These advanced capabilities were used to sift through the unimaginably massive amounts of data that Military Intelligence intercepts and collects from Gaza — telephone calls, text messages, surveillance camera footage, satellite images and a huge array of various sensors — in order to turn them into usable intelligence information: where will a specific Hamas commander be located at a specific time, for instance. To give a sense of scale of the amount of data being collected, the IDF said it estimates that any given point in the Gaza Strip was photographed at least 10 times each day during the conflict.
This allowed Military Intelligence to not only kill several dozen top operatives from Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second-most significant terror group in the Strip, but also to do so with a smaller number of civilian casualties. Knowing that Abu Harbid was staying in a separate building, the Israeli Air Force was able to strike only that room, killing him and no other people. During the fighting, Palestinians were killed, including 66 minors.
The IDF maintains that most of the people killed were members of terror groups and that some were hit not by Israeli strikes but by errant rockets from Gaza that failed to clear the border and landed within the Strip; at least eight civilians were reportedly killed in this way.
But the military also acknowledges that civilians were killed by Israeli fire, though it says considerable effort was put into minimizing civilian casualties whenever possible.
This included directly contacting people in buildings that were due to be attacked and calling off strikes when too many civilians were seen in the area. Military Intelligence maintains that the seriousness of this issue justified the attack on the building, as well as the decision to bring down the entire structure, rather than just a surgical strike on the floors where Hamas was operating, as this might not have destroyed all of the electronic warfare capabilities in the tower.
Rocket fire from Palestinian militants has also harmed Israeli infrastructure, damaging a gas pipeline and pausing operations at a gas rig and at two major Israeli airports. Doctors and nurses there administered hundreds of vaccinations, prescriptions and screenings a day to more than 3, patients.
But on Monday night an Israeli airstrike hit the street outside, sending shrapnel into the clinic, shattering windows, shredding doors, furniture and computers, caking rooms in debris and wrecking the virus lab.
The pharmacy was shut, and medicine deliveries paused. More than 1, Gazans have been wounded in the Israeli offensive, so the damage to hospitals and clinics was especially dangerous.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza was already dire before the war. Unemployment hovered around 50 percent. The Israeli and Egyptian governments control what comes in and out of the strip, as well as most of its electricity and fuel.
A spokesman for the Israeli Army, Lt. Hamas fighters operate from an extensive network of tunnels under Gaza. An Islamist political group called Hamas won elections and took control of Gaza in Since then, Hamas has occupied the strip, which has become a site for protests, bombings, land assaults and other acts of violence. Israel and the United States, as well as several other countries, consider Hamas a terrorist organization.
Since Israel controls the Gaza coastline, experts believe many of these weapons are smuggled into the region or provided by anti-Israeli allies in other countries, such as Iran. Three major conflicts between Israel and Hamas have taken place in Gaza since Operation Case Lead and Operation Pillar of Defense were in response to rocket fire over the Gaza-Israel border, while the kidnapping and murdering of three Israeli teenagers by two Hamas members sparked a seven-week conflict known as Operation Protective Edge in Palestinians run away from tear gas dispersed by Israeli forces as they inch closer to the border fence separating Israel and Gaza on May 14, For Gaza, the current conflict is the worst since a war in — but how did the area become such a flashpoint?
Due in part to its desirable coastal location, the land now known as Gaza has been fought over from time to time for centuries, but the modern conflict over the region dates to In , the newly formed United Nations approved a plan to partition the region into a Jewish and an Arab state.
The Palestinian Arabs, backed by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, rejected the plan, as it gave them less than half the land despite their outnumbering Jewish residents two to one. But the leaders of what was to be Israel agreed to it and moved ahead on their own. The first Arab-Israeli war broke out the next day. Egyptian forces set up a base in the town of Gaza and attempted to drive the Israelis back but, by that autumn, the area they controlled around the town was just about 25 miles long and 5 miles wide.
When Egypt and Israel reached an armistice in February, the borders of the Gaza strip were drawn up and it remained under Egyptian control. Having lost their homes and livelihoods, around , people became dependent on U. Gaza remained under Egyptian military rule until the Suez Canal Crisis of , when Egypt nationalized that major shipping route in defiance of Britain and France.
Israeli ships were prevented from passing through the canal, and also from using the Tiran Straits linking Israel to the Red Sea. In response, Israel invaded Gaza, occupying the strip for several months before international pressure forced them to give it back to Egypt. In June , years of escalating border skirmishes and small-scale guerrilla attacks, exacerbated by the tensions of the Cold War, came to a head in the Six-Day War.
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