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AP PHOTOS: 100 days of agony in a war unlike any seen in the Middle East
Oliver James Montgomery View
Date:2025-04-09 02:33:41
JERUSALEM (AP) — Photographs of a war unlike any seen in the Middle East have captured 100 days of agony.
Scenes from Hamas’ surprise attack on a music festival, farming communities and army outposts in southern Israel are seared into the national psyche. The bloodied bodies of young men and women lying on a highway where they were gunned down. An older woman squeezed between two gunmen on a motorcycle while she is being taken to the Gaza Strip as a hostage.
Some 1,200 people were killed that day, Israel’s worst single loss of civilian lives. About 250 others were abducted. Some, mostly women and children, were eventually released or traded for Palestinian prisoners. Some were killed in captivity.
The pain endures for the families of more than 100 people still held hostage by Hamas. Street graffiti and public vigils keep their plight in Israelis’ minds. The shock from what happened on Oct. 7 has fueled a nationwide determination to carry through the military’s offensive in Gaza until Hamas is eliminated.
Every day in Gaza, Israel’s firing of rockets, artillery and missiles produce new images of Palestinian suffering and loss. Rescuers pull the body of a toddler out of the wreckage of a demolished building. Outside of a morgue, relatives weep over loved ones lined up on the pavement in white body bags — another family killed in the Israeli bombardment.
At the few hospitals still operating, wounded patients are treated on the floor. Many of them are children, bloody and crying in pain. Overwhelmed doctors struggle to treat them with an increasingly insufficient stock of medicines and other supplies.
In 100 days, the military’s relentless bombardment and ground assault has killed around more than 23,000 Palestinians — roughly 1% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people. The fighting has uprooted almost the entire population, most of it squeezed into the territory’s far south.
Palestinians pray over bodies of people killed in the Israeli bombardment who were brought from the Shifa hospital before burying them in a mass grave in the town of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Mohammed Dahman)
In the north, which was Israel’s first target, mountains of rubble fill the landscape. Much of Gaza City and surrounding districts have been leveled. Many residents who fled fear they’ll never be allowed to return, or if they are, their neighborhoods will be uninhabitable.
In parts of southern Gaza where Israel advised people to evacuate, rescuers dig through smoldering piles of concrete, stone and dust, looking for survivors of airstrikes and shelling. Tent camps have sprawled over any empty piece of land. Crowds mob distribution sites for food, with one in four people in Gaza starving under Israel’s siege of the territory.
And the war goes on. Israeli soldiers detonate entire blocks in Gaza, saying they are destroying Hamas tunnels. Hamas fires volleys of rockets into Israel. Israeli officials say their offensive will continue through 2024.
Al Jazeera journalist Wael Dahdouh holds the hand of his son Hamza, who also worked for Al Jazeera and who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Sunday, Jan. 7, 2024. Dahdouh lost his wife, two other children, and a grandson earlier in the war and was nearly killed himself. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)
Antonio Macías’ mother cries over her son’s body covered with the Israeli flag at Pardes Haim cemetery in Kfar Saba, near Tel Aviv, Israel, Sunday, Oct. 15, 2023. Macias was killed by Hamas militants while attending a music festival in southern Israel earlier this month. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
Israeli security forces inspect charred vehicles burned in the bloody Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas militants outside the town of Netivot, southern Israel, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
Mourners gather around the five coffins of the Kotz family during their funeral in Gan Yavne, Israel, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023. The family was killed by Hamas militants on Oct. 7 at their house in Kibbutz Kfar Azza near the border with the Gaza Strip, More than 1,400 people were killed and some 200 captured in an unprecedented, multi-front attack by the militant group that rules Gaza. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
Kenzi al Madhoun, a four-year-old who was wounded in an Israeli bombardment, lies at Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah City, Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians and Hamas militants transport Yarden Bibas to Gaza after kidnapping him from his home in Nir Oz, a kibbutz in Israel near the Gaza border, on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas militants stormed the border with Israel, killed over 1,200 Israelis, and took over 200 hostages. (AP Photo)
Palestinians evacuate a building hit in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in Rafah on Sunday, Oct. 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)
Palestinians are treated as they lie on the floor after being wounded in an Israeli army bombardment of the Gaza Strip, in the hospital in Khan Younis, Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)
Israeli tanks head towards the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on Thursday, Oct.12, 2023. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
An Israeli Apache helicopter fires flares over the Gaza Strip as seen from southern Israel, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
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