Israel-Hamas War: Some escaped on foot, but many were killed or taken hostage – city left in shock
Surrounded by destruction, and in the midst of a few local people dazed and frankly in shock after the events of Saturday and Hamas’s attack, I prepared to leave the city of Sderot.
Gunmen had careered through its streets on the back of four-wheel drives shooting up cars, killing drivers, and then dismounting and hunting down residents to either kill or take hostage and move to Gaza.
As I approached our vehicle, I caught sight of a hospital gurney somewhat haphazardly abandoned next to two cars.
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I decided to take a look and saw the gurney and two stretchers on the floor were covered in blood.
The two cars were riddled with bullets, their interiors splattered with blood.
In one vehicle I saw two children’s car seats, one for a baby, and another that looked like it belonged to a toddler.
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Around the cars were dozens of rubber gloves that had clearly been peeled off and thrown away.
I turned a corner and encountered a rabbi wearing a bulletproof vest, along with two assistants, who were tending to the bodies of what looked like two people rolled up, separately, in plastic.
They haven’t had time to identify and remove the victims yet. This type of scene isn’t uncommon in southern Israel at the moment.
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There are pockets of destruction along the borderline with Gaza where the Hamas fighters breached the Israeli defensive system and wreaked havoc in towns, villages, and kibbutzim.
The numbers of people killed or missing continues to rise.
Survivors like Ytzhak Shitrit, who witnessed the attack in Sderot and hid in his home all day praying the gunmen wouldn’t find him, are suffering.
He was friendly when I approached him, and he told me what happened – in reality he can’t believe he survived.
“I was shocked, shocked, I heard the shooting, and I couldn’t believe it,” he said gesturing wildly.
“6am on a Saturday, on a holiday, it was scary, very scary.”
He hid in his shelter. “We went inside immediately and then we heard the constant shooting, and it sounded like it was in our living room.”
Ytzhak lives opposite the main police station that was taken over by the Hamas gunmen who killed at least 20 police officers.
In the end the Israeli forces destroyed the police station to take back control.
In many ways it’s a symbol of a security system that simply failed.
Standing looking at the heap of mangled rubble, Major Doron Spielman came over and introduced himself to me.
“A couple hours ago there was shooting in this city, the place we are standing in now just yesterday women and children were gunned down and were dragged from here back to the Gaza Strip,” he explained to me.
“Even when we as the IDF, when one person is killed we take it as a personal loss and personal responsibility, here with hundreds of people being killed we will do the most thorough analysis we have ever done, we’ll make sure that never happens again, but that’s going to be for tomorrow, today we have to do everything to protect our civilians, restore peace to the people of Israel, and make sure Hamas never again do this carnage to the people of Israel.”
The road leading to Sderot is lined with family cars attacked by Hamas as they moved towards the city in this surprise attack.
An abandoned car damaged by gunfire
The cars are abandoned where they were ambushed. Belongings are strewn across the road, and next to some cars pools of blood are dried in the hot sun, marking the tarmac.
A handful of vehicles are completely burnt out, inside police and army investigators were sifting through the remains, looking for clues to the identity of the owners and the victims.
Some people escaped on foot, but many were killed or taken hostage and driven the short distance to Gaza.
At a petrol station we came across SWAT teams, stationed here to try to retrieve hostages taken by Hamas and possibly still inside Israel – among them are negotiators.
But this is an ongoing war and you’re never far from it.
While we were filming the air reverberated to the sound of Israel’s Iron Dome air defence shield picking off rockets fired from Gaza.
And mingled within the noise was the sound of helicopter gunships firing into Gaza, attack drones in the skies, and jets carrying out regular sorties against Hamas targets in the Strip.
The defence forces are still securing the border but there is already a huge build-up of soldiers and hardware.
We watched as multiple armoured personnel carriers with Israeli flags attached, rumbled their way across the flat farmlands towards Gaza.
An Israeli incursion is coming, and it will be bloody.
The government is in no mood for mercy, and that will inevitably cost the lives of civilians.
Donald Trump has agreed to send “top of the line weapons” to NATO to support Ukraine – and threatened Russia with “severe” tariffs if it doesn’t agree to end the war.
Speaking with NATO secretary general Mark Rutte during a meeting at the White House, the US president said: “We’ve made a deal today where we are going to be sending them weapons, and they’re going to be paying for them.
“This is billions of dollars worth of military equipment which is going to be purchased from the United States,” he added, “going to NATO, and that’s going to be quickly distributed to the battlefield.”
Weapons being sent include surface-to-air Patriot missile systems and batteries, which Ukraine has asked for to defend itself from Russian air strikes.
Pic: Reuters
Mr Trump also said he was “very unhappy” with Russia, and threatened “severe tariffs” of “about 100%” if there isn’t a deal to end the war in Ukraine within 50 days.
The White House added that the US would put “secondary sanctions” on countries that buy oil from Russia if an agreement was not reached.
It comes after weeks of frustration from Mr Trump against Vladimir Putin’s refusal to agree to an end to the conflict, with the Russian leader telling the US president he would “not back down” from Moscow’s goals in Ukraine at the start of the month.
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Trump says Putin ‘talks nice and then bombs everybody’
During the briefing on Monday, Mr Trump said he had held calls with Mr Putin where he would think “that was a nice phone call,” but then “missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city, and that happens three or four times”.
“I don’t want to say he’s an assassin, but he’s a tough guy,” he added.
Earlier this year, Mr Trump told Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy “you’re gambling with World War Three” in a fiery White House meeting, and suggested Ukraine started the war against Russia as he sought to negotiate an end to the conflict.
After Mr Trump’s briefing, Russian senator Konstantin Kosachev said on Telegram: “If this is all that Trump had in mind to say about Ukraine today, then all the steam has gone out.”
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Meanwhile, Mr Zelenskyy met with US special envoy Keith Kellogg in Kyiv, where they “discussed the path to peace” by “strengthening Ukraine’s air defence, joint production, and procurement of defence weapons in collaboration with Europe”.
He thanked both the envoy for the visit and Mr Trump “for the important signals of support and the positive decisions for both our countries”.
At least 30 people have been killed in the Syrian city of Sweida in clashes between local military groups and tribes, according to Syria’s interior ministry.
Officials say initial figures suggest around 100 people have also been injured in the city, where the Druze faith is one of the major religious groups.
The interior ministry said its forces will directly intervene to resolve the conflict, which the Reuters news agency said involved fighting between Druze gunmen and Bedouin Sunni tribes.
It marks the latest episode of sectarian violence in Syria, where fears among minority groups have increased since Islamist-led rebels toppled President Bashar al Assad in December, installing their own government and security forces.
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In March, Sky’s Stuart Ramsay described escalating violence within Syria
The violence reportedly erupted after a wave of kidnappings, including the abduction of a Druze merchant on Friday on the highway linking Damascus to Sweida.
Last April, Sunni militia clashed with armed Druze residents of Jaramana, southeast of Damascus, and fighting later spread to another district near the capital.
But this is the first time the fighting has been reported inside the city of Sweida itself, the provincial capital of the mostly Druze province.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reports the fighting was centred in the Maqwas neighbourhood east of Sweida and villages on the western and northern outskirts of the city.
It adds that Syria’s Ministry of Defence has deployed military convoys to the area.
Western nations, including the US and UK, have been increasingly moving towards normalising relations with Syria.
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UK aims to build relationship with Syria
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Concerns among minority groups have intensified following the killing of hundreds of Alawites in March, in apparent retaliation for an earlier attack carried out by Assad loyalists.
That was the deadliest sectarian flare-up in years in Syria, where a 14-year civil war ended with Assad fleeing to Russia after his government was overthrown by rebel forces.
The city of Sweida is in southern Syria, about 24 miles (38km) north of the border with Jordan.
The man convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher has been charged with sexual assault against an ex-girlfriend.
Rudy Guede, 38, was the only person who was definitively convicted of the murder of 21-year-old Ms Kercher in Perugia, Italy, back in 2007.
He will be standing trial again in November after an ex-girlfriend filed a police report in the summer of 2023 accusing Guede of mistreatment, personal injury and sexual violence.
Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was released from prison for the murder of Leeds University student Ms Kercher in 2021, after having served about 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
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Since last year – when this investigation was still ongoing – Guede has been under a “special surveillance” regime, Sky News understands, meaning he was banned from having any contact with the woman behind the sexual assault allegations, including via social media, and had to inform police any time he left his city of residence, Viterbo, as ruled by a Rome court.
Guede has been serving a restraining order and fitted with an electronic ankle tag.
The Kercher murder case, in the university city of Perugia, was the subject of international attention.
Ms Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student, was found murdered in the flat she shared with her American roommate, Amanda Knox.
The Briton’s throat had been cut and she had been stabbed 47 times.
(L-R) Raffaele Sollecito, Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox. File pic: AP
Ms Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were placed under suspicion.
Both were initially convicted of murder, but Italy’s highest court overturned their convictions, acquitting them in 2015.
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