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GAZA: Israel hammered the Gaza Strip on Tuesday with the fiercest air strikes in its 75-year conflict with the Palestinians, razing entire districts despite a threat from Hamas militants to execute a captive for each home hit.
Across the barrier wall enclosing the coastal enclave, Israeli soldiers collected the last of the dead four days after Islamist Hamas gunmen rampaged through towns in the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.
Israel has vowed to take “mighty revenge”, calling up hundreds of thousands of reservists and placing Gaza, crowded home to 2.3 million people, under total siege.
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Gaza’s health ministry said Israel’s retaliatory air strikes had killed at least 830 people and wounded 4,250. The strikes intensified on Tuesday night, shaking the ground and sending more columns of smoke and flames into the sky.
The United Nations said more than 180,000 Gazans had been made homeless, many huddling on streets or in schools.
At the morgue in Gaza’s Khan Younis hospital, bodies were laid on the ground on stretchers with names written on their bellies. Medics called for relatives to pick up bodies quickly because there was no more space for the dead.
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A municipal building was hit while being used as an emergency shelter. Survivors there spoke of many dead.
“No place is safe in Gaza, as you see they hit everywhere,”
said Ala Abu Tair, 35, who had sought shelter there with his family after fleeing Abassan Al-Kabira near the border.
Radwan Abu al-Kass, a boxing instructor and father of three, said he had been one of the last to evacuate his five-storey building in the Al Rimal district after the area came under attack. He finally left when a missile hit the building, which was destroyed by a bigger strike after he got out.
“The whole district was just erased,” he said.
Three Gaza journalists were killed while reporting outside a building, bringing the number of journalists killed to six.
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The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said Israeli strikes had since Saturday destroyed more than 22,600 residential units and 10 health facilities and damaged 48 schools.
The United Nations human rights chief said Tuesday Israel’s announcement of a “complete siege” of Gaza would exacerbate the “already dire” humanitarian situation in the strip, as he condemned alleged mass killings and executions by Palestinian militants.

Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement that such siege “risks seriously compounding the already dire human rights and humanitarian situation in Gaza, including the capacity of medical facilities to operate.”
Israel’s embassy in Washington said the death toll from the weekend Hamas attacks had surpassed 1,000, dwarfing all modern Islamist attacks on the West except for 9/11.