Palestinian Youth are Not Safe from Israeli Bullets (Chris McGreal, The
Guardian, 17 September 2004) 20 September 2004 The death and
disorientation of the children of Gaza In their homes, in the street, in UN-run
schools, Palestinian youth are not safe from Israeli bullets
Chris McGreal in Khan Yunis
Friday September 17, 2004
The Guardian
Raghda Alassar's classmates did not hear the Israeli bullet that tore into the
nine-year-old's brain as she wrote an English test. But as a pool of blood
spread across her desk and spilled on to the floor, a wall of screams
rose from the classroom of the UN elementary school for girls in Khan Yunis.
At that point Raghda was still crying for help. By the time she was hauled into
the trauma room of a neighbouring hospital she was silent.
For five crucial days the army blocked Raghda's transfer to an Israeli hospital
with the facilities to offer a glimmer of hope. An infection set in. On Tuesday
doctors told her father, Adnad, that she was brain dead.
"The bullet entered under her eye and went out the back of her head," Mr
Alassar said.
"It took them a long time to stop the bleeding, and her heart stopped and they
gave her shocks. From that moment she was like a dead body, although she wasn't
dead."
"I find it so difficult to believe what happened to my daughter. She was at
school, just carrying her notebook, not a gun. What is my daughter -
nine years old - guilty of that she has to be shot? It's state terror against
the whole population."
In recent weeks the Israelis have again been preoccupied with terrorism, from
the murder of 16 people in the Beersheba bus bombings to the slaughter of
Russian schoolchildren in Beslan, which received blanket coverage.
During the six months of relative peace for Israelis, until the Beersheba
bombings, the army killed more than 400 Palestinians. Most were fighters, but
they also included about 40 children under 15. Palestinians say this
also is a form of terror.
"We're always listening for the helicopters, listening for the tanks, listening
for the bombs," said Khitam abu Shawarib, the only social worker in Rafah
refugee camp, on the southern tip of the Gaza Strip.
"I am very sorry when I hear of a Jewish woman or children killed. I think it
is wrong and many people here think it is wrong. But what the Jews suffer is
nothing to the terror we live with from them.
"It takes such a toll on our health, on society, most of all on the children."
Israelis live in fear of random attacks, principally the suicide bombing of
buses and cafes, and shootings in the occupied territories. But they are
generally safe in their homes and are more likely to be killed in a
road accident than by a bomb.
In southern Gaza and parts of the West Bank there is often no sanctuary from
the seemingly relentless, indiscriminate Israeli shooting.
Israel classifies Gaza Strip towns such as Rafah and Khan Yunis, and Nablus and
Jenin in the West Bank, as war zones.
That, the army says, justifies the firing of powerful sophisticated weapons
into residential areas or the bulldozing of scores of homes each month,
ostensibly in search of rarely discovered tunnels for smuggling in weapons.
Barely a night passes in Rafah or Khan Yunis without the machine-gun fire that
has shredded hundreds of homes, forcing families to sleep in a single inner
room behind bricked up windows or a second wall.
Others live in the rubble of their bulldozed houses, perpetually in the firing
line from the rarely seen soldiers high in the gun towers.
A fortnight ago 15-year-old Mazen al-Ara was trying to lead his siblings away
from tanks and heavy shooting around their house on the edge of the
"Philadelphi Road", the highly militarised border at Rafah.
The army had partially destroyed the family home months before, but the Aras
went on living there because they had no money to move.
Usually they sheltered in an inner room when the shooting began, but that night
it was so intense that Mazen said they would all be killed if they
stayed.
As he led the terrified group into the street, Mazen was caught by a burst of
fire. The boy died; doctors took 18 bullets from his body.
A few days earlier 10-year-old Munir al-Daqas left his home in Jabalya refugee
camp to visit his grandparents' house five minutes' walk away. Israeli tanks
were on the far side of the camp, but no one saw any danger in the heart of
Jabalya, around its bustling market, in daylight.
"It must have been a sniper," his mother, Kifah, said. "People told me as I was
shopping in the market. I couldn't believe it. Munir was just there with me and
now they were saying he was dead."
Mrs Daqas unfolded a picture of the semi-naked body of her son in his grave.
There is a bullet wound in the chest and another in the groin.
In four years of intifada, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says, the
army has killed 136 children in Rafah and Khan Yunis, a quarter of all the
Palestinian children who have died during the uprising, because of its
"indiscriminate shooting, excessive force, a shoot-to-kill policy and the
deliberate targeting of children".
The dead in Khan Yunis and Rafah in recent weeks also include two 12-year-old
boys, a 15-year-old girl and a 75-year-old man in a wheelchair, Ibrahim
Halfalla, who was crushed under the rubble of his own home by an army bulldozer
as his wife begged the soldiers not to advance.
The army has not offered an explanation for the killing of Raghda Alassar, but
it frequently says that child victims are caught in crossfire during
Palestinian attacks on the army or Jewish settlers.
There were no such battles when Raghda Alassar and Munir Daqas were hit. Or
when a bullet pierced the blind of Sara Zorob's living room and struck the
10-year-old in the chest, killing her instantly.
Commanders in Gaza have admitted in the past that when their soldiers are
attacked they are allowed to fire back randomly, risking civilian lives.
There are other young victims, as well.
"The children who are physically injured are not the only ones harmed," said
Usama Freona, a psychologist at the UN clinic in Rafah.
"The levels of violence children are exposed to is horrific. "We work in a lot
of schools to treat the children. In the one next to Kfar
Darom [a Jewish settlement in Gaza], all the children are suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder. Most of them were crying and shaking when they
were speaking about their experiences. There is a lot of bedwetting."
Mohammed abu Yusuf is the counsellor at Raghda Alassar's school. "After Raghda
was shot," he said, "the children were crying and screaming.
Five girls in her class still won't come back to school. We took Raghda's desk
away and brought another but none of the students will sit at it."
Raghda Alassar is not the first child shot at the cluster of UN schools in Khan
Yunis. Last year an Israeli bullet blinded Huda Darwish, 12, as she sat at her
desk.
Mrs Daqas said her other children could not comprehend Munir's death. "Munir's
younger brother doesn't understand he is dead. He thought he would come back
after the funeral and kept asking why Munir has come when we've had 'the party'
for him. His four-year-old sister asks every day if we can search the market
because Munir must be lost," she said.
Mr Freona said the constant violence begets violence.
"Look at the games children play. Most of the boys play Arabs and Jews. Many
want to play the role of the Jews. They see that the Israeli soldiers are the
ones with the guns and they are strong and they see that is the most important
thing," he said.
"They see guns as the source of power, the solution to dealing with any
problem, the way to get what they want."
With that has come a collapse in respect for authority.
The image of Mohammed al-Dura, the 12-year-old Gaza boy shot as his father
vainly tried to protect him from Israeli gunfire in the first days of the
latest intifada, is seared on the Palestinian consciousness.
It has come to symbolise what they see as the callous indifference of Israeli
forces to the lives of their children. But Mrs Abu Shawarib said it had a
further impact on many children, who saw that a father was unable to protect
his son.
"The respect for authority is shattered because children see their fathers
beaten in front of them," she said. "The authority of the father, who used to
just have to utter one word for the child to obey, is shattered. The father
looks helpless to protect the child and the child thinks they are alone."
Another result of the perpetual killing was that many children came to expect
an early death and to welcome the prospect of becoming a "martyr".
"The martyr is in paradise, he has glory here and in the afterlife where it is
so much better than life in Rafah," she said. "The children see many people
killed, so they come to expect to be killed. This is horrible, that children
should accept the possibility of death."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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