Gaza City, Sept. 25 -- The morning began with a roar that Gaza has come to recognize and dread. By midday, the fragments of a family home in the crowded central town of Az-Zawayda had been carried to a hospital in Deir al-Balah, and so had the bodies of the people who lived there. Local emergency officials said at least eleven Palestinians were killed in that single strike, including several children. It was one scene in a day of intensified bombardment that, taken together, again laid bare a war's forensic arithmetic: a family name entered into a ledger of the dead, a street's bearings rewritten by blast, a city of more than a million people with nowhere left to turn.

Health authorities in the enclave reported additional fatalities acro...