re: #49 Killgore Trout

Not really sure I’d chalk this up to an Israeli mistake quite yet. We’ll know more soon.

In the same article, note that the Israeli military is concerned about this particular strike and how it will play:

“Ms. Elaiwa, 59, said that her center was well-known in the neighborhood and that it had been in the same building for almost a decade. She said she had no idea why it would be bombed. “No one lived there except us,” she said. “There was no one else in the building.”

At the site, neighbors picked through the rubble of modest medical equipment and scattered children’s books, from the small neighborhood children’s library Ms. Elaiwa ran. There was a seared copy of “Jane Eyre,” condensed, in English with Arabic translation, and an English-language copy of “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.”

Neighbors like Yasir Abu Shoodq, 32, stared up at the sky through the holes the missile cut through the roof and each floor before making a crater in the ground. Young children picked up the chunks of sharp steel from the crater and made off with them.

Mr. Abu Shoodq said, and Ms. Elaiwa confirmed, that there had first been a warning rocket, “a knock on the roof,” a few minutes before the missile hit. “But no one understood what it meant,” she said. “No one could imagine the center would be a target for anyone.” In any case, she said, the residents were too handicapped to have fled the building on their own in any case.

Azzedin Ali, 26, another neighbor, said angrily: “They are bankrupt of targets and of pity. What would the handicapped have been resisting? This is the enemy striking civilians in the places they think they are safe.”

As he spoke, perhaps a mile away, a rocket was launched from Gaza toward Israel, its contrail slightly wobbly in a hot, hazy sky.

In a rare Saturday briefing for reporters at Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, a senior Israeli military official said, when asked, that the army was looking into what happened at the center for the disabled. “A group is investigating now what was the target, what was the intelligence,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with military protocol.

The briefing was an apparent effort to rebuff growing international alarm at the rising death toll from the airstrikes in Gaza — 120 so far, according to Palestinian officials — and the calls for restraint.

The official spoke of the difficulties the air force faced in minimizing collateral damage in the densely populated environment of Gaza, describing the mission as “very challenging,” and showed video clips from the air that he said demonstrated the military’s care in targeting.”