Israel has dropped a staggering 6,000 bombs on Gaza in less than a week

Israel has dropped a staggering 6,000 bombs on Gaza in less than a week


The Washington Post reports:

The Israeli air force on Thursday said it had dropped 6,000 bombs against Hamas targets so far — a staggering number over the course of six days, according to warfare experts.

“Israel is dropping in less than a week what the U.S. was dropping in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller, much more densely populated area, where mistakes are going to be magnified,” said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser at the Dutch organization PAX for Peace and a former U.N. war crimes investigator in Libya. He helped plan airstrikes for the Pentagon during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The highest number of bombs and other munitions dropped in one year during the war in Afghanistan was just over 7,423, Garlasco said, citing U.S. military records. During the entire war in Libya, the NATO alliance reported dropping more than 7,600 bombs and missiles from planes, according to a U.N. report.

Questions also emerged Thursday after video footage appeared to show Israel using white phosphorus in a strike on Gaza’s harbor. A video verified by The Washington Post that was filmed Wednesday shows the firing of two artillery shells, followed by white strings of smoke. The controversial munition can cause severe harm when used against civilians. Human Rights Watch said it had verified videos of the strike on Gaza’s harbor and another along the Israel-Lebanon border that it said appeared to show Israel’s use of white phosphorus. [Continue reading…]

 

Reuters reports:

Mosques broadcast messages telling Gaza Strip residents to stay put on Friday, in defiance of an Israeli military call for more than a million civilians to move south within 24 hours in the build-up to its expected ground offensive.

Leaders of the enclave’s governing militant group Hamas also urged Palestinians to ignore the call, and by Friday afternoon there were no signs of any mass exodus from the north of the enclave.

Any incursion into the densely populated territory would be a pivotal moment in Israel’s war with Hamas, which on Saturday launched the bloodiest attack on the country since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Israel has already mounted the heaviest air strikes on Gaza ever, and has mobilised 300,000 reservists and amassed tanks near the border in response to the Hamas assault.

In Gaza, the threats of a ground invasion conjured up images of the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe that refers to the 1948 war of Israel’s creation that led to their mass dispossession.

Gaza analyst Talal Okal described the Israeli relocation order as an “attempt to push the Palestinian people of Gaza into Nakba”.

“Like they did in 1948 when they pushed people out of historical Palestine by dropping barrels of explosives on their heads, today Israel is repeating this before the eyes of the world and live cameras,” Okal told Reuters. [Continue reading…]

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