Horror words of Israeli troops in Gaza as they fight on even as ceasefire looms

Fighting raged across war-battered Gaza on Monday as the war’s two year anniversary loomed and peace negotiators desperately tried to reach a ceasefire deal.

Israel’s bombs piled into Gaza City, announced by deep booms and sending vast black and grey smoke clouds billowing over the enclave, heavy machine gun fire echoing through the ruins. In this terrifying hellscape civilians are desperately clinging onto hope of peace as Hamas and Israeli troops entered what the region hopes to be the final death spiral of war.

In a cruel twist of irony we were witnessing from a mile away one of the most violent days of the recent war as Israel tried to kill as many Hamas as fighters as possible. The Palestinian militant group and their Palestinian Islamic Jihad colleagues in terror were trying to do the same - kill Israeli troops and exact violence in the final days of conflict.

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If, that is, the conflict is to end any time soon.

At least 64 Palestinians had died in the past 24 hours of violence in Gaza even as Hamas and Israeli negotiators hammered out plans to impose a 20 point US peace plan on the Strip. Both arguing sides are 250 miles from the fighting as they argue in suits and the comfort of separate meeting rooms - but they might as well be a million as they are in stark contrast.

One Israeli soldier told us as he shooed us away from our brief vantage point of Camel Hill, near the Israeli town of Sderot on the Gaza border: “It’s all talk. I cannot see a peace deal. The fighting in Gaza will end in us taking the place. Hamas will lose.”

Within minutes of our arrival on the Gaza border we could hear the fighting- the deadly ground truth about this war, that despite all the talk of peace, people are dying constantly. Between us on Sderot hill and the fields leading into Gaza, Israeli traffic zoomed by as Israelis went by the daily business despite the war raging just a few hundred yards beyond them.

A key part of Donald Trump ’s 20-point peace plan is that Israel is to suspend its military operations to pave the way for the hostages to be released. Over the weekend, Israeli media reported that the Israeli Defence Force has now reduced its operations to defensive manoeuvres in the Gaza Strip.

And yet we saw bombs dropping on the Strip’s central and northern quarters with such regularity that it must mean Hamas still represents a considerable offensive threat. A government spokesperson qualified the claims that there was “a temporary halt in certain bombings” - meaning it will still continue to strike the enclave.

After being moved on from Camel Hill, which is apparently banned to the press, we were shunted back to a hill in Sderot, where we watched the carnage continue. In half an hour we witnessed about ten major blasts on Gaza City, whose buildings are slowly and ruthlessly being reduced to rubble, to match the rest of the Strip.

An IDF soldier confirmed we were witnessing blasts inside the Strip’s Gaza City community which has been under attack for weeks now. Both sides have agreed in principle to Trump’s peace plan, involving a ceasefire, release of hostages and prisoners and the start of rebuilding Gaza.

Hamas must relinquish control of the Strip and its fighters can accept an amnesty if they lay down their arms, and remain in Gaza. President Trump, along with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will take over-arching roles in Gaza’s security as part of a Trumpian-named “Board of Peace.”

These latest talks are technical and aimed at nailing down the vagaries of Trump’s deal - focusing on releasing the remaining 48 hostages, including 20 who are still thought to be alive. More than 67,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza since fighting began two years ago tomorrow. 1,200 were killed in Hamas’ October 7 attack and more civilians have died since. Since the start of the war, 1,152 military personnel have been killed, Israel’s defence ministry says.

The figures include soldiers, police officers, Shin Bet agents and civilian security officers and deaths in battle as well as accidents, illnesses and suicides. The Israeli defence ministry says that 42% of those killed were under the age of 21, including many conscripts, 141 were over the age of 40.

But the conflict has killed thousands of others beyond and into deep into the Middle East - as far as Yemen where Houthi rebels supporting Hamas have been killed. Lebanon has seen killings as the IDF and Hezbollah exchanged missiles, culminating in Mossad’s exploding pager plot which killed and maimed thousands of Hezbollah men.

Iraq and Syria have also seen Iranian sympathising militants killed and the war has even expanded into the US bombing Hamas’s controllers Iran, alongside Israel’s air force. And inevitably the hatred has spread, as anti-semitic extremists conflated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyanu’s hardline approach to Gaza with the Jewish faith all the way to the UK.

Two people were killed by hate-filled Syrian-born terrorist Jihad al-Shamie’s assault on a Manchester Mosque during the Jewish faith’s holiest of days Yom Kippur. The entire world needs the Gaza conflict to end but nobody wants it more than the desperate civilians there trying merely to stay alive and caught between Hamas and the IDF.

On Monday, there were claims Israel’s Shin Bet security service passed on its preliminary warning to the police about suspicious activity in the Gaza Strip on October 7 at 3.03am. But police received it only at 7.03am, about half an hour after the Hamas attack started – an inquiry conducted by the police’s intelligence division found.

The results of the probe were revealed in Israeli press reports.

The Shin Bet said the information was passed on and received by the police in real time. But police said tthey conducted, a systems upgrade the night before the attack on the encrypted system for transferring the Shin Bet’s information, causing the delay in receiving the warning.

Nobody noticed it until the early morning. The police did not know about the systems upgrade and only discovered it during the inquiry, which was conducted last year. If true it means that as many suspected the attack by Hamas was not detected until too late because of a perfect storm of systems failure.