Israeli troops mass on Gaza border as Hamas attack death toll hits 1,000

UN issues warning over humanitarian disaster as invasion appears likely

- Bethan McKernan, Peter Beaumont, Oliver Holmes

A huge Israeli military build-up was continuing along Gaza’s border yesterday as the country’s military confirmed the death toll from Saturday’s Hamas attack had passed 1,000 and wave after wave of airstrikes hit the militant-controlled territory.

Amid mounting expectations that Israel will launch a ground invasion of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip within days, Israeli soldiers were still collecting dead bodies four days after Hamas rampaged through southern Israeli towns in the deadliest terrorist attack in the country's history.

In a sign of the intensifying crisis, rockets launched from Hezbollah controlled southern Lebanon at northern Israel were met with return attacks on the third day of violence along the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Evidence of the scale of Saturday's horror continued to emerge, including in the southern kibbutz of Be'eri, where more than 100 bodies have been retrieved - 10% of its population In Kfar Aza kibbutz, bodies of Israeli residents and Hamas militants lay on the ground beside strewn furniture and torched cars as Israeli soldiers went from house to house to take away the dead.

"You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms [...] It's not a war, it's not a battlefield. It's a massacre," said Israel's Maj Gen Itai Veruv, escorting journalists at the scene. "It's something we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places." Hundreds of Israeli tanks and other military vehicles converged on muster points around Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of reservists were travelling to join their units. An Israeli military spokesperson said its forces were installing "an iron wall" along the border.