(NBC NEWS) What everybody feared has indeed happened. The Israeli ground invasion, Israel launched its army into Gaza.
There was very heavy fire from the air, a lot of rockets, airplanes support, and tanks and armored personnel carriers, combat engineers, all went on the ground at the same time.
Apparently, we don't know the details yet, but they're attacking from the north, the central region and the south.
The goal of this invasion is not all out war against the Gaza Strip or even against Hamas. It appears limited at this stage to taking out the secret tunnel network that Hamas has built that lead from Gaza into Israel.
The goal is allow gunmen to go through those tunnels and attack Israeli soldiers and civilians inside Israel.
This is all about destroying as many of those tunnels as possible.
Now to do this Israel called up about 50-thousand army reserves and today has said they're going to call up more reserves.
So it doesn't look like it's going to be very quick operation at all. Earlier estimates were that if Israel did this, it would take about ten to 14 days.
And the fear of course is that when Israel goes in with the army, the question will civilian death toll rise.
But what will happen now is that Hamas will fire, even with a vengeance, 130 on average a day so far, that will probably increase.
There was very heavy fire from the air, a lot of rockets, airplanes support, and tanks and armored personnel carriers, combat engineers, all went on the ground at the same time.
Apparently, we don't know the details yet, but they're attacking from the north, the central region and the south.
The goal of this invasion is not all out war against the Gaza Strip or even against Hamas. It appears limited at this stage to taking out the secret tunnel network that Hamas has built that lead from Gaza into Israel.
The goal is allow gunmen to go through those tunnels and attack Israeli soldiers and civilians inside Israel.
This is all about destroying as many of those tunnels as possible.
Now to do this Israel called up about 50-thousand army reserves and today has said they're going to call up more reserves.
So it doesn't look like it's going to be very quick operation at all. Earlier estimates were that if Israel did this, it would take about ten to 14 days.
And the fear of course is that when Israel goes in with the army, the question will civilian death toll rise.
But what will happen now is that Hamas will fire, even with a vengeance, 130 on average a day so far, that will probably increase.