Someone please educate me: What is the significance of this? Why would Israel bomb this building and tell people to evacuate? I'm not familiar. Is it normal for them to announce evacuation?
There is none. Just more noise in press than usual because AP was sitting in the building.
>Why would Israel bomb this building and tell people to evacuate?
Because Israel interested in taking out whatever Hamas physical assets there are in the building and not in killing civilians
> Is it normal for them to announce evacuation?
Yeap. Usually whoever occupies building get phone calls and SMSes hour or two upfront. This is usually followed by a "roof knocking" with specially developed munition that makes a lot of noise. Only after this bombing commences
Probably warning time proportional to building size. Over last few days few 13 floors buildings went down with zero casualties and there were multiple recordings of it filmed from cameras positioned on tripods. It's not something that you can do with "few minutes warning before attack"
Given modern technology (satellite and mobile links), it's hardly possible to "suppress and disrupt the media" as everybody can see. If there is somebody who does suppression of media in gaza it will be hamas: wrong reporting and you are in best case expelled an in worst case dead.
> Even if they took out some computers, disrupting operations (communication, etc) still achieves targets.
> Given modern technology (satellite and mobile links), it's hardly possible to "suppress and disrupt the media" as everybody can see.
It's like saying without evidence, "Verizon's operations in the World Trade Center were basically unaffected on 9/11, but Morgan Stanley's operations there were crippled."
Media can take their laptops, get out and keep on uploading stuff 5 minutes later.
In case of intelligence/command center it will takes weeks to bring all the physical lines to new "secure" location in the city and to get/hookup whatever equipment is used to terminate them.
Terrorist organizations ("elected" or not) don't usually contain themselves to just their evil bases and well defined areas.
Given that Israel believes this is a legitimate target against Hammas (whether it contains intelligence, weapon caches or weapon manufacturing), the target itself are not the people occupying it. That's why, in order to minimize casualties while still operating a war effort, they notify and allow ample time to evacuate the building
APs vague "we were notified" and "narrowly evacuated" is an exaggeration, they were notified by the Israelis themselves and given time to evacuate (that's why they don't mention any casualties in that story, since they probably don't exist). You could argue that no (primarily or not) civilian targets should be attacked ever but that's another subject
The government in Gaza has been firing rockets at Israel for the past few days; Israel says that this attack is a direct military response to the rockets, although (as you can see upthread) others dispute that story.
Since 500+ missiles are still being launched daily at Israeli civilian cities, Israel is slowly but methodically destroying any means necessary to launch those missiles.
Seems fishy.