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| Israeli soldiers near the Gaza Strip on Thursday. Israel’s assault came in answer to an attack by militants through a tunnel. Credit Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
N.Y. TIMES
JERUSALEM — Israeli tanks rolled into the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday night and naval gunboats pounded targets in the south as Israel began a ground invasion after 10 days of aerial bombardment failed to stop Palestinian militants from showering Israeli cities with rockets.
Israeli leaders said the incursion was a limited one focused on tunnels into its territory like the one used for a predawn attack Thursday that was thwarted. They said it was not intended to topple Hamas, the militant Islamist movement, from its longtime rule of Gaza.
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Image CreditRonen Zvulun/Reuters[The day began ] with Israel’s early-morning report that it had foiled an attack through a tunnel at about 4:30 a.m. by striking from the air at 13 Palestinians who emerged from it and tried to infiltrate a kibbutz, the first time that had happened in the current conflagration. [An Isaeli military leader] said later that the incursion “illustrates the clear and immediate threat we have from the Gaza Strip,” and noted that Israel had uncovered four similar tunnels into its territory over the last 18 months. |
As rockets continued to rain down on Israeli cities, a military spokesman said the mission’s expansion was “not time bound” and was aimed to ensure Hamas operatives were “pursued, paralyzed and threatened” as it targeted “terrorist infrastructure” in the north, south and east of Gaza “in parallel.”
...the Palestinian death toll neared 250 and more than 120 rockets rained on cities throughout southern and central Israel all afternoon and evening.... Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, called the invasion “a dangerous step.”
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| Flares fired by the Israeli forces lit up the northern Gaza strip tonight Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697019 |
Israel did not send ground troops into Gaza during eight days of cross border violence in 2012. It was condemned internationally for an intense three-week air-and-ground campaign in 2008-9, when 1,400 Palestinians were killed along with 13 Israelis in fierce street fighting. Israel originally seized the territory in the 1967 war and evacuated its settlers and soldiers in 2005, but maintained restrictions on imports, exports and travel for the Palestinians left behind.
The military operation started about 10 p.m., hours after Israel bombed a rehabilitation hospital and another airstrike killed four children playing on a Gaza City rooftop — an echo of the previous day’s bombing that left four young children, all cousins, dead on a beach.
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| Terrified: A Palestinian child shouts at doctors at al-Shifa hospital. Israeli public opinion appears to strongly support the offensive after days of unrelenting rocket fire from Gaza and years of southern Israeli residents living under the threat Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697019/ |
At the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City, most but not all of the 17 patients and 25 doctors and nurses were evacuated before the electricity was cut and heavy bombardments nearly destroyed the building, doctors said. “We evacuated them under fire,” said Dr. Ali Abu Ryala, a hospital spokesman. “Nurses and doctors had to carry the patients on their backs, some of them falling off the stairway. There is an unprecedented state of panic in the hospital.”
“Communications with Gaza have become problematic” since the ground invasion, said a statement from Christopher Gunness of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides health care, education, and other services for more than half of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents who are classified as Palestinian refugees. The agency is currently sheltering thousands who evacuated their homes.
....The United Nations estimates that about three-quarters of those killed so far were civilians, not militants, and about 50 of those were children.
The military declined to offer an explanation for the strike on the rooftop. On Wednesday, after an earlier Israeli strike killed four children on the beach, the military said it aimed to kill Hamas militants and called the civilian deaths a “tragic outcome,” but did not provide details of why it hit a simple shack on the beach and fired again as the children fled. Israeli officials say that they take precautions to avoid hitting civilians but that Hamas makes it hard by firing rockets from residential areas and discouraging residents from evacuating their homes.
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| The heavy thud of tank shells, often just seconds apart, echoed across the Gaza Strip early this morning as thousands of Israeli soldiers launched a ground invasion Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697019 |
Michael B. Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, said in a late-night interview that Mr. Netanyahu had “exercised extraordinary restraint up until now” by not engaging ground troops and “paid a heavy political price for it.” Thursday’s tunnel attack, he said, “was a game changer,” adding, “Essentially, Hamas invaded Israel first.”
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| A Palestinian protester hurls a stone towards Israeli soldiers during a demonstration against the Israeli military action in Gaza, at Hawara checkpoint near the West Bank of Nablus Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697019 |
In contrast to the Iron Dome missile-defense system that Israel says has stopped some 300 rockets from hitting populated areas over the last 10 days, Mr. Oren said, “We don’t have a response to the tunnels.”
He added, “They are reinforced concrete tunnels, basically impregnable from the air and their openings are camouflaged.”
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France's Socialist government provoked outrage today by becoming the first in the world to ban protests against Israeli action in Palestine. Socialist Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said mass demonstrations planned for the weekend should be halted.
Mr Cazeneuve said there was a ‘threat to public order’, while opponents said he was ‘criminalising’ popular support of the Palestinian people.
Thousands were set to march against the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, calling for an immediate end to hostilities in which civilians including many children have been killed.
But Mr Cazeneuve fears there might be a repeat of the fights between ‘ultra’ Jewish vigilantes and pro-Palestinians which happened after a demonstration last Sunday.
Referring to the main Paris march, Mr Cazeneuve said: ‘I consider that the conditions are not right to guarantee security.’ He welcomed a legal procedure instigated by the Paris police prefecture to ban the march, despite it already being widely advertised.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697019/
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France's Socialist government provoked outrage today by becoming the first in the world to ban protests against Israeli action in Palestine. Socialist Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said mass demonstrations planned for the weekend should be halted.
Mr Cazeneuve said there was a ‘threat to public order’, while opponents said he was ‘criminalising’ popular support of the Palestinian people.
Thousands were set to march against the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, calling for an immediate end to hostilities in which civilians including many children have been killed.
But Mr Cazeneuve fears there might be a repeat of the fights between ‘ultra’ Jewish vigilantes and pro-Palestinians which happened after a demonstration last Sunday.
Referring to the main Paris march, Mr Cazeneuve said: ‘I consider that the conditions are not right to guarantee security.’ He welcomed a legal procedure instigated by the Paris police prefecture to ban the march, despite it already being widely advertised.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697019/