Australian-Israeli woman, 28, who was supposed to be at the doomed music festival where hundreds of innocent revellers were savagely gunned down vows to stay and fight Hamas terrorists on the front line: 'I have a moral imperative to be here'
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- Australian-Israeli woman to take up arms against Palestine
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An Australian dual citizen living in Israel has vowed to fight Hamas terrorists on the frontline after her friends were savagely gunned down at a music festival she was supposed to attend.
Mai Gutman, 28, who was born in Israel but moved to Australia when she was 18 months old, is part of the 465,000-strong Israeli Reserve Army and is waiting for the call to take up arms.
On Saturday, Israel suffered one of the darkest days in the Jewish state's history when Palestinian militants rampaged through southern towns killing at least 1.000 people and carrying out mass-abductions as thousands of rockets were fired from Gaza.
Among those targeted where young revellers at the Supernova music festival, where paragliding gunmen dropped in from the sky shooting dead 260 helpless people as they desperately tried to flee.
Ms Gutman had been set to join the rave but at the last minute decided to stay in Jerusalem.
'My phone started pinging from a WhatsApp group saying "help us, help us",' she told A Current Affair.
'All these different girls were texting... they're coming at us, they're shooting at us, my friend is dead, people are dying there are bodies everywhere.
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'To think that could have been me, to think my friends were there, to think that these people were just young people my age who just went to have a good time.
'You wouldn't think ... that's where your life would end.'
While Ms Gutman has the ability to flee to the safety of Australia, she is adamant that she is not going anywhere.
'I have a moral imperative to be here,' she said.
'I think if I took the moment to sit down and internalise what's really going on I think there would be an element of fear, but living in Israel and living in a period of such heightened tension I don't have the luxury.
'I'm currently on standby waiting, my bags are packed, I just have to be given the call.
'If things heat up in the north then I'll be sent there, I just don't have the luxury to sit down and be scared and have a cry, it's not the time.'
If called upon, Ms Gutman will join reservists who have already been drafted to launch a counter-offensive against Hamas as part of its 'Swords of Iron' campaign.
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Hamas today warned Israeli civilians to get out of the port city of Ashkelon or face death 'in response to the airstrikes' that are relentlessly pounding the Gaza strip, suggesting that more bloodshed is imminent.
The terrorists also warned it will not hand over hostages until the fighting ends - a day after they warned they would execute Israeli civilian captives if the airstrikes continued.
It comes after Israel warned Hamas they had 'nowhere to hide' and that its air force was launching 'extensive attacks' on the Palestinian terrorist group in revenge for its deadly surprise incursion that saw hundreds of Israeli's slaughtered.
Israeli forces have already used its strike force of 600 planes and 300 rocket launchers to relentlessly pound the Gaza strip, with airstrikes and artillery destroying thousands of Hamas targets and killing 770 Palestinians.
But Israel today issued a fresh warning to Hamas, with the military saying the terrorists have 'nowhere to hide' in Gaza and that its air force was carrying out 'extensive' airstrikes in waves of every four hours.
'We will reach them everywhere,' military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said, hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to obliterate Hamas.
Netanyahu, who first came to power in Israel in 1996 and has served three separate terms, compared Hamas to the Islamic State group and said Israel planned to deploy 'unprecedented force' that would 'reverberate for generations'.
But in response to the airstrikes, Hamas's armed winged warned the residents of Ashkelon to leave before 5pm Israeli time.
'In response to the enemy's crime of displacing our people and forcing them to flee their homes in several areas of the Gaza Strip, we give the residents of the occupied city of Ashkelon a deadline to leave it by 5pm this evening,' the Al Qassam Bridgades said.
Minutes after the sinister warning was made, Hamas claimed it had launched rockets at Israel's international Ben Gurion airport, located just 61km from the port city. But this claim was quickly denied by a spokesperson at the airport, who said it had not been hit by any rockets and that operations there continue.
Hamas also warned today it will not hand over hostages until the fighting ends - a day after they warned they would execute Israeli civilian captives if the airstrikes continued.
Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, told NBC News the terrorist group is not open to a prisoner exchange, before issuing the sinister message: 'The colonial occupation will pay a price for the devastation inflicted upon the Palestinians in Gaza.'
Prior reports had suggested that Qatar had been mediating a potential swap of Israeli hostages in exchange for imprisoned Palestinians. It comes after Hamas warned late last night it would begin executing Israeli civilian captives.
'Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of one of the civilian hostages,' Hamas' armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement.
Hamas militants abducted up to 150 people, including women and children, from Israeli territory and dragged them back in Gaza amid their ruthless slaughter.
There has still been no complete official count of the dead and missing from Saturday's attacks - but Israeli media say more than 1000 Israelis have been killed.
In the southern town of Be'eri, where more than 100 bodies have been retrieved, volunteers in yellow vests and face masks solemnly carried the dead out of homes on stretchers.
A long, wide trail of blood wound along the floor of a house where bodies had been dragged out to the street from a blood-soaked kitchen strewn with overturned furniture.
In response, Netanyahu, 73, said in a nationally televised address late last night: 'We have only started striking Hamas. What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.
'Hamas terrorists bound, burned and executed children. They are savages. Hamas is ISIS,' Netanyahu concluded.
Thousands of Hamas targets have been wiped out in brutal aerial bombing campaigns, Israeli defence officials claimed, but harrowing clips circulating social media showed how the rockets and bombs also obliterated Palestinian residential blocks, killing hundreds of civilians.
Military spokesman Richard Hecht told reporters on Tuesday that the bodies of some 1,500 Hamas militants had been found around the Gaza border following strikes, adding that security forces had 'more or less restored control over the border' with Gaza.
Israel also ordered a 'complete siege' of Gaza, cutting off electricity, fuel and food for the 2.3 million Palestinians who for the most part were already living in abject poverty.
The four-day-old war has brought gun battles to the streets Israeli towns for the first time in decades while neighbourhoods in Gaza have been reduced to rubble.
Palestinians reported receiving calls and mobile phone audio messages from Israeli security officers telling them to leave areas mainly in the northern and eastern territories of Gaza, and warning that the army would operate there.
At one point, the Israeli military advised Gaza civilians to flee to Egypt, only to issue a quick clarification confirming that the crossing was closed and there was no way out.
On Tuesday morning, air raid sirens were blaring in cities across Israel, suggesting Hamas was launching another salvo of rockets.
Israel and Hamas have had repeated conflicts in past years, often sparked by tensions around a Jerusalem holy site.
But this time, the context has become more explosive.
The surprise weekend attack by Hamas left a death toll unseen since the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria, fomenting calls for Israel to crush Hamas no matter the cost, rather than continuing to try to bottle it up in Gaza.
Israel is run by its most hard-right government ever, dominated by ministers who adamantly reject Palestinian statehood.
Hamas, in turn, says it is ready for a long battle to end an Israeli occupation it says is no longer tolerable. Desperation has grown among Palestinians, many of whom see nothing to lose under unending Israeli control and increasing settler depredations in the West Bank, the blockade in Gaza and what they see as the world's apathy.
On Monday, thousands of Israelis were evacuated from more than a dozen towns near Gaza, and tanks and drones were deployed to guard breaches in the Gaza border fence against new incursions.
In the Gaza Strip, tens of thousands fled their homes as airstrikes levelled buildings.
The moves, along with Israel's formal declaration of war on Sunday, pointed to Israel increasingly shifting to the offensive against Hamas, threatening greater destruction in the densely populated, impoverished region where 2.3 million people live on top of each other in squalid conditions.
The IDF said it struck hundreds of Hamas targets in Gaza's City Rimal neighbourhood, which is home to Hamas' ministries and governing buildings, overnight.
IDF spokesman Richard Hecht said Gazans were being told to evacuate 'over social media' before strikes, but did not give details.
Also on Monday, Israel found more bodies from Hamas' stunning weekend attack into southern Israeli towns.
Rescue workers found 108 bodies in the tiny farming community of Be'eri - around 10 per cent of its population - after a long hostage standoff with gunmen.
In Gaza and the West Bank, 704 people have been killed, according to authorities there; Israel says hundreds of Hamas fighters are among them. Thousands have been wounded on both sides.
In a video statement Monday, Israel's foreign minister warned Hamas against harming any of the hostages who were taken from Israel and being held in Gaza.
Eli Cohen said Israel was committed to bringing the hostages home 'in the spirit of mutual responsibility.'
'We demand Hamas not to harm any of the hostages, Cohen said. 'This war crime will not be forgiven,' he added.
Hamas seized more than 100 hostages amid their surprise attacks this weekend, forcibly deporting some soldiers as well as innocent civilian women and even children back into Gaza.
Unsettling footage showed women being marched into vehicles, bloodied and bruised, often with their hands bound behind their backs.
A student who attended a desert rave and a mother and her two young girls were among the innocent victims snatched on Saturday.
Particularly shocking footage showed the abduction of Noa Argamani, 25, a student who was torn from her boyfriend's arms and driven away on the back of a militant's motorcycle as she screamed and pleaded for her life.
As violence escalates, Israel has responded with devastating airstrikes into the Gaza Strip, bringing down residential buildings they say contained military infrastructure.
The Israel Defense Forces announced on October 9 it had carried out more than 500 strikes on targets across the Gaza Strip overnight.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA said an airstrike early on Monday hit a market area 'killing and wounding dozens and causing heavy destruction'.
A school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was also hit in the attack on the camp.
'The school was severely damaged and was housing about 225 people, though no casualties were recorded among the displaced, but the school sustained significant structural damage,' UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told a daily press briefing.
All UNRWA schools across the Gaza Strip are closed, and more than 300,000 people students are impacted, according to the UN.
The Times of Gaza reported 'dozens' had been 'killed and burned alive' during the attacks on Jabalia in northern Gaza Strip.
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