They're still digging dead family members out of the rubble--when the Israeli Defence Forces permit it--and the death toll in Gaza has now reached around 1,300, one-third of them children, half of them civilians. Another 5,000 Gazans were wounded. Tens of thousands of Gazans are now homeless. Parts of Gaza City after the attack "looked like Grozny on a bad day."
Newsweek reports:
The relatively new, $7 million campus of the American School was completely demolished in air strikes. The Al Quds Hospital in downtown Gaza City, run by the Red Crescent Society, was hit by a bomb and set afire. Part of the massive shell that purportedly did it now sits on hospital director general Khalid Judah's bookshelf. Although the hospital building survived major structural damage, the fire forced the evacuation of 500 patients to other hospitals in the middle of the night, many of them leaving hooked up to medical machinery; a baby was even rolled out in an incubator. "I can guarantee you, no one used this building to fire at the Israelis," Judah said.
Elsewhere, five facilities were, according to [UNRWA spokesperson John] Ging, deliberately targeted, not counting many others that suffered collateral damage from air strikes nearby. In none of those cases, he said, was there any evidence that the U.N. facilities were being used to attack the Israelis, as spokesmen claimed. Ging said he had direct liaison contacts with ranking IDF officers, who disputed their own spokesmen, acknowledging to him that no U.N. facilities had been used to attack the army.
The press continues to be tightly controlled: the few foreign reporters who have been allowed in are being shepherded around by the military. Small wonder. Israel doesn't want too much more of this sort of thing leaking out:
[H/t stageleft]
The "human shields" meme is wearing a bit thin. This was at least in part a war against civilians from the beginning, to punish them for their choice of government. Meanwhile Hamas is talking tough about more rockets and so on. They remind me of the slimy fight promoter telling his poor old punchdrunk guy, "Get in there. The bum can't hurt us."
And what do the surviving civilians think? There's a good cross-section of comment here.
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