Withdrawing its settlements and ground forces from Gaza in 2005, Israel continued to exercise its control by means of an aerial occupation. Over the past 19 years, this strategy produced alternating cycles of aerial bombardment. Despite their sheer magnitude, there is however remarkably little understanding of their variation and spatiality across multiple episodes. Our analysis combines spatial data on aerial attacks from all major military operations in Gaza, including 2008-2009, 2014, and 2023-2024 with geo-coded data on casualties and socio-economic indicators. We find that aerial violence intensified in scale, duration, lethality, and destruction, while simultaneously becoming more indiscriminate over time, in spite of advancing Israeli military technology. Across episodes, we also identify a socio-economic targeting bias: selective casualties cluster in areas characterized by higher measures of wealth and education, while indicators of poverty show the opposite effect. Over time, however, this spatial pattern of selective violence also fades out. This leads us to discuss the changing nature of violence in Gaza in relation to common but insufficient theoretical explanations for resorting to selective or indiscriminate violence respectively. Additionally, bombardment density varies as a function of topography and urban morphology, with sites located at higher altitudes or in more densely built-up areas being targeted more frequently. Despite the repeated wide-spread destruction and tens-of-thousands civilian casualties, we conclude that the aerial occupation of Gaza has failed, leading to a reverse towards a hybrid of aerial and terrestrial occupation as of October 2023.