Houston Chronicle · Houston, TX · 18 July 2014

CP-2014-059

Israel begins ground attack on Gaza Strip

Operation Protective Edge targets Hamas infrastructure as death toll nears 250, many of them civilians

By Jodi Rudoren and Anne Barnard / NEW YORK TIMES

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — Israeli tanks rolled into the northern Gaza Strip 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.

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.”

As midnight approached Thursday, residents of northern Gaza were cowering in their homes, afraid to answer mobile phones or peek out windows. Some sent text messages reporting that they could hear tank shelling, heavy artillery, and F-16s dropping bombs.

Moussa al-Ghoul, 63, who lives northwest of Beit Lahiya, said his neighborhood had turned into “a war zone” with tanks surrounding his home, having destroyed those of two of his sons. He said shells were landing “everywhere.” Gaza news outlets reported that electricity had been cut to 80 percent of the coastal territory after cables bringing power from Israel were damaged.

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (masthead).

Context added by this archive

The strongest dek in the batch: a U.S. metro putting 'death toll nears 250, many of them civilians' in display type above the fold of its world page.

Column 5 also carries, in the paper's own voice, 'The military operation started about 10 p.m., hours after Israel bombed a rehabilitation hospital and an other 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.' Nouns: 'Palestinian militants', 'Hamas operatives', 'terrorist infrastructure' (both in quotation marks and attributed to the Israeli military), 'the militant Islamist movement', 'the coastal territory'. 'Occupied' does not appear in the paper's own prose; 'occupation' appears once, in the Barhoum quote.

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