Netanyahu Vows to Demolish Hamas, as Israel Urges Gazans South

 Israeli tanks head towards the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023. (AP)
Israeli tanks head towards the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023. (AP)
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Netanyahu Vows to Demolish Hamas, as Israel Urges Gazans South

 Israeli tanks head towards the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023. (AP)
Israeli tanks head towards the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023. (AP)

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Sunday to "demolish Hamas" as his military prepared ground operations in Gaza to root out the militant group, whose deadly rampage through Israeli border towns stunned the nation.

Israel has urged Gazans to evacuate south, which hundreds of thousands have already done in their Hamas-controlled enclave that is home to 2.2 million people, about half in Gaza City.

Inside besieged Gaza, where conditions are deteriorating and deaths from Israeli air strikes rising, civilians said they had nowhere to flee and were not safe anywhere. Hamas has asked them to stay put.

With fears of the conflict spilling over, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken continued his rapid tour of Middle East states, seeking to prevent escalation and secure the release of 126 hostages Israel says were taken by Hamas back into Gaza.

Arab leaders stressed the need to protect Gaza civilians.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, which has the only viable border crossing into Gaza, said he was in talks to enable aid deliveries and called Israel's action collective punishment.

Renewed clashes on Israel's border with Lebanon on Sunday morning with Hezbollah militants, backed by Israel's regional foe Iran, underscored the dangers of regional spillover.

In a call with his French counterpart, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi warned about further escalation if Israel attacked the Gaza Strip, Iranian state media reported.

Netanyahu convened Israel's expanded emergency cabinet, including former opposition lawmakers, for the first time on Sunday. "Hamas thought we would be demolished. It is we who will demolish Hamas," he said, adding that the show of unity "sends a clear message to the nation, the enemy and the world".

Israel is carrying out the most intense bombardment Gaza has ever seen in response to the killing of 1,300 people when Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli towns on Oct. 7. They shot men, women, children and soldiers and seized hostages in the worst attack on civilians in the Israel's history.

Israel's military said 279 of its soldiers had died.

Graphic video of the attacks, and reports from medical and emergency services of atrocities in the overrun towns and kibbutzes, deepened Israelis' sense of shock.

Gaza bombardment

Authorities in Gaza said more than 2,300 people had been killed in Israel's retaliatory strikes so far, a quarter of them children, and nearly 10,000 wounded. Hospitals are running short of supplies and struggling to cope with the flow of injured.

Among them was four-year-old Fulla Al-Laham, 14 members of whose family, including her parents and siblings, died in an Israeli air strike.

"May God keep me alive to take care of her," said her grandmother Um Muhammed Al-Laham, who held the little girl's hand as she lay in a hospital with a bandaged arm and on a drip.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said early on Sunday that 300 people had been killed and 800 more injured in Gaza during the last 24 hours.

The Israeli military on Friday told residents of the northern half of the Gaza Strip - which includes Gaza City's more than one million residents - to move south immediately.

"Residents of Gaza City, I call upon you again: Hamas is trying to prevent your evacuation. We will enable it southward. Leave Gaza City and all the surrounding areas for the sake of your personal security," reiterated chief Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari on Sunday.

Some Palestinians who went south said they were heading back north because they were attacked wherever they went.

"I am taking my family back into Gaza. I can't continue to live in a school or outside my home, when no place is safe anyway," said Abu Dawoud, a Gaza accountant.

Hussam Abu Safiya, an intensive care doctor on a children's ward at the Kamal Edwan hospital in the northern Gaza strip, said the order to evacuate was impossible.

"In this ward as you can see, there are children who are attached to ventilators, and now we have been asked to evacuate the hospital, where should we evacuate these children?"

The World Health Organization said Israel's orders for the evacuation of 22 Gaza hospitals were a "death sentence for the sick and injured".

Hamas has said dozens of people were killed in strikes on cars and trucks carrying refugees south on Friday. Reuters could not independently verify this claim.

'Nakba' trauma

Some Gazans have vowed to stay, remembering the "Nakba," or "catastrophe," when many Palestinians were forced from their homes during the 1948 war that accompanied Israel's creation.

Blinken said he had a productive meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh on Sunday before heading to Egypt. He will travel to Israel again on Monday.

Crown Prince Mohammed said Saudi Arabia was working hard to try to prevent the conflict escalating and wanted to help lift the siege.

The violence in Gaza has been accompanied by the deadliest clashes at Israel's northern border with Lebanon since 2006.

On Sunday, Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters launched a missile at an Israeli border village, killing one person and wounding three others. The Israeli military said it was striking in Lebanon in retaliation.

Netanyahu's national security adviser has warned Hezbollah, not to take action that could lead to Lebanon's "destruction".

Iran has lauded the Hamas attack on Israel but denied any involvement.

"If the crimes of the Zionist regime, including the massacre of people and the siege of Gaza, do not stop, the situation will become more complicated and it will escalate," Iran's Raisi told France's Emmanuel Macron in a call, state media said on Sunday.

Hamas said in a statement on Saturday it and Iran had "agreed to continue cooperation".



Sudan PM Vows to Rebuild Khartoum on First Visit to War-torn Capital

Kamil Idris, a former UN official who was appointed in May as prime minister by Sudan's leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, addresses people and local fighters supporting the Sudanese army who came to cheer him on, during a visit in Omdurman on July 19, 2025. (Photo by Ebrahim Hamid / AFP)
Kamil Idris, a former UN official who was appointed in May as prime minister by Sudan's leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, addresses people and local fighters supporting the Sudanese army who came to cheer him on, during a visit in Omdurman on July 19, 2025. (Photo by Ebrahim Hamid / AFP)
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Sudan PM Vows to Rebuild Khartoum on First Visit to War-torn Capital

Kamil Idris, a former UN official who was appointed in May as prime minister by Sudan's leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, addresses people and local fighters supporting the Sudanese army who came to cheer him on, during a visit in Omdurman on July 19, 2025. (Photo by Ebrahim Hamid / AFP)
Kamil Idris, a former UN official who was appointed in May as prime minister by Sudan's leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, addresses people and local fighters supporting the Sudanese army who came to cheer him on, during a visit in Omdurman on July 19, 2025. (Photo by Ebrahim Hamid / AFP)

Sudan's Prime Minister Kamil Idris on Saturday pledged to rebuild Khartoum, ravaged by more than two years of war, as he made his first visit to the capital since assuming office in May.

Touring Khartoum's destroyed infrastructure earlier, the new premier outlined mass repair projects in anticipation of the return of at least some of the over 3.5 million people who fled the violence, AFP reported.

"Khartoum will return as a proud national capital," Idris said, according to Sudan's state news agency.

Sudan's army chief and de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who appointed Idris, landed Saturday at Khartoum's airport, recaptured by the army in March after nearly two years of occupation by their rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The war between the Sudanese army and the RSF began in the heart of the capital in April 2023, quickly tearing the city apart.

Tens of thousands are estimated to have been killed in the once-bustling capital, and reconstruction is expected to be a herculean feat, with the government putting the cost at $700 billion nationwide, with Khartoum alone accounting for around half of that.

The army-aligned government, which moved to Port Sudan on the Red Sea early in the war and still operates from there, has begun to plan the return of ministries to Khartoum even as fighting rages on in other parts of the country.

Authorities have begun operations to properly bury the bodies still missing around the city, clear thousands of unexploded ordinance and resume bureaucratic services.

On a visit to Sudan's largest oil refinery, the Al-Jaili plant just north of Khartoum, Idris promised that "national institutions will come back even better than they were before".

The refinery -- now a blackened husk -- was recaptured in January, but the facility which once processed 100,000 barrels a day will take years and at least $1.3 billion to rebuild, officials told AFP.

Cabinet stumbles

The UN expects some two million people will return to Khartoum this year, but those coming back have found an unrecognizable city.

The scale of looting is unprecedented, aid workers say, with evidence of paramilitary fighters ripping copper wire out of power lines before they left.

Vast areas of the city remain without power, and the damage to water infrastructure has caused a devastating cholera outbreak. Health authorities recorded up to 1,500 cases a day last month, according to the UN.

"Water is the primary concern and obstacle delaying the return of citizens to their homes," Idris said on Saturday.

A career diplomat and former UN official, Idris is building a government that critics warn could put up a veneer of civilian rule, in addition to facing challenges within its own camp.

In 2020, during a short-lived transition to civilian rule, the government in Khartoum signed a peace agreement with Sudanese armed groups, allocating a share of cabinet posts to signatories.

All but three cabinet posts are now filled, and armed groups currently fighting alongside the army have retained their representation in Idris's government.

But reports that Idris had sought to appoint technocrats in their place have created tensions.

Some of the armed groups, known together as the Joint Forces, have been integral in defending North Darfur state capital El-Fasher, which has been besieged by the paramilitaries since May of last year.

If the RSF succeeds in taking El-Fasher, it will control all of the vast western region of Darfur, cementing the fragmentation of the country.

Despite the army securing the capital, as well as the country's north and east, war still rages in Sudan's west and south, where the RSF is accused of killing hundreds of civilians in recent days.

Sudan is suffering the world's largest hunger and displacement crises, with nearly 25 million people in dire food insecurity and over 10 million internally displaced across the country.

A further four million people have fled across borders.