A Series of Tubes

So Israel decided to invade Gaza.  I like maps and the map on the left is courtesy of Nasa (Gaza is surrounded by sea, Israel, and Egypt).  When Israel attacked, civilians wanted to flee to Egypt (since the only other options are to become an awesome swimmer or to flee in the direction of the fighting).  Egypt did not open their border so there has been and will be huge numbers of civilian casualties.

You can get a little bit of a sense of what is happening from news descriptions such as the one I read on December 29th that:

More than 310 Palestinians have been killed since Saturday, and 1,400 have been wounded. Saturday was the deadliest day in Gaza since Israel’s occupation of the territory in 1967. Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak said today that Israel was in an “all-out war against Hamas.” Israel has bombed every major town in Gaza, including Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah, and is now threatening to launch a ground invasion as Israeli troops and tanks move to the border. On Sunday, the Israeli cabinet called up 6,500 reserve forces. Overnight, Israeli warplanes bombed Gaza’s Interior Ministry and the Islamic University in Gaza City. A separate Israeli bombing killed four young Palestinian girls from the same family. Palestinian officials say at least twenty-two children have been killed and more than 235 children have been wounded since Saturday.

The thing is that Israel, which controls the airspace sea and the border from 2 sides, is not allowing foreign journalists to enter Gaza to see what is happening.  The only way to get information out of the region is through bloggers and people taking videos with cameras on their phones.

Update:  Apparently the video that I found was taken after a Hamas pick up truck exploded in a market during a rally on accident.  So…instead of it being an anti Israeli video it is more of an anti Hamas video.  On top of that it has been taken down from the original source.  I’m glad that the source updated it to reflect the change but it kind of sucks that it was not correct the first time.  I guess it highlights the difficulties in getting an objective perspective on the situation.

So below is a video taken right after an air strike in Gaza on January 3rd 2009.  It contains dead bodies and a lot of blood so if you don’t want to see that, don’t looks at the video.  The fact that it is unedited, there isn’t a news reporter talking over it, and there isn’t a news corporation censoring it gives you a raw view of what an air strike actually means.

THIS VIDEO IS NOT CHILDREN APPROPRIATE:
–Video has been removed (see update above—

The video was taken from this blog.