GAZA CITY (Dispatches) -- While touring military deployments in southern Occupied Palestine, today, the occupying regime of Israel's army chief of staff Benny Gantz admonished division commanders to “pay attention not to just take random houses and fire at them unnecessarily”.
The comments came just a day after a very high profile incident in which the Zionist regime attacked a seemingly random house and discovered it was full of civilians, including a large number of children. Israeli officials blamed the incident on a “targeting” mistake.
Though public criticism of the 2008-09 Israeli invasion of Gaza was kept fairly limited, post-war criticism of the seemingly random nature of a lot of Zionist attacks grew in the months and years to follow. Already, there is a palpable sense in the Israeli press that massive civilian death tolls are going to be a lot tougher to paper over this time around.
It’s also going to be difficult to avoid, because the occupying regime of Israel seems determined to escalate attacks on the tiny strip but doesn’t seem to have all that many real targets, and is measuring its escalation in quantity of targets hit, without any indication that they are hitting much other than random houses.
At least six Palestinians were martyred Tuesday in a new wave of Israeli strikes on Gaza, medics said, raising the Palestinian toll from six days of bombardment to around 120.
More than 1,000 Palestinians have been injured in the bombing campaign.
Among the latest victims were 15-year-old Yahya Muhammed Awad who was hunting birds near the beach when a missile hit the northern Sudaniya area, and two men who were killed in the nearby town of Beit Lahiya: Yahya Maaruf, a farmer who was working his land, and another man called Bilal Birawi, 20.
And in Mughraqa, just south of Gaza City, another strike killed Mahmud Rizk al-Zahar, he said.
Overnight, the Israeli military said it attacked about 100 targets with a combination of aircraft, warships and artillery.
Palestinian officials confirmed that National Islamic Bank in Gaza City, which was set up by the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, was severely damaged in a raid.
Monday was the bloodiest day of the Zionist aggression since it was launched on Wednesday, with 33 people martyred.
During the late evening, a family of four was martyred in an attack on Beit Lahiya, and two teenage brothers were killed in Rafah.
