Israel Kills Four Children on Gaza Beach; Overall Toll at 220

Israeli Officials Insist It's Totally Hamas's Fault

The stark brutality of the ongoing attacks on the Gaza Strip are in full view tonight, after Israeli warplanes pounded a group of four small children playing soccer on the beach, killing them all.

Photos show the four children playing soccer quietly amongst themselves, nowhere near anything, before being ripped apart by Israeli attacks. Israeli officials insisted they were “targeting Hamas,” though Hamas is clearly not visible anywhere in the area.

Even the so-called moderates within the Israeli government appeared quite comfortable with the news of the grisly deaths, with Finance Minister Yair Lapid declaring that the “whole world” understands that it was Hamas’s fault and would be fine with even further Israeli escalation against the tiny strip irrespective of such “unfortunate” incidents.

Tiny, but densely populated. The Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 220 Palestinians, with around 80% of the toll civilians, mostly women and children whose homes were destroyed in attacks.

Israel has agreed to a brief “humanitarian pause” in the attacks, five hours overnight tonight by US reckoning. The pause seems not to have any specific goal at this point, as officials say even further escalation is likely the moment it ends, at which point the word “humanitarian” becomes entirely past tense.

The Obama Administration, which has loudly cheered Israel’s offensive, was silent on the question of killing children at the beach. When pressed at today’s briefing, the State Department spokeswoman insisted the question simply never came up at the latest Obama Administration meetings, and that no comment was likely to ever come at all, beyond the general sense that the US believes whatever Israel is doing is probably fine.

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.