According to the UN, 459 buildings were destroyed or damaged. Forty impact craters were detected on roads.
The destruction, which can be seen across the entire 25-mile strip was concentrated in the north, around Gaza City, and the southeast.
Rights groups decried the targeting of Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Tensions boiled over in May after Hamas fired rockets into Israel in response to Israeli police cracking down on Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem. Israel responded with airstrikes, setting off nearly two weeks of hostilities.
You see? Hamas rocket fire didn't set off two weeks of hostilities - Israel's response is what started the war!
We saw the same dynamic in 2008: Hamas announced the name of the war and shot hundreds of rockets at Israel, but only when Israel responded was when the media declared that Israel started a war.
That isn't the worst part of this article, though.
The article goes in detail on the damage caused, almost all of it by Israel, but not once does it describe why Israel might have performed over a thousand airstrikes. It does not describe what Israel's targets might be, with the exception of "militants" and Hamas' offices in the Al Jalaa media building.
The word "tunnels" is not mentioned once, even though Israel described during the war that they were considered a major target and Hamas' most important strategic asset. Chances are very good that the reason Wehda Street was so heavily targeted is that the bustling commercial center was sitting on top of critical Hamas tunnels.
Why has no reporter asked the IDF that question?
The Washington Post could have easily looked at what Israel targeted in previous wars - command and control centers, major terrorist leaders, rocket launchers, arms and explosives caches. But it didn't even consider that Israel might have had excellent intelligence and good reasons for choosing the targets it did, even sometimes with the knowledge that innocent civilians might get killed because the target is that important.
Instead, the vague impression that one gets from the article is that Israel just randomly chose arbitrary targets and bombed the hell out of them.
The reporters didn't even bother asking the IDF to comment on why the damage is what can be seen. Meaning, the only people in the world who know exactly why Israel chose its targets weren't asked that question in the preparation for this article.
In the end, this is a one-sided article that only discusses damage and doesn't even speculate on why a professional army would choose its targets, or why Hamas chooses to place military targets among civilian objects and infrastructure.
The Washington Post's slogan is "Democracy Dies in Darkness." Yet the article doesn't illuminate - on the contrary, it purposely obscures.
And one can only imagine why such an article gets approved to begin with.
