According to Israel's military, Hamas launched more than 500 rockets aiming toward Israel, but all were intercepted and landed on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
Since the commencement of the war on October 7, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have "identified approximately 550 failed launches fired by Hamas that landed inside the Gaza Strip."
“The Hamas terrorist organization uses the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields, and launches rockets from civilian infrastructure, areas, and buildings in the Gaza Strip,” the IDF said in a statement on Saturday.
The IDF provided video footage of some of the unsuccessful launches, as well as an infographic depicting the Gazan impact sites of Hamas' failed rockets, in an online statement.
It is unknown how many of the 3,785 Palestinian deaths recorded on Oct. 19 by the Hamas-backed Gaza Health Ministry are the consequence of Hamas's defective missiles.
The new data come after the IDF reported that Hamas had launched over 6,900 rockets against Israel since the war began.
In addition to continuing to shoot rockets against Israel, Hamas is holding more than 200 Israeli captives abducted by its militants.
Hamas freed the first hostages, two dual citizens of the United States and Israel, on Friday. The mother and daughter were living at Nahal Oz, an Israeli kibbutz near the Gaza border, when Hamas seized them on Oct. 7.
The terrorist organization stated that the captives were freed "for humanitarian reasons" and "to prove to the American people and the world that the claims made by Biden and his fascist administration are false and baseless." It also stated that the release was in reaction to Qatar's mediation efforts.
Israel, on the other hand, presented a contrast.
“Hamas presents itself to the world as having returned the women they took hostage on humanitarian grounds, while Hamas is in fact a murderous terrorist organization that right now is holding infants, children, women, and elderly people hostage in the Gaza Strip, and continuing to commit crimes against humanity,” Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the IDF said in a statement Friday.
An Israeli emergency responder with two decades of expertise in rescuing remains recently told Epoch Israel that he found it impossible to deal with what he saw in villages decimated by Hamas militants, describing the scene as "hellish."
“Do you want me to tell you about the hardest sights? Bodies of babies tied up,” said Mendy Haviv, a commander of non-governmental rescue and recovery organization ZAKA.
He and his ZAKA activists arrived in Be'eri, a kibbutz near Israel's Gaza border. It housed about 1,000 individuals before Hamas launched their barbaric onslaught.
“At the end of the kibbutz, in a house that was completely destroyed, they [the babies] are sitting on a fence outside of the house,” Mr. Haviv recalled. “Their bodies are burned. Their parents, sitting in front of them, are slaughtered.”
He described even more harrowing scenes: a pregnant woman with her stomach cut open and a woman burned in a wheelchair.
“Burnt bodies, burnt houses everywhere. Decapitated heads of children of several ages,” he added. “The smell of rotting corpses [is so bad] that you can’t even breathe.”
He said that the volunteers came across booby traps put under the victims' bodies in kibbutz Kfar Gaza, some five kilometers north of Be'eri.
When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel on October 12, he stated he seen images of Hamas casualties that demonstrated "depravity in the worst imaginable way."
“It’s beyond what anyone would ever want to imagine, much less actually see and, God forbid, experience. A baby, an infant, riddled with bullets. Soldiers beheaded. Young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms,” he said.
“To me, it, in the most immediate future, hearkens back to ISIS and some of the very things we saw when it was on its rampage that, thankfully, was stopped.”
Many inhabitants in northern Gaza are fleeing south as Israel prepares to launch a ground assault into Gaza to defeat Hamas.
Meanwhile, there are growing fears of a wider battle, particularly near Israel's northern border with Lebanon, where Iran-backed Hezbollah fanatics are active.
Mr. Hagari stated that Israel has begun evacuating its population residing along its northern border in preparation of allowing the IDF to "expand its operational freedom to act against the Hezbollah terrorist organization."
