JERUSALEM: Israel pounded Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip for the fifth straight day since the militants' audacious attack and the death toll spiralled into the thousands, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed their complete destruction.
"Every Hamas member is a dead man," the veteran right-wing Israeli leader said, again likening them to the Islamic State group and promising: "We will crush them and destroy them as the world has destroyed Daesh."
Netanyahu earlier temporarily settled his political differences and set up an emergency government including centrist former defence minister Benny Gantz for the duration of the crisis.
Saturday's surprise attack - the worst in Israel's 75-year history - has seen a total of 1,200 people killed in the militants' onslaught, according to Israeli forces. Most were civilians.
In Gaza, officials reported more than 1,000 people killed in Israel's sustained campaign of air and artillery strikes on the crowded Palestinian enclave, sending black smoke billowing into the sky and razing entire city blocks.
The United Nations said 11 of its staff had been killed in Gaza since Saturday, while the International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies said it had lost five of its members.
In the occupied West Bank, at least four Palestinians were killed when armed Israeli settlers attacked a town south of Nablus, taking the death toll to 29, the Palestinian health ministry said.
Israel has massed forces, tanks and other heavy armour around Gaza in its retaliatory operation against what Netanyahu labelled "an attack whose savagery... we have not seen since the Holocaust".
US President Joe Biden pledged to send more munitions and military hardware to its close ally Israel and expressed revulsion at the "sheer evil" of the slaughter of civilians in Hamas' unprecedented assault.
The crisis, dubbed "Israel's 9/11", saw Netanyahu strike a political deal with Gantz and pledge to freeze for now his government's judicial overhaul plan that has sparked unprecedented mass protests.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid has not joined the temporary alliance, although the joint statement said a seat would be "reserved" for him in the war cabinet.
"Israel before anything else," Gantz wrote in a social media post, while the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote that he "welcomes the unity, now we must win".