Sahouin and her mother stayed only four days before finding a lift back home again. On Oct. 24, just before Israeli ground troops began a ground assault of the north Gaza strip, she realized again she may have made the wrong choice.By then, escaping south had got much harder. With the Israeli military now wholly encircling the northern town of Gaza City, many are finding the journey has got harder still. Israel’s government has vowed to destroy Hamas, which the US and European Union designate a terrorist organization and which a month ago killed more than 1,400 Israelis while taking around 240 people hostage. Their strategy has involved a bombing campaign of extraordinary ferocity, which the Hamas-run health ministry says has killed over 10,000 Palestinians and made Gaza intolerable for the living.That is a number relief organizations consider broadly accurate. At least 4,000 of the dead are children. Many are still buried under the rubble created by collapsed buildings. Children arrive at hospitals with their names scrawled on their arms to facilitate identification in case their parents don’t survive. Some of the dead are buried in mass graves.