Some people, communicating via satellite phones, have described the attack as the “heaviest bombardment yet,” according to independent journalist Sharif Kouddous.
“People can’t call ambulances or civil defense. We are being bombed in an unprecedented manner,” said an unidentified journalist at a Gaza hospital, according to a translation by The Nation’s Palestinian correspondent, Mohammed El-Kurd. “The sky around us just lights up [with explosions], and no one knows what’s going on.”
But they weren’t war-crimes at the time and in fact, to the contrary, were very much in the spirit of war as it was being prosecuted by all of the belligerents.
There’s been a lot of really good work on the history of air power and the logic that led to deliberately targeting civilians in WW2 on all sides. It wasn’t necessarily as nakedly bloodthirsty as it appears to us now looking back. If you honestly believed that targeting civilians would shorten the war and ultimately result in less suffering, it was actually a moral decision, or at least morally ambiguous.