the third-most sacred site in Islam (known in Arabic as Haram al-Sharif, meaning Noble Sanctuary) Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven from there. 

A Hamas leader referred to Saturday’s assault into southern Israel, which included Palestinian gunmen on paragliders under cover of thousands of rocket launches, as the “al-Aqsa flood” in defense of the mosque, 75 kilometers to the northwest of Gaza.  

There have been numerous assaults on the mosque “by Israeli soldiers marching in with their boots on, which is total desecration. If that happened in any synagogue in the world, something comparable, we’d be screaming that it was antisemitism, which indeed it would be,” said Professor Joel Beinin of Stanford University. 

For the Israeli government, Jerusalem is its “unified, eternal” capital. It has held the eastern part of the city since the 1967 Middle East war, a setback for Palestinian dreams of a capital there. 

Israel’s annexation of largely Palestinian eastern Jerusalem is not internationally recognized. There are now more than 200,000 people living in Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem. 

A nationalistic mythology, rooted in biblical scripture, is used by those on the right in Israel to justify the occupation of Palestinian territories and the continuing repression of its people, according to Khaled Elgindy, director of the Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs program at the Middle East Institute in Washington. 

The primary area in dispute is on the west bank of the Jordan River, which the Israeli government refers to as Judea and Samaria. Many Jews living there assert it is the land of their people going back 4,000 years and was never under Arab rule. 

Palestinians see history differently and point to their families’ residing there under four centuries of Turkish rule and before. 

Hope for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and a two-state solution waxed and waned through declarations, armed conflict and treaties since the early 20th century after the British took control of the region following the end of the First World War. Britain and France then carved the area into spheres of influence. Violence between the Arab indigenous population and arriving Jewish settlers, part of a burgeoning Zionist movement, escalated. 

A war erupted in 1948, a day after Israel declared independence and Arab armies from five countries marched into areas that had not been apportioned by the United Nations to the Jews. The Israelis emerged victorious. For Palestinians, it was a historic loss known as the Nakbah or “catastrophe” for the large number of families who lost their land and became refugees. 

More wars would follow. 

“It’s hard to ignore the parallels [Saturday] with events from exactly 50 years ago when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. Israel had been feeling quite triumphalist and invincible after its lightning victory of 1967,” Elgindy told VOA. 

There was a burst of hope, 30 years ago, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, with U.S. President Bill Clinton as a witness, signed the Oslo Accords at the White House.  But the interim agreement failed. It did not lead the Palestinians to a state of their own after a period of self-governance under the Palestinian Authority. Israel did not stop settlement building, blaming the Palestinian leadership for failing to prevent terrorist attacks emanating from territory under Fatah control. 

No U.S. president since Barack Obama has effectively raised the issue of scaling back the Israeli presence in their territories, according to the Palestinians. 

The two-state solution “has been dead for decades, unfortunately. I never would have said that before because I never wanted to subject the Palestinian people to more years of trauma and tragedy living in a one state that was not giving them their rights,” said James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab-American Institute. “The result is that today, I don’t know where you get a Palestinian state. I don’t know where it’s to be set up.” 

Analysts across the political spectrum generally concur there will be continuing repercussions if the plight of the Palestinians is ignored. 

“The Palestinian people are not going to vanish into thin air. This issue is not going to go away just because you think it’s too much of a problem to deal with it,” Beinin told VOA. 

Palestinian disgust with the corruption of Fatah, the largest faction of the PLO, led to Hamas as the victor in 2006 balloting in Gaza, the last time elections were held there.  

“Israel has been pounding the Gaza Strip every several years since 2008. They call it ‘mowing the grass,’” said Beinin, a former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

The deterioration of the situation in the Middle East in recent decades “is clearly an American failure,” according to Zogby, contending that Washington has not effectively used its influence. Zogby refers to the Israelis as America’s spoiled child and the Palestinians as the abused child.

“America has not taken the adult role that it should take and create limits for both sides. We put pressure on and punished Palestinians, and we’ve continually rewarded and placated Israel,” Zogby told VOA. 

That led to an inevitable violent outburst from Hamas in the densely populated Gaza Strip, according to Beinin. “You’re going to imprison 2.1 million people for a decade-and-a-half and there won’t be an explosion?” 

The Stanford professor said he has family at a kibbutz that was attacked on Saturday, adding, “I don’t know where they all are at this moment.”

More than 600 Israelis were killed and at least 2,200 wounded in the Saturday attacks by Hamas, according to officials in Tel Aviv. It was the deadliest day of violence for Israel since the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago. 

Hamas has also abducted 100 Israelis, including women, children and the elderly, as well as soldiers, and taken them to Gaza.

Israeli retaliation in Gaza, through shelling and airstrikes, has killed 300 people, half of them civilians, according to Hamas. 

There is a wider geopolitical context with the timing of the Hamas attack – an attempt to thwart the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. 

“Who opposes it? Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” program.

“So, to the extent that this was designed to try to derail the efforts that were being made, that speaks volumes.”

The Abraham Accords, initiated by the previous U.S. administration of President Donald Trump, effectively ignored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in pursuing diplomatic recognition between Israel and additional Arab nations. 

Iran and Hamas have a long relationship, noted Blinken in his Sunday TV interviews.

“Hamas wouldn’t be Hamas without the support it’s had for many years from Iran. In this moment, we don’t have anything that shows us that Iran was directly involved in this attack, in planning it or in carrying it out. But that’s something we’re looking at very carefully, and we’ve got to see where the facts lead,” said Blinken on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.  

“I think it’s unlikely Hamas could have carried this out without that support,” said Elgindy at the Middle East Institute. But, he added, “Hamas is not an operative or a proxy of the Iranian regime.”

For decades, the Saudis, who are Sunni Muslims, have been engaged in a rivalry with the Iranians, who are Shiite Muslims, for leadership of the Islamic world. The split goes back to the 7th century when Muslims became divided about who should be the Prophet Muhammad’s successor as caliph. 

Nearly all Palestinian Muslims are Sunnis and Hamas is a Sunni-led faction, something that has not prevented support from the Shiite Islamic Republic in Tehran.

State television in Iran on Saturday showed video of members of parliament in Tehran standing and chanting “Death to Israel” and “Palestine is victorious,” while government officials were quoted pledging support for the “anti-Zionist resistance” across the region. 

“People will talk about Israeli intransigence and Palestinian suffering. All true. None of that justifies this barbaric attack on civilians and hostage taking. The Middle East will never be the same,” predicted Steven David, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University.

Several U.S. nationals have died since the start of Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on Saturday, a National Security Council spokesman said Sunday, adding that U.S. officials remained in touch with their Israeli counterparts.

Official word of Americans killed in the conflict came as Israel retaliated for the incursion, one of the bloodiest in it history, launching attacks on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.