Gaza City was a ghost town of funeral tents and nervous bread queues yesterday as shocked residents ventured out of their homes under Israel’s massive firestorm only to carry out the bare necessities of life: buying food and burying their dead.

Hospital officials said that the death toll had risen to almost 300, with more than 1,000 injured. With 150 patients in critical condition and the city’s hospitals already on the verge of collapse even before the Israeli blitz, doctors expected the numbers of dead to swell even further.

“There is no way we can handle such a catastrophe. People are dying for want of basic amenities,” Hassan Abu Tawila, of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, said. “A normal country would have difficulty coping with such a catastrophe. Imagine the situation for a place that has been under Israeli siege for 18 months already.”

With the city mortuary overflowing with corpses too disfigured by hundreds of tonnes of explosives to be identified, families forsook the traditional funeral cortèges and held impromptu ceremonies in the streets.

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It is Hamas’ actions that have precipitated the current, inevitable, crisis

Richard Beeston, Foreign Editor

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Radio stations ordered all members of the security forces, who have borne the brunt of the attack, to slip into civilian clothes, stay away from their bases and avoid congregating in groups to escape death from above, where Israeli helicopters, jets and unmanned drones prowled on the hunt for targets. These included a mosque close to the hospital – used for “terror activities”, according to Israel – and Hamas’s al-Aqsa television studios, a mouthpiece for the Islamist regime. Last night Hamas’s cultural bastion, the Islamic University, was also hit.

Stunned residents of the vast, overcrowded city huddled indoors overnight as Israeli aircraft systematically dismantled Hamas’s security apparatus, turning the sky black with smoke. Like a storm, the tempest of high explosives moved south as the day progressed, with jets bombing the central prison compound at noon, and, as Hamas forces scrambled to round up inmates, sweeping down to Rafah to target the tunnels under the Egyptian border, the lifeline that Hamas has used to rearm under siege.

Hundreds of tunnels snake under the border, supplying not only weapons but also basic foodstuffs and medicines to a black market thriving on a society sealed off from the outside world for more than a year.

But the airstrikes sent scurrying hundreds of ordinary Palestinians, who had arrived for a promised medical aid shipment across the Egyptian border but ran into yet more missiles and bombs.

It had been Israel’s version of “shock and awe”. The first wave of airstrikes by as many as 100 helicopters and jets on Saturday lasted only a few minutes, yet left more than 100 people dead. It marked the start of the largest Israeli blitz on Gaza since it conquered the coastal territory in 1967.

Even war-hardened Gazans had seen nothing like it as vast fireballs and columns of smoke enveloped their teeming cities. But it was only the beginning of Operation Cast Lead. Israel’s intelligence service informed the Government yesterday that it had succeeded in destroying as much as 50 per cent of Hamas’s rocket capacity.

Hamas remained defiant in the face of the withering assault. As its leadership vanished into underground shelters, members of its armed wing, the Izz-ad-din al-Qassam Brigades, launched dozens of mortars and rockets into southern Israel, including one long-range missile that landed close to the southern city of Ashdod, the farthest that Hamas has succeeded so far in projecting its firepower into the Jewish state’s central coastal plain, where most of its citizens live.

Israel launched its blistering campaign precisely to prevent such an increase, saying that having a quarter of a million of its citizens within range of Hamas rockets was intolerable.

“Our intention is to totally change the rules of the game,” said Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, warning that the vast array of tanks and troops mustering yesterday on the borders of the Gaza Strip could be unleashed at any time.

“There is a time for calm and a time for fighting, and now the time has come to fight,” he said, rejecting international calls for a rapid ceasefire to prevent further massive bloodletting. “For us to be asked to have a ceasefire with Hamas is like asking you to have a ceasefire with al-Qaeda,” Mr Barak said.

Israeli commentators lauded the offensive, saying that it had caught Hamas by surprise and seized back the initiative for Israel, which has watched helplessly as hundreds of rockets have been fired into its territory since a six-month ceasefire ended a week ago.

There was, however, trepidation at what might lie ahead if a full-scale ground offensive were to be launched into the heart of Hamas territory, where the Islamist movement has been training and equipping an army of an estimated 15,000 fighters and digging tunnels to allow its highly motivated guerrillas to move unobserved and outflank the invaders.

“We are only at the beginning,” the daily Yedioth Ahronot cautioned. “It has been a very successful beginning. But we must not forget for a moment that the [2006] Lebanon war also began with a successful aerial strike. Then, too, the enemy was in shock, but recovered quickly – too quickly.”

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