[News] Israel launches ground invasion into Gaza; 100,000 civilians told to leave their homes

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Israel announces launch of ground invasion into Gaza; 100,000
  civilians told to leave their homes

author Thursday July 17, 2014 23:29author by Saed Bannoura - 
*http://www.imemc.org/article/68507*

    After its latest round of airstrikes Thursday evening killed seven
    small children (four of whom were four years old), and Israeli
    officials flatly rejected a ten-year truce offered by Palestinian
    resistance groups, the Israeli military announced late Thursday
    night that hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers have begun a
    ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Power was cut to the entire Gaza Strip, as close to two million 
Palestinian civilians huddle in the dark reporting explosions, flares 
and Israeli airstrikes hitting in the north and eastern parts of the 
Gaza Strip.

An Israeli military official issued a statement which read, "Israel is 
committed to act to protect its citizens. The operation will continue 
until its goals are reached: To bring quiet to the citizens of Israel 
for a long period of time, and to seriously harm Hamas and other 
terrorist organizations' infrastructure in the Gaza Strip."

The last time Israel launched a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, in 
January 2009, Israeli troops killed over 1400 Palestinians, the vast 
majority of whom were civilians, including hundreds of small children. 
Many of those killed were blown to pieces by artillery shells and missiles.

Palestinians in Gaza have no army, and no official government, as the 
have lived under Israeli military rule since 1967. In 2006, after the 
election of the Hamas party to run the Palestinian Authority, Israeli 
military forces sealed the borders of Gaza, creating what many human 
rights groups have termed 'the largest open-air prison on earth'.

In Thursday's invasion into Gaza, Israeli military officials say that 
artillery, infantry, naval forces, air forces and hundreds of tanks are 
being deployed as the troops move in to Gaza, one of the most crowded 
places on earth.

Earlier Thursday, Israel dropped leaflets in the streets of northern 
Gaza ordering 100,000 Palestinians to leave their homes. The leaflet 
drops were followed by increased aerial bombardment in an area that has 
already seen heavy civilian casualties and destruction from Israeli bombs.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians left their homes and walked southward 
to try to take shelter in United Nations schools. But in the last major 
ground invasion of Gaza, in 2009, Israeli forces attacked UN schools 
with artillery shells and white phosphorus, a weapon whose use is banned 
in civilian areas.
-- 
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863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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