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"GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip \u2014 I woke up on my concrete floor, having slept fitfully with my head on my flak jacket. The night was interspersed with occasional loud booms including one at 3:30 a.m. in which an F-16 took out an apartment just across the street.\nNone of us was too sure what to expect on this, the first day of Israeli invasion. But looking out the window of the secure location in which we had spent the night, the streets were completely empty and the only sound that could be heard was an incessant buzz of an Israeli drone above.\nSee also: An Explosion, Then Bloodied Children: What I Saw on Gaza Beach\nJournalists began to make forays into the center of Gaza City and after receiving some updates from families gathered around the Gaza strip, we got a phone call from a senior nurse at the Al-Wafa hospital. This is a hospital which I had visited 2 days ago after it was struck by Israeli shellfire. It specializes in treating brain and spinal injuries as well as geriatric care.\nThe nurse, whose name is Ali Hassan, was distressed. \"My hospital is gone,\" he said. The hospital took at least fifteen direct hits overnight and is now a smoldering ruin. The wards have been gutted and it is unusable. \nHe told me that the hospital had been evacuated while under fire. All lights had gone out, and patients were carried out in blankets before being taken to a clinic in the center of Gaza City. I arranged to meet Ali Hassan at his mosque for Friday prayers. There was a strong turnout at the mosque, despite the threat of air strikes.\n\nFaithful gather for Friday prayers, Al-Nasser Mosque, #Gaza City. There is a lot to pray for. #c4news pic.twitter.com/viNOue0rad\n\u2014 Jonathan Miller (@millerC4) July 18, 2014\n\n\nImam of al-Nasser mosque #Gaza City said \"We will be better Muslims for the all the stress we are enduring.\" #c4news pic.twitter.com/JQUQjkJOKQ\n\u2014 Jonathan Miller (@millerC4) July 18, 2014\n\nAfterwards I talked to Ali Hassan and he broke down in tears. He told me his \"was the only hospital in Gaza able to offer rehabilitation\" and that many people would now die without that specialist care. He brought me to the clinic to which the patients had been evacuated, which included two men who had been it by shrapnel last week and had suffered severe brain injuries.\nI also met little Aya, a sixteen-year old girl paralyzed from the waist down who has a spinal tumor. I interviewed her on Wednesday, when she told me how terrified she was. Her hospital had been located right on the border, adjacent to the no man's land, beyond which lay Israeli infantry positions. \nAya described her experience to me as the shelter was hit last night. She said that shortly after she had broken her Ramadan fast, a shell had hit her ward. \"We were in complete darkness,\" she said. \"The air was full of dust. Everyone was screaming and I couldn't see any of my friends.\"\n\n#c4news Aya Abdam, 16, who has spinal tumour and is paralysed + Ali Hassan, senior nurse from al-Wafa hospital #Gaza pic.twitter.com/qJESEmpiYf\n\u2014 Jonathan Miller (@millerC4) July 18, 2014\n\nAli Hassan then took me to meet the director of the Al-Wafa hospital, who described what had happened as a war crime and a crime against humanity. \nHe went so far as to accuse the International Committee of the Red Cross of trying to prevent him from describing the attack in those terms. He said he'd been told that doing so \"just wouldn't help.\" He was upset and angry as were his staff. Despite their anger, they had all returned to work \u2014 for this in Gaza is the new normal.\n\nIsraeli air missiles hit al-Wafa Hospital, the rehabilitation center, on July 16, 2014. Image: Mohammed Talatene/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesA few hours later, as we were driving through Gaza City, we happened across another slice of everyday life. A crowd had gathered and was blocking the road. We asked what was going on and were told that, a few minutes earlier, residents of a four story block of flats down the road had been warned by telephone calls from the Israeli Defense Force to leave the building because it was about to be attacked.     \nWe decided to stand with the local residents to watch what would happen. They were incredibly casual about it. They continued to mill around the area and cars continued driving up and down the street. Then came what they know here as 'the knock on the roof.' One of three pilotless drones circling directly overhead fired a rocket onto the roof of the apartment building. The rocket didn't contain an explosive warhead. But the bang it made was intended as the final warning before the real explosion.\nThe street cleared. And almost exactly four minutes later, there was a gut-slamming explosion of orange fire and dust and the four story apartment block was no more. We neither saw nor heard the F-16 which did this. \n\n#Gaza #c4news We witness a knock on the roof from a drone and then this: an F-16 strike on a 4-storey block. pic.twitter.com/u02e8hNNdJ\n\u2014 Jonathan Miller (@millerC4) July 18, 2014\n\nThe green flags of Hamas were flying in the street and it's possible that one of the residents on the block was a member of Hamas. But 50 people lived in there, in eight apartments, most of them children, we were told. We currently still have no information as to why the building was targeted. \nI met a pharmacist whose shop downstairs was destroyed by the explosion. I interviewed him next to the debris of what a few minutes before had been a substantial concrete building. He was very angry. \n\"Ban-Ki Moon tells us not invade Israel, but it is we who are being invaded,\" he said. \"They are killing our children, they are destroying our homes. I want to send a message to the world, to America and to the United Nations that we need protection from the Israelis.\"\n\n#Gaza attack #c4news 50 people lived in here, most children, said the Pharmacist from next door: shop destroyed pic.twitter.com/bnCHGSig2X\n\u2014 Jonathan Miller (@millerC4) July 18, 2014\n\nThe Israeli invasion seems so far to be a limited ground incursion. One Israeli soldier died today killed by small arms fire; the Israeli Defense Forces are investigating whether his death resulted from friendly fire. \nAs the tanks moved in, the air strikes continued unabated. Tonight I heard that a mother and her five children had been killed in a village just north of Gaza City. The Palestinian Ministry of Health has just reported that 274 people have been killed here in 10 days with 2,100 wounded. \nThe IDF insist that they conduct precision targeting and they have twice now released footage purporting to show bombing missions aborted due to the proximity of civilians or children in the area. \nThey also do warn people if their houses are about to be destroyed and describe mistakes such as the killing of the four boys on the beach next to my hotel the other day, as \"tragic, terrible mistakes.\" \nBut Palestinians scoff at the notion of humanitarian bombing, they see themselves being punished for the sins of the extremist Islamist regime which rules here. And they can see no way out of what has become an endless war. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJonathan Miller is a Foreign Affairs Correspondent for Channel 4 news in London. He has covered conflicts, revolutions, natural and unnatural disasters and has won four Royal Television Society awards for Channel 4 News.\nhttp://www.channel4.com/news/\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.\n      window._msla=window.loadScriptAsync||function(src,id){if(document.getElementById(id))return;var js=document.createElement('script');js.id=id;js.src=src;document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0].parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);};\n_msla(\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\",\"twitter_jssdk\");"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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