Israel Palestine news LIVE: IDF continues to strike Gaza with air strikes as troops massed on the border ‘prepare to execute mission’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday urged the West to rally around the people of Israel as they did around Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, and show them they are not ‘alone’.

‘My recommendation to the leaders to go to Israel and I think to support people, just people I’m not speaking about any institutions, just to support people who have been under terrorist attacks,’ he said on a visit to NATO headquarters.

Israel’s swift and brutal retaliation against Hamas militants in Gaza has given rise to hundreds of civilian casualties with many in the international community questioning whether the Israeli Defence Forces are committing war crimes.

‘What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations,’ he said, and in remarks to U.S. President Joe Biden condemned Hamas for what he said was ‘savagery not seen since the Holocaust.’

Meanwhile, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a total siege of Gaza, cutting off water, food and electricity to force its residents into starvation as they are pounded by constant airstrikes.

Speaking to soldiers near the Gaza fence yesterday, Gallant doubled down and said: ‘Hamas wanted a change and it will get one. What was in Gaza will no longer be,’ with even a former Israeli ambassador to Britain declaring that the IDF’s goal is ‘to come out of this with a different reality in Gaza.’

But now, the U.N.’s top diplomat Josep Borrell has cautioned Israel against meting out disproportionate and indiscriminate punishment against Palestinian civilians.

‘Israel has the right to defend (itself) but it has to be done accordingly with international law, humanitarian law, and some decisions are contrary to international law.

‘Some of the actions – (such) as cutting water, cutting electricity, cutting food to a mass of civilian people is against international law,’ Borrell said on Tuesday.

Israeli troops have massed ‘infantry, armoured soldiers, artillery corps’ as well as 300,000 near the border with Gaza, all of whom ‘are ready to execute the mission we have been given’, the military said.

Hundreds of thousands of troops are ‘close to the Gaza Strip getting ready to execute the mission that we have been given by the Israeli government – and that is to make sure that Hamas at the end of this war won’t have any military capabilities by which they can threaten or kill Israeli civilians’, the military added.