AP reporter on war in Gaza and razing of AP office

An 11-day war between Israel and Gaza's ruling Hamas militant group in May left over 260 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead.

It was the fourth war between the bitter enemies since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, with fighting erupting after weeks of tensions and clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli police in contested east Jerusalem.

Israeli aircraft struck hundreds of targets in Gaza, while Hamas launched over 4,000 rockets at Israel. In a first, the violence also spilled over into clashes between Jews and Arabs inside Israel as well.

In Gaza, tens of thousands of homes were damaged and more than 2,000 others were destroyed. Israel has eased its blockade of Gaza as part of Egyptian-led efforts to broker a longer-term cease-fire, but reconstruction efforts have yet to get off the ground. In rocket-scarred southern Israel, residents remain jittery.

On the sixth day of the war, the Israeli air force bombed the 12-story al-Jalaa tower, roughly an hour after ordering all occupants to evacuate. No one was injured, but the building was destroyed. The building was home to offices belonging to The Associated Press, the Al-Jazeera satellite channel as well as dozens of families. Israel has said it had evidence Hamas was using the building for military purposes, though it has not released any evidence publicly to back the claim.

Here, some AP journalists involved in the coverage reflect on the story and their own experiences.

Josef Federman, AP's News Director for Israel the Palestinian Territories and Jordan reflects on the coverage and his own experiences:

The airstrike happened on the sixth day of the war. During those first few days, we had worked out a nice little routine. Karin Laub, the Mideast news director, would keep an eye on the story in the mornings while I would rest and do TV interviews. Then I would come in and handle the story and write the night's big roundup at the end of the day.

The airstrike happened on a Saturday, and it was actually kind of quiet. I went out and did a TV interview for Chinese television. Whenever I did TV, I would turn my phone off and put it down so I could focus on the interview. So, I turned my phone off for about 10 minutes.

When I turned it back on, there were eight missed calls from the office. I thought, "What the heck is going on?" And then as I was staring at my phone, it rang again and it was Karin and she was frantic. We had just received a warning from the Israeli army that the building with our Gaza office was going to be blown up. "We've been given an hour to clear out," she said, before asking me to call my contacts to see if we could stop it.

A couple of days earlier, I had given the Israeli military the GPS coordinates of our office to make sure it wasn't accidentally bombed. So I called them to see if they could stop this. The spokesman was very nice, asked for more details about the building and said he would make some phone calls to see if anything could be done.

I then called the Foreign Ministry, telling the spokesman that this would be a public relations disaster if Israel destroyed the AP office. He also promised to make some calls and see if he could help.

Then, I called the prime minister's office and got a very different reply. There were no offers of help. The spokesman merely said: "Make sure you get your people out of there and they are safe."

That's when I knew the office was going to get blown up.

I rushed home, flipped on the TV and watched our office get blown up in real time on live TV.

This wasn't the worst thing we've dealt with. In 2014, two people were killed in an accident, an explosion in Gaza, and another staffer was badly wounded. So, all things considered, this wasn't the worst outcome. At least everybody was safe.

They had an hour to get out of there. They grabbed what they could. And the amazing thing is, they went to work. They ran down the stairs, they got out of the building and they took incredible footage: They interviewed people, they spoke to the owner of the building who was also pleading with the army not to do this, they got incredible photos. We wrote some great stories and a first-person account. The resilience is amazing.

It's not easy, but everybody kind of knows what to do. They spring to life, everybody knows their job, and they just go to work and take care of business.