Israeli military invades Gaza

By Jodi Rudoren and Anne Barnard / New York Times News Service

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

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, such as the one used Thursday for a predawn attack, which 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 some sparsely populated farmland in 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 and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping.

Context added by this archive

The fullest cut of this wire story in the batch.

Two sentences in column 4 are worth keeping: 'Israel 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' - 'left behind' is the New York Times's own phrase - and '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, which left four young children, all cousins, dead on a beach.' The paper then reports the UN estimate that about three-quarters of those killed had been civilians, 'and about 50 of those were children', and that Palestinian health officials said at least 17 children died in airstrikes on Wednesday and Thursday, 'raising sharp new questions about civilian deaths'. 'Occupied' appears only in Barhoum's quote; 'seized' is the paper's own word.

Cite this clipping

"Israeli military invades Gaza," The Bulletin, 18 July 2014. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2014-065. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2014-065