Family relives horror at hands of Israeli soldiers
REPORTING FROM GAZA
By SHAHANAAZ HABIB
TRY
as she may, Rhita Helow cannot get rid of the image of finding her dead
father with his feet sticking out from a pile of earth near an olive
tree behind their home.
She saw Israeli soldiers shoot her father in his stomach two weeks ago and
watched him die before her eyes.
But nothing prepared her for the shock of finding her father’s badly decomposed
body partially buried in a pile of earth.
After the ceasefire, the family came home to Zaitoon here. They dug out his
body and gave him a proper burial.
Rhita said the Israelis also killed one of her brothers and her one-year-old
niece.
Recounting
the painful incident, Rhita said that on Jan 4, Israeli tanks rolled
into Salahadin Street in Zaitoon and blew out all the windows of the
family’s huge two-storey home.
Frightened, the family of 14
huddled together under the stairs and spent the night there. At dawn,
the soldiers entered the house and saw the family under the staircase.
Rhita’s father was shot right in front of them.
A soldier who spoke Arabic told the family to leave the house if they wanted to
be safe.
Night of terror:Rhita at the staircase where the family huddled when Israeli
tanks blew
out their windows. The soldiers came the next morning and killed her
father at this spot.
“When we came out, the soldiers starting shooting at us. A bullet hit my
brother. And another got my niece.
“We called the ambulance but Israeli soldiers shot the ambulance too and would
not let them take away the injured,” she said.
Rhita
said soldiers took away another one of her brothers. The rest of the
family got on their knees and crawled to a small hill to take cover.
“We
stayed on the hill for 13 hours, cold and scared, until the soldiers
left. We were five women, four children and one old man,” she said. The
group then walked for an hour to get to Rhita’s sister’s home.
After the ceasefire was announced, the Helow family immediately returned home
but found their house in an absolute mess.
For Rhita, now more than ever, there could never be peace between Israel and
Palestine.
“We
will be at war forever. We will never surrender our land. There are
thousands of houses like this. We can lose our houses but not our
land,” she said.
She wants Israel to be tried for war crimes for using illegal weapons like
white phosphorous bombs.
Rhita said nobody cared about the Palestinians.
“You journalists come and take our stories. But what happens after this? We
want solutions.”
