The Times’ Anshel Pfeffer reports from Kfar Aza, where “the horrors that Israelis endured at the hands of Hamas in this kibbutz, a mile from the suburbs of Gaza City, defy belief. As they surged through Israeli defences, the Palestinian militants attacked Kfar Aza from four directions, starting with the “youngsters’ quarter” on the western side, closest to Gaza. Every few minutes soldiers broke the silence to announce that more dead people had been discovered. Some said that up to 40 babies’ corpses had been found among entire families who were shot dead as they slept. The children in particular appeared to have suffered gruesome deaths: there were claims that some had had their throats cut. “I’ve served as a combat soldier and officer for 39 years,” Major General Itai Veruv said as he stood with red-rimmed eyes at the entrance to the kibbutz. “I’ve never seen anything that comes close to this. It’s not even something that our parents knew. This is something out of the world of our grandfathers back in Europe, from the pogroms and the Holocaust.”

The BBC, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail, all also carry dispatches from Kfar Aza.

The Guardian, the BBC, The Times all cover US President Biden’s speak last night, when he said that “pure, unadulterated evil” had been unleashed on Israel by the terrorists of Hamas.

The Times’ Richard Spencer assesses Israel’s military options in responding to Hamas. “The risks for Israel are operational and strategic. The operational risk is simple to understand. Hamas will have expected this retribution and will seek to draw the Israeli army into a trap, using the sort of cheap drones that have done so much damage to Russian tanks in Ukraine to inflict maximum losses on the Israeli attackers. The strategic risk comes on two fronts. The first would involve the West Bank, which is already restive as Netanyahu’s coalition partners push their aggressive settler agenda, provoking clashes with Palestinians and one full-blooded settler assault on the Palestinian village of Huwara… The second, and more serious, response could come from Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah is Hamas’s ally and is also sponsored by Iran, but it is part of the government of Lebanon as well and has represented itself as eager to stay out of the fighting. However, it would be severely weakened if Hamas, the “second front of the resistance”, were destroyed, and might feel obliged to intervene.”

The Times’ Roger Boyes writes that “This is an operation orchestrated by Iran: secret meetings with the head of the Quds Force of Iran’s revolutionary guard have smoothed the way. Plainly Tehran wants to sabotage a US-supported attempt to reconcile Saudi Arabia with Israel. King Saud is committed to the Palestinian cause; his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, perhaps less so. Iran, having picked up rumours about the king’s declining health, may have thought this was the moment to kick up trouble… there is a sophistication to this operation that suggests an Iranian mastermind: Tehran has decided to take control of the Palestinian cause.” Boyes issues a call to Western governments: “Hamas is a criminal as well as a terrorist organisation. As such it is incapable of reform, of reinvention as a democratic entity. It draws its authority only from Iran. That is where western policymaking should be directed: breaking Tehran’s spidery hold on its murderous proxies.”

Under the headline ‘Nothing is normal any more’, the Financial Times focusses on an Israel still traumatised and reeling from the savagery and surprise of Hamas’s attack. “Israelis are being called up in record numbers,” it writes. “Schools have been ordered to close. Streets are deserted. On the pavements outside normally crowded cafés, empty chairs are stacked away: in the days since Hamas militants inflicted the worst ever death toll in a single attack in Israel, almost no facet of life in the country has been left untouched.”

The Telegraph’s Madeline Grant writes on the fears being felt by British Jews following the celebratory reaction of some in Britian to the Hamas attacks. “Following the darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust,” she writes, “British nationals gleefully took to the streets to celebrate indiscriminate slaughter. That there are people at the heart of our polity who feel empowered to revel in such desecration, in public, with no consequences, suggests a catastrophic erosion of social norms. Up and down the country, Jewish families will be debating whether it’s safe for their children to attend school; schools already protected by heavy security designed to guard against anti-Semitic attacks. Tragically, it has emerged that Jake Marlowe, a UK citizen missing following the Supernova rave massacre, left the UK for Israel because of fears over the rise of anti-Jewish bigotry.”

The Telegraph’s editorial, meanwhile, argues that “there is no moral equivalence here. Hamas terrorists have wantonly slaughtered hundreds of Israelis in an unprovoked assault designed to incite a wider war in support of the Palestinians… Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran have no interest in a two-state solution. They want Israel destroyed and do not recognise its right to exist. Pro-Palestinian activists in the West who are backing Hamas are in reality subscribing to a profoundly hateful anti-Semitic ideology.”

Yediot Ahronot’s Yossi Yehoshua focusses on the implications of Biden’s speech. “A more dramatic warning against Iran and Hizbullah couldn’t have been given than the one that was issued yesterday by US President Joe Biden in the most Zionist speech ever delivered  by an American president,” he writes. “The political and historical implications of that speech will be addressed in time, but they first and foremost were aimed at Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, who for the past two days has been challenging Israel on its northern border ahead of making a final decision whether or not to draw Israel into a second front… The ball is now in Beirut’s court, and even more so in Tehran’s court. A decision of that kind, to enter into a war against Israel and the United States jointly, won’t be made by Nasrallah alone, even though his standing in the axis of evil has been significantly upgraded in the time since Qasem Soleimani’s assassination. He is now considered to rank second.”

Yediot Ahronot’s Nahum Barnea also writes on Biden’s speech. “Anyone trying to read between the lines could also find emphasis on Israel’s duty to uphold the rule of law and democracy,” he writes, “but, in my opinion, that wasn’t particularly significant. The important thing was the combination of emotional identification and strategic partnership, and the complete moral repudiation of Hamas’s motivations and its horrific behaviour on the ground: Neither the distress of life in Gaza nor memory of the Nakba. Only evil.”

Ynet features the UK’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, joining the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in criticising the BBC’s repeated failure to use the word “terrorist” to describe Hamas members. Mirvis said that the broadcaster’s insistence on using the term “militant”, instead, was “as if one is providing a window of opportunity for justification, and nothing can justify this.”

Israel Hayom reports that coalition leaders have given Prime Minister Netanyahu a mandate to invite National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz and senior members Gadi Eisenkot and Gideon Saar to join an emergency government. The three will likely join as ministers without portfolio, with Gantz and Saar then joining a small security team overseeing prosecution of the war. Fellow opposition leader Yair Lapid is likely to remain outside government, having seemingly made his joining dependant on Ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir being removed.

Maariv covers the relative public silence of the prime minister in the early hours of the attacks. “It will be remembered,” it writes, “that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made very few media appearances at the beginning. His addresses to the public were limited to two recorded video clips in which he said mainly that Israel was at war and that the enemy would pay a painful price. He didn’t address the nation until Monday. Members of the governing coalition also refrained from being interviewed, which also angered the public. Off the record, coalition sources say, ‘In the first two days, nothing was clear. There was a dearth of information; we didn’t know anything for certain, so we were worried about speaking to the public. Any mistake or inaccuracy can be damaging.’ They say they knew their disappearance from the media gave the public a terrible feeling of abandonment and a lack of surety. ‘We weren’t kept in the loop, partly for the natural reason that the prime minister was completely consumed and concerned with the awful security incidents. He simply didn’t have the headspace to hold briefings or to pass on messages. Our silence didn’t look good; we have to fix that.’”

Yediot Ahronot colleague Nadav Eyal writes of “the tremendous solace that comes from the stories of heroism. People need heroism at moments like this. The heroism shown by the civilian security teams on the kibbutzim, who deserve to have an entire book written about them in the annals of the Jewish people. The heroism shown by mothers, the women in uniform, the men in uniform and the senior commanders, who charged immediately at the terrorists without hesitation, fighting against a numerically superior enemy, paying with their lives for a leadership, intelligence and military failure on a scale never seen before in Israeli history.” Eyal continues, however: “Just one word is missing from that long list of things that have provided us with solace during these awful and petrifying days: the government. It has done none of that.”