ISRAELI warplanes pounded downtown Gaza City, home to Hamas’ centres of government, with relentless bombardments into early on Tuesday, after Israel’s prime minister vowed retaliation against the Islamic militant group that would “reverberate for generations.” The 4-day-old war has already claimed at least 1,600 lives, as Israel saw gun battles in the streets of its own towns for the first time in decades and neighbourhoods in Gaza were reduced to rubble. Hamas also escalated the conflict, pledging to kill captured Israelis if strikes targeted civilians without warning. Israel’s military said it had found the bodies of roughly 1,500 Hamas militants in Israeli territory as it gained effective control in the south and “restored full control” over the border. It was not immediately clear if those numbers overlapped with deaths previously reported by Palestinian authorities. Israel said that Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza are holding more than 150 soldiers and civilians snatched from inside Israel after the attack caught its vaunted military and intelligence apparatus completely off guard. As the Israeli military activated 3,00,000 reservists in a massive mobilisation, a major question was whether it will launch a ground assault into the tiny Mediterranean coastal territory. The last ground assault was in 2014. 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 Gaza, tens of thousands fled their homes as airstrikes levelled buildings.