Here is a little background to whats recently happened in Gaza.
Taken from
Reddit.
About 3 weeks ago 3 Israeli teenagers were kidnapped near the town of Hebron. The Israeli government placed the blame on Hamas, and started detaining Hamas members throughout the West Bank in order to find the missing teenagers. This came as an incredible gift to Netanyahu, who has been just waiting to dismantle the recent Fatah-Hamas unity government- He sees Abbas as someone who's trying to dance at two weddings- Trying to appease the Israeli government on one side, and trying to appease large portions of the Palestinian public by endorsing Hamas (which Israel, as you know, considered a terrorist organization) on the other- And that shit, for him, is intolerable. So he used the event as an excuse to "clean" the west bank from Hamas as much as possible- By arresting members, mostly, including ones that were released in the Gilad Shalit deal.
And then the teenagers were found dead.
This shit triggered a massive response in the Israeli public, and racism which built up during the years started to come out. Following the news of the death of the teenagers, I am sad to say that I was ashamed of my country for the racist and hate-filled statements that came afterwards. The government realized just how much shit has burst from the dam they built with their cocky and hawkish attitude throughout the years, and tried their best to control and calm down the situation. Extremist jewish groups went out to the streets of Jerusalem and chanted "death to arabs", counter protests started emerging with people from both the left and the right calling for non-violence and an end to racism, the situation was getting extremely tense- but as soon as I thought it couldn't get any worse, it absolutely did.
6 religious-extremists jews (who were later caught by the Israeli police and confessed), influenced by the recent events (and probably their lack of compassion, emotion, and grey matter),
decided to kidnap a Palestinian kid, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, as revenge. They grabbed him by force, drove him in their car to a nearby forest, and (according to the autopsy and later, their recreation of the act in front of the police) made him drink gasoline. After doing that, they doused him in it, and lit him on fire.
This caused the Arab-Israeli public to go nuts. Riots and protests started in the boy's neighborhood, Shuafat, as well as a variety of other predominantly-arab towns and cities. The Israeli police responded in an attempt to contain the situation (
and it didn't help when a few of them were caught beating the murdered teen's cousin on camera). Things were starting to feel like intifada 2.5.
continued in the Reddit link above.
So far since the fighting started last Tuesday, over
160 Palestinians have died [thousands injured] and over 1100 air strikes from Israel.
Hamas has fired over 650 rockets into Israel, 0 Israeli death [Israel's Iron dome has intercepted many of these rockets].
Israel has called up
40000 reservists for a possible ground invasion into Gaza.
Israel says its giving warnings to the Palestinians before they air strike homes.
Here is a
video of the Knock on Roof warning they provide,
article