Israel-Hamas war death toll spirals over 1,100 as Gaza Strip is bombed and gun battles rage for a third day

Tel Aviv — Israel’s military said Monday morning that it struck hundreds of Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight as four combat divisions were deployed to the country’s south, where battles with Hamas militants continued. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said “fighter jets and helicopters, aircraft and artillery struck over 500 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip” Sunday night and Monday morning, claiming to have destroyed tunnels and at least seven “Hamas command centers” in the blockaded Palestinian territory.

The IDF said it also struck a command center used by Islamic Jihad, another Iran-backed terror group based in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. 

“It’s taking more time than we expected to get things back into a defensive security posture,” Israeli military spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht told journalists Monday morning, acknowledging the ongoing battles in southern Israel three days after Hamas launched its unprecedented attack on the Jewish state.

Death toll mounts in Israel and Gaza

Officials said the Israeli death toll from Hamas’ surprise attack stood at 700 Monday morning, but it was expected to continue to rise. More than 250 of the dead were people who had been attending a music festival near the border with Gaza when the attack took place. At least four U.S. nationals were among the dead, and an undetermined number remained missing.

Israel has made it clear that it wants vengeance, and in the Gaza Strip, retribution was falling from the sky. The airstrikes had killed more than 430 people as of Monday morning, including 91 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. 

In the coming days, Israel is expected to launch a ground incursion into Gaza, a densely packed region sandwiched between the Mediterranean Sea to the west and Israel to the north and east.

Israel has been locked in a cycle of violence with Palestinian militant groups for decades, but what happened on Saturday was unprecedented. Hundreds of Hamas militants broke through the steel and concrete barrier that Israel has used for decades to contain Palestinians inside Gaza. 

They stormed into Israel by land, sea and even on paragliders as waves of rockets — more than 3,000 of them — were unleashed on Israeli towns and cities.

The gunmen from the group, which has long been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and Israel, went on a rampage, slaughtering civilians in the streets, engaging Israeli security forces with deadly effect, and kidnapping hostages including women, children and the elderly. 

Some of them were paraded through the streets of Gaza — human trophies that Hamas knows it can use as leverage against its enemy.

One of the captives is Noa Argamani, a university student who was hauled away on the back of a motorcycle as she screamed for help.

“She is an amazing person, a sweet child,” her father Yaacov told CBS News. “I cannot believe it.”

The shocked father said he wanted the Israeli government to rescue his daughter, but “only by peaceful measures.”

“We need to act with sensitivity,” he said. “They [Palestinians] also have mothers who are crying, the same as it is for us.”

“Seems like Israel had no clue”

For many in Israel, the question burning Monday morning was how the country’s intelligence agencies could have failed to detect and disrupt planning for such a significant Hamas assault.

“It seems like Israel had no clue,” former Israeli intelligence officer Gonen Ben Itzhak, who used to recruit spies to infiltrate Hamas, told CBS News. He said Israel — distracted by simmering violence in the other Palestinian territory, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where it’s been protecting Israeli settlers — let down its guard in Gaza.

“I won’t be surprised if they will start to even kill some of the hostages on camera,” he said, predicting that Hamas would try to force the Israeli government to negotiate. 

But Israeli leaders and military officials weren’t discussing any negotiations Monday morning. 

With some people calling the attack Israel’s 9/11, military spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the objective was “to make sure that at the end of this war, Hamas will no longer have any military capabilities to threaten Israeli civilians with, and in addition to that, we also need to make sure Hamas will not govern the Gaza Strip.”

CBS News’ Erin Lyall, Duarte Dias and Tucker Reals contributed to this report.

Haley Ott

Haley Ott is an international reporter for CBS News based in London.