Gaza massacres continue. posted by Richard Seymour

Israel's "warning" to the Palestinians:

Israel dropped leaflets in the Gaza strip late yesterday, telling Palestinian civilians to stay away from homes used to store weapons. The Israel Defense Forces said it will now target such buildings, many of which are in populated areas.

Everyone killed in ensuing raids has been warned: their homes stored weapons. Or to put it more precisely, their homes were believed to have stored weapons. They're openly saying they intend to target civilian areas now. In a completely unrelated story, a mysterious unidentified explosion somehow blew up a family's home in Gaza, killing everyone inside.

Fresh food, water and electricity are scarce since Israel has blown up the power station and ensured that sewage treatment plants can't work. What is more:

Israel also kept up the pressure from the sea, shelling a key coastal road used by emergency vehicles and others.

So, that's Israel's strategy in Gaza: bomb civilian houses, pummel the infrastructure further and keep up the pressure on those ambulances. It looks and feels like sadism: slow, suffocating torture, the relentless hammer of military blows, starvation, thirst, disease, the total destruction of everything the Palestinians have been able to build for themselves. Indeed, racist colonial states often pursue sadism as state policy: it was a fairly commonplace practise in the 19th and 20th centuries. The limit on this was that most of these states wanted to exploit the hell out of the people they ruled: Israel simply wants the Palestinians to disappear.