Gaza, Oct 12 (IANS): The Gaza Health Ministry has said 1,400 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli strikes since Saturday, the media reported.

The ministry giving more details said 447 children and 248 women are among the 1,417 killed by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip, The Guardian reported.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has spoken to the king of Jordan, Abdullah II.

Palestine's main news network, Wafa, cited Abbas as stressing "the need to move to political action to end the occupation and achieve peace, stressing the rejection of practices related to killing civilians or abusing them on both sides, calling for the release of civilians, prisoners and detainees, and stressing the need to stop settler terrorism against our people in Palestinian cities, villages and camps in the West Bank", The Guardian reported.

In his first public statement since the war between Israel and Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip began, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi acknowledges failures that enabled Hamas' infiltration and mass murders on Saturday, Israeli media reported.

"The IDF is responsible for the security of the country and its citizens, and on Saturday morning in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip, we did not handle it. We will learn, we will investigate, but now is the time for war," Halevi says from southern Israel, Times of Israel reported.

"Yahya Sinwar, the ruler of the Gaza Strip, decided on this horrible attack, and therefore he and the entire system under him are dead men. We will attack them, we will dismantle them, dismantle their system," he says, Times of Israel reported.

Halevi says a time will come to investigate how Hamas managed to carry out the attack.