JERUSALEM/CAIRO — Israeli forces rescued four hostages held by Hamas since October in a raid in Gaza on Saturday that Palestinian officials said killed more than 200 people, one of the single bloodiest Israeli assaults of the eight-month-old war.

The hostage rescue operation and an intense accompanying air assault took place in central Gaza’s al-Nuseirat, a densely built-up and often embattled area in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian territory’s ruling Islamist group.

An Israeli military spokesperson said the operation took place in the heart of a residential neighborhood in Nuseirat where Hamas had kept the hostages in two separate apartment blocks. Israel’s forces came under intense fire during the assault and responded by firing “from the air and from the street,” the spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said.

“We know about under 100 (Palestinian) casualties. I don’t know how many from them are terrorists,” he said in a briefing with journalists. An Israeli special forces commander was killed during the operation, a police statement said.

Gazan paramedics and residents said the assault killed scores of people and left mangled bodies of men, women and children strewn around a marketplace and a mosque.

Israel named the rescued hostages as Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41. They were taken to hospital for medical checks and were in good health, the military said.

They were all kidnapped from the Nova music festival during the deadly raid by Hamas-led Palestinian militants on Israeli towns and villages near Gaza on Oct. 7, which precipitated the devastating war.

Hamas’ raid killed some 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and Israel’s subsequent bombardment and invasion of Gaza has killed at least 36,801 Palestinians, according to an updated tally by the territory’s health ministry on Saturday.

CALL TO PRESIDENT
Gunmen took around 250 hostages back to Gaza on Oct. 7, more than 100 of whom were released in exchange for about 240 Palestinians held in Israeli jails during a week-long truce in November. There are 116 hostages left in the coastal enclave, according to Israeli tallies, including at least 40 whom Israeli authorities have declared dead in absentia.

The spokesperson for Hamas’ armed al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Ubaida, said some hostages were killed during the rescue operation.

“It’s a blatant lie,” Israeli military spokesperson Peter Lerner told CNN.

Asked about news reports that U.S. intelligence supported the rescue operation, Mr. Lerner said Israel and the US had a “close, intimate working relationship” as relates to intelligence but declined to elaborate.

Attempts by the United States and regional countries to forge a deal that would release all remaining hostages in return for a ceasefire have repeatedly failed as Israel presses its assault in Gaza. Fresh airstrikes in the southern city of Rafah hit homes later on Saturday, residents and Hamas officials said.

Israeli News 12 broadcast footage of Noa Argamani reunited with her father, smiling and embracing him. Video of Ms. Argamani’s kidnapping, showing her shouting “Don’t kill me!” as she was driven into Gaza on a motorbike, had circulated soon after she was taken on Oct. 7.

A smiling Ms. Argamani was shown speaking by phone to Israeli President Isaac Herzog from hospital surrounded by family and friends, in footage released by the president’s office. “Thank you for everything, thank you for this moment,” she said.

“I am so excited to hear your voice, it brings tears to my eyes … Welcome home,” Mr. Herzog said.

Poland praised the rescue of the hostages and said that one was a dual Israeli-Polish citizen.

US President Joseph R. Biden welcomed the return of the four Israeli hostages rescued in Gaza. “We won’t stop working until all the hostages come home and a ceasefire is reached,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Paris alongside French President Emmanuel Macron.

Following the hostage rescue, Israel’s centrist war cabinet minister, Benny Gantz, delayed a statement on Saturday in which he was widely expected to announce his resignation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s emergency government. Gantz had presented the conservative premier a June 8 deadline to come up with a clear post-war strategy for Gaza.

BLOODY SCENES
A different picture unfolded back in Gaza, where Palestinian health ministry officials and local medics said an Israeli military assault in Nuseirat had killed scores of people.

The ministry did not say how many of the fatalities were combatants.

The Hamas-run government media office in Gaza said later the death toll had risen to at least 210 Palestinians with many more wounded, after medics and health officials gave earlier tolls of up to 100 dead. There was no immediate confirmation of the highest figure from Gaza’s health ministry.

Social media footage that Reuters could not immediately verify showed bodies spilling entrails onto blood-stained streets.

“It was like a horror movie but this was a real massacre. Israeli drones and warplanes fired all night randomly at people’s houses and at people who tried to flee the area,” said Ziad, 45, a paramedic and resident of Nuseirat, who gave only his first name.

The bombardment focused on a local marketplace and the al-Awda mosque, he told Reuters via a messaging app. “To free four people, Israel killed dozens of innocent civilians,” he said.

Emergency response teams sought to ferry the dead and wounded to hospital in the nearby city of Deir al-Balah but many bodies were still lying in the streets, including around the market district, Ziad and other residents said.

Nuseirat, a historic Palestinian refugee camp, has been subjected to heavy Israeli bombing during the war and there has also been fierce ground fighting in its eastern areas.

Late on Saturday, an Israeli airstrike killed five Palestinians in the Al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, Palestinian medics said.

The war has destabilized the wider Middle East, drawing in Hamas’ main backer, Iran, and its heavily armed Lebanese ally Hezbollah, which Israeli officials are threatening to go to war with on Israel’s northern border. — Reuters

SEOUL — South Korea will begin loudspeaker broadcasts directed at North Korea (NK) on Sunday that will be “unbearable” for the Kim Jong Un regime, its National Security Council said, after Pyongyang resumed sending balloons carrying trash across the border.

The Council met on Sunday morning, after dozens of balloons with trash attached were found in Seoul and in areas near the border earlier in the day and overnight.

“The measures we will take may be unbearable for the North Korean regime but they will send a message of hope and light to the North’s troops and its people,” the Council said.

South Korea has warned it would take “unendurable” measures against the North for sending the trash balloons, which could include blaring propaganda broadcasts from huge loudspeakers set up at the border directed at the North.

Pyongyang started sending balloons carrying trash and manure across the border in May and has said the move was in retaliation to anti-North leaflets flown by South Korean activists as part of a propaganda campaign.

On June 2, it said it would temporarily halt sending the balloons because 15 tons of trash it sent was probably enough to get the message across on how “unpleasant” it was. However, it vowed to resume if leaflets are again flown from the South by sending hundred times the amount.

A group of South Korean activists defied the warning and have since flown more balloons to the North with leaflets criticizing its leader Kim Jong Un together with USB sticks containing K-pop videos and dramas, and US dollar notes.

North Korea has shown some of the angriest reactions towards the leaflet campaign and the loudspeaker broadcasts, in some cases firing weapons at the balloons and speakers in the past.

South Korea stopped the broadcasts under an agreement signed by the two Korea’s leaders in 2018 declaring a new era of peace and harmony and vowing to ease military tensions to eliminate the chances of another war breaking out.

But tensions have mounted since then as North Korea pushed ahead with the development of ballistic missiles and declared it sees South Korea as its “enemy number one,” unveiling a range of weapons that it said were aimed at the South.

South Korea’s broadcasts are blasted from multiple speakers stacked in large racks and include world news and information about democratic and capitalist society with a mix of popular K-pop music. The sound is believed to travel more than 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) into North Korea.

South Korea’s military said the North launched about 330 balloons with trash attached starting Saturday and about 80 of them dropped in South Korea. — Reuters

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis, who says he regularly prays “Lord, give me a sense of humor,” will welcome comedians from around the world to a cultural event in Italy to “celebrate the beauty of human diversity,” the Vatican said on Saturday.

Whoopi Goldberg, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien and Chris Rock will be among more than 100 entertainers at the Vatican on June 14.

The pope “recognizes the significant impact that the art of comedy has on the world of contemporary culture,” a Vatican statement said.

British comedian Stephen Merchant — the co-writer of the TV comedy series The Office — and Italian comedian Lino Banfi will also be at the event.

The meeting will take place on Friday morning, before the pope travels to Puglia to attend the Group of Seven (G7) leaders’ summit.

“The meeting between Pope Francis and the world’s comedians aims to celebrate the beauty of human diversity and to promote a message of peace, love and solidarity,” the Vatican said.

The audience has been organized by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and Dicastery for Communication.

Ms. Goldberg last month said in an interview that she had offered the pope a cameo in Sister Act 3, in which she will reprise her comedy role of a singer who takes refuge in a convent and organizes a choir.

“He said he would see what his time was like,” Ms. Goldberg said joking, when asked if the pope had accepted her offer. — Reuters