Who does this to fellow human beings?
The bombs that hit these streets in the time between the Observer's two visits were visible, and sometimes audible, across the city as huge explosions sent up eruptions of grey smoke into the sky.
What happened here in Beit Hanoun, and in other neighbourhoods of Gaza hardest hit by the Israeli assault, will inevitably demand an explanation: whether the extremity of violence unleashed in these residential areas in recent days was proportionate, or if the destruction amounts to a war crime.
Those are questions for the days ahead. On Saturday, however, in the midst of a 12-hour humanitarian ceasefire, the concerns were more immediate ones, as thousands of Palestinian residents flocked back to their ruined neighbourhoods to see what remained.
As they came on foot and in cars, they were accompanied by fire engines, bulldozers and ambulances of the Red Crescent, whose crews by mid-afternoon had recovered 85 bodies, many of them partially decomposed, buried under the rubble of Gaza's most damaged neighbourhoods. Officials said the death toll among Palestinians had passed 1,000.
In some places visited by the Observer whole blocks had been flattened, dozens of buildings at a time reduced to a moonscape from which the smell of death at times wafted. We came across Mohammad Shaweish at the entrance to Beit Hanoun, sitting on a cane chair in a pink ground-floor room that had been ripped open to the street, an electricity pylon lying black and smouldering outside where it had been felled. His family occupied four homes on this corner, all gutted by the air strike that ripped off the outside walls.
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Don't expect them to be loving those who did this to them.
= new reply since forum marked as read
They simply irrationally hate and want to kill Jews. Nothing to do with living circumstances over the last 70 years. Nothing at all.
is killing their own children? All those pictures you see in the media of crying Palestinians -- they're actually crying with joy that all of their immediate and extended family members are finally dead.
You know I an a genuine Tom Paine fan .
Bet you didn't know he played cricket 
That is probably why we keep you around here...along with your severe weather alerts.
Cricket is by no means 'obscure information'. Cricket is life 
The common wealth DID belong to an individual.
Whoever was perched on the British throne.
Nothing common about it and no commoners among the wealthy
Police and paramedics inspect the scene after a suicide bomber blew himself up on a rush-hour bus near the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo during the Second Intifada, on June 18, 2002
On Monday Shaked quoted this on her Facebook page: "Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."
"They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists," said Shaked. Standing behind the operations on Gaza, "they are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists," Shaked added.
Read more: http://www.dailysabah.com/mideast/2014/07/14/mothers-of-all-palestinians-should-also-be-killed-says-israeli-politician
Little innocent fugging children.
Israelis are relentlessly killing children - let them defend that statement.
I can't take much more of this. Stop the killing of children. 
earthquake...a man-made earthquake.
The very end of that article...
Repeated shelling has inflicted a terrible reality on Palestinians as they try to salvage something from shattered homes and lives
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/26/gaza-pause-bombing-destruction-seen-israel
If there is something worse than the scenes of destruction, it is what is visible in the faces in Beit Hanoun and Shujai'iya. A man is led away down one street in Shujai'iya; staggering and blind with grief he his held up by two others. Women sit in the dust, crying.
We find 33-year-old Rifaat Suqr sitting outside his gutted house, a stunned look on his face. "It is like an earthquake hit this street," he says. "An earthquake."
Except that this was not an earthquake. This was the work of men.
Shujai'iya neighborhood today
from Mohammed Omer on Twitter
but imagine returning to your home to see this or worse, crawling out of the rubble and dealing with the smell of destroyed family members, pets and farm animals, let alone infrastructure.
Man to man is so unjust!!!
....some bomb on!
Is that what you're trying to say?
?w=460&h=345
SO WHAT?!
Apparently commonsense posts that are even the slightest pro-Israel are no longer tolerated in this sudden fervor of pacifism.
So I will politely watch from the sidelines until the echo chamber passes.
Because they were all "polite defense for israel," and you might get in trouble for that.
That's how it works, yup. 
The abused becomes the abuser
Thieves.
I try to stay out of these I/P post but this morning I had to make a comment.
Certain leadership now in Israel is doing what abused human beings have done within families. The chain needs to stop somewhere. How can it be stopped?
One thing in my book is for sure. We should not continue to enable the abuse happening. We need to look at withholding any kind of military aid unless certain steps are taken to stop this mess. We should be calling the shots in what we as a country provide to them, not them telling us what to provide them.
Qalandiya checkpoint, Occupied Palestine
Boston (photo: Nadeen Abuhasan)
Karachi, Pakistan
Chicago
Cape Town, South Africa
Rabbat, Morrocco
Nazareth
July 25, 2014
“I want to survive, and if I don’t, remember that I was not a Hamas man or a fighter. I wasn’t used as a human shield, either. I was home.” This tweet came from a young Gaza resident the night of July 23, as the Israeli air force was bombing Gaza. It caught the attention of Orit Perlov, a researcher at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) and an expert on analyzing Arab societies through social networks. Perlov was quick to retweet it and even posted these words of despair on her Facebook page. She wanted to expose the Israeli public to a different perspective. But most of the Israeli responses were not empathetic. One suggested that the despondent young man organize his friends and launch an Arab Spring against Hamas.
In an interview with Al-Monitor, Perlov says, “This is one of the sadder tweets I’ve come across. It reflects despair and hopelessness. After all, what do they have in Gaza? 45% unemployment, intermittent power and water supply and now a third war within six years. It’s a society seeking to survive. I call it ‘Gaza Ghetto’ because that’s how they feel, and I don’t argue with people’s perception of themselves.” Such descriptions of the difficult climate in Gaza emerge from the social media all the time, and Perlov constantly monitors them.
She recounts, for example, that “The Gazans distinguish among eight different types of Israeli bombings. There’s a bomb that starts with a shriek and then a boom — that means it fell far away. If you hear a boom, it fell nearby. There are small shells that fall before the big shell, like a kind of warning. They don’t hide, of course, because they have no shelters. Anyone reading the tweets from there will do so with a heavy heart.”
Since the start of Operation Protective Edge, Perlov has increased her presence on the networks in Egypt and Gaza. That way she manages to gain insights and interesting assessments of how Hamas is conducting itself, many of them different from those expounded by experts and pundits in the Israeli media. As she explains in a recent report she compiled for INSS, Perlov has been looking at the networks for answers to several questions, among them why Gaza’s residents, most of whom opposed to Hamas, don’t take to the streets to demonstrate or rebel against its rule.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/orit-perlov-social-media-palestinians-gaza-mahmoud-abbas.html#ixzz38gI2VUSd
Chicago
