100 Gazans Killed; 7 Israelis Injured

Netanyahu: Truce 'Not Even on the Agenda'

The death toll from Israeli airstrikes against the tiny Gaza Strip continues to mount, with at least 100 now confirmed dead and hundreds of others wounded. The toll includes a large number of civilians, whose homes were demolished in Israeli salvos.

At least 13 children are already confirmed killed in the Israeli attacks, and more expected as civilians remain missing in the rubble of their former houses. The local hospitals are reporting almost exclusively civilian tolls in the most recent strikes, saying they’ve seen few Hamas fighters show up in the clinics.

Gaza towns, not fully repaired from Israel’s 2008-09 invasion, are being smashed again, and Israel is ordering some 100,000 civilians out of their homes in anticipation of a ground invasion that will further level their towns.

Israel, by contrast, has seen 7 injured from the Gaza rocket fire that is supposedly a justification for the onslaught.

That’s unsurprising, because while rockets from Gaza are being fired all over Israel, they are extremely primitive weapons with no guidance, rarely hitting anything, and even when they do rarely doing more than superficial damage to the roof of some random building.

Still, the underlying narrative of the long-suffering Israelis and the Palestinian aggressors is so ingrained that Dianne Sawyer from ABC News had no problem reporting on “rockets raining down on Israel” while showing footage of destroyed Palestinian homes in Gaza, falsely labeling them as “an Israeli family trying to salvage what they can.”

ABC later issued a statement saying “they are Palestinian, not Israeli. We regret the error and will correct it.” As always, the correction will likely be seen by only a fraction of those who were presented with the putative destruction of Israeli civilian homes, and with the US loudly endorsing Israel’s mass killings as ‘self defense” against Hamas’ largely useless rocket strikes, most will likely assume that ABC’s phony coverage was the real McCoy.

Israel is taking advantage of the international ambivalence about the killings to continue its escalation without rest, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bragged that a truce is “not even on the agenda” for Israel, which remains determined to keep pounding Gazans for the foreseeable future.

 

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.