A massive Israeli military buildup continued along Gaza’s border on Tuesday, amid mounting expectations that Israel would launch a ground invasion of Gaza within days. The Israeli military said it had mostly secured its border with Gaza after a night of intensified airstrikes across the enclave that destroyed infrastructure and displaced thousands of people. Israel’s defence minister said he had “released all restraints” on his troops, adding that Gaza “will never return to what it was”. Israel’s military confirmed the death toll from Saturday’s Hamas attack had passed 1,000 – the deadliest militant assault in its history. Israeli soldiers were still collecting bodies of the dead four days after Hamas rampaged through southern Israeli towns. The Gaza health authority has put the death toll in the enclave at 900 since Saturday. Among the dead are 260 children and 230 women, it said. Frightened residents of Gaza described bombardments striking residential buildings, hospitals and schools across the enclave amid growing concern over destruction of civilian infrastructure as Israel pledges to enforce a full siege. The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations on Tuesday described Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip and vow to impose a complete siege on the Hamas-controlled Palestinian enclave as “nothing less than genocidal.” “Such blatant dehumanisation and attempts to bomb a people into submission, to use starvation as a method of warfare, and to eradicate their national existence are nothing less than genocidal,” Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour wrote in a letter to the UN security council on Tuesday, seen by Reuters. Two Palestinians were fatally shot in East Jerusalem by Israel’s border police, in a sign of increasing violence that is disproportionately targeting youth across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A salvo of rockets from Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon was fired at northern Israel, in a sign of the rapidly escalating crisis. Israeli forces responded with fire in the third consecutive day of violence along the Lebanese-Israeli border. The Israeli military also shelled Syria from the Golan Heights after mortar rounds were fired into the territory. The UN’s human rights council warned there is already “clear evidence” that war crimes may have been committed in the latest explosion of violence in Israel and Gaza. It said it had been collecting evidence of “war crimes committed by all sides” since Saturday. Israel is believed to have identified most of the hostages abducted by Hamas and has started notifying their families. Officers from the Israel Defence Forces were to tell about 100 families on Tuesday that their loved ones were in Gaza. Joe Biden declared support for Israel, calling the assault by Hamas militants that left nearly 1,000 people dead an “act of sheer evil”. At least 14 Americans were killed in last weekend’s attack and an as yet unknown number of Americans are being held hostage, Biden said from the White House. The first plane carrying US ammunition landed in Israel on Tuesday. Later he wrote on X, “The brutality of Hamas, the blood-thirstiness, brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS. This is terrorism.” EU foreign ministers have reversed the decision by the European Commission to suspend payments to the Palestinian Authority, after an emergency meeting in Oman. The EU has issued a warning to Elon Musk over the alleged disinformation about the Hamas attack on Israel, including fake news and “repurposed old images”, on X, which was formerly known as Twitter.