On This Day in 2009: When Palestinian children returned to school for the first day of classes since Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza ended, not all pupils showed up. Some students had to be excused for not attending after being killed by the Israeli army during its three-week bombing campaign of the besieged strip.
Over 300 Palestinian children were killed in ‘Operation Cast Lead’ — between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 — which took the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians in total.
Signs replaced the once-occupied seats at al-Fakhura School in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza; names of victims written under the word in red: ‘Martyr’, 24 January, 2009.
(Photo: Anja Niedringhaus / AP)
On this day in 2009: Israel attacks UN school in Gaza with white phosphorus, killing two brothers and wounding 12 others
1,898 people were taking shelter from the fighting when artillery shells hit the UN school in Beit Lahiya at around 6 a.m. on 17 January, 2009. Two brothers, aged five and seven, were killed. Their 18-year-old sister was grievously injured and had to have her leg amputated. Their mother lost a hand and sustained a serious head injury. Twelve others were injured. According to relatives, they had fled their homes to escape the bombardments and had come to the school hoping to find safety.
Human Rights Watch visited the site on January 23, six days after the attack, and saw white phosphorus wedges still burning when children dug them out of the sand.
The use of white phosphorus as a weapon – as opposed to its use as an obscurant and infrared blocking smoke screen – is banned by the United Nation’s third convention on conventional weapons.
Watch: Rain of Fire: White Phosphorus in Gaza
(Photo: Iyad El-Baba)
Pro-Israel Rally For Attacking Gaza Called for ‘Wiping Out’ Palestinians, NYC, 1-11-09
On January 11 2009, an estimated 10,000 people rallied in front of the Israeli consulate in midtown New York in support of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip, which at the time had already claimed the lives of 800 Palestinians (1,400 by the end of the campaign).
The event was a festive affair that began and ended with singing and joyous dancing. Comments included:
Nothing good is going to come out of it unless they keep fighting all the way with this until they wipe them all out.
There’s only one way to deal with the cancer — you burn it out or you remove it.
Attendees included Charles Schumer, the senior United States Senator from New York — who highlighted Israel’s supposed humanitarian methods of warfare by pointing to its text messaging of certain Gaza Strip residents urging them to vacate their homes before Israeli forces bombed them — and David Paterson, the then Governer of New York.
Palestinian doctor’s desperate plea for help on live Israeli television minutes after three of his daughters are killed by an Israeli shell (2009)
Like the shellings of UN-run schools and a major hospital in Gaza City, the Israeli public might have regarded the deaths of his three daughters as just more collateral damage in an ugly but justified war, if they noticed it at all. But Dr Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish is a gynaecologist at Israel’s Shiba Hospital near Tel Aviv, and is well known among Israeli medical colleagues and journalists.
During the 22 days of Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza, the Palestinian doctor and peace advocate who speaks Hebrew fluently had helped the Israeli media cover the war by giving phone interviews from inside Gaza.
But on Friday night, Dr Aboul Aish’s scheduled live interview with Israeli Channel 10 television was conducted minutes after three of his daughters were killed by an Israeli shell. His raw anguish forced Israelis to take their first real glimpse of the suffering and death caused to Palestinian civilians.
Shlomi Eldar, the Channel 10 correspondent, his own voice choking with emotion, repeatedly noted Dr Aboul Aish’s connection to Shiba Hospital as he held out his mobile phone, allowing viewers to hear the physician cry and sob: “My daughters, they killed them, Oh lord, God, God, God.”
“I want to save them but they are dead,” Dr Aboul Aish said. In a video of the interview, available on YouTube, the physician can be heard imploring for help while a shaken Mr Eldar pleads on air for anyone in the army who might be viewing to let ambulances reach the Aboul Aish home in the Jebalya refugee camp. “Maybe something can still be saved,” he said.
In extraordinary scenes, after having three of his daughters killed, the doctor received an angry reception from some Israelis following a press conference, despite saying that Israelis and Palestinians “can live together” and that there is “no difference between Palestinians and Israelis”.
I can tell you with certainty that white phosphorus is absolutely not being used.
Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask
PUBLISHED DURING OPERATION CAST LEAD, 3 YEARS AGO TODAY: 7 JANUARY, 2009
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night’s work in Gaza by the army that believes in “purity of arms”. But why should we be surprised?
Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. “Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties,” yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night’s butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.
What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I’m afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against “international terror”. The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.
I’ve reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.
The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel’s right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel’s own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin’s government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn’t even apologise.
Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.
And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we’ll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We’ll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we’ll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn’t. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.
Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.
Photo: A Palestinian girl injured in the Israeli bombardment of a UN school on January 6, 2009 is taken to Shifa hospital in Gaza City. (AP)
On This Day — January 3, 2009: An Israeli airstrike hits the Ibrahim al-Maqadna mosque in Gaza during the busy period of evening prayers where several hundred male and female worshippers congregated, killing at least 13 Palestinians, six of whom were children.
Fdil Sobih, 40, an ambulance driver who was one of the first people to arrive at the scene, told the Observer that the sight outside the Ibrahim al-Maqadna mosque was horrific, and was made worse by the desperation of locals trying to dig out those buried under the rubble with their hands. “I saw people cut to pieces,” he said. “No one expected this here. The mosque is a few hundred metres from the hospital and it is heavily populated and is surrounded by houses.
Astonishingly, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed in a 2009 report (“The operation in Gaza: Factual and legal aspects”) that “the mosque was not attacked at all” and that “the supposed “civilians” who were casualties of the attack were in fact Hamas operatives killed while fighting against the IDF.”
The ministry tracked back on their comments in a later report (“Gaza Operation Investigations: Second Update”) after this incident — among many others — was brought to the world’s attention by the UN’s fact finding mission, which concluded that the attack was a deliberate targeting of civilians.
Photo: The bodies of two Palestinian children killed in the Israeli airstrike lie next to each other in the mortuary of a hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on January 3, 2008. (Getty Images / Reuters)
![On anniversary of Gaza war, we will remember IDF soldiers who destroyed Palestinian families
BY AMIRA HASS • HAARETZ
On the third anniversary of the Cast Lead onslaught, we remember the anonymous soldiers who fired on a red car, in which a father, Mohammed Shurrab, and his two sons were returning home from their farm lands. It is not fair that the officer who then served as GOC Southern Command of the Israel Defense Forces, Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant, will be the only one remembered on this anniversary. Indeed, the list of fighters who should be mentioned and recalled is long.
We will remember the pilot who delivered the bomb that killed Mahmoud al-Ghoul, a high-school student, and his uncle Akram, an attorney, at the family’s home in northern Gaza. We will remember the soldiers who analyze photographs taken by drones, who decided that a truck conveying oxyacetylene cylinders for welding, owned by Ahmad Samur, was carrying Grad rockets - a decision that led to an order to bomb the vehicle from the air which, in turn, led to the deaths of eight persons, four of them minors.
We will remember the soldiers who turned the Abu Eida family home in eastern Jabalya into a base and place from which to shoot, and confined in one room an elderly invalid, a blind woman and two older women. We will remember how these soldiers did not allow these four persons to go to the restroom for nine days. We will remember the soldiers who herded members of the Samouni family into one house and were themselves positioned 80 meters from it when it was shelled, with all its residents inside, under orders from brigade commander Ilan Malka - someone else whom we will remember, of course.
The list goes on and on, and we ask forgiveness from those we haven’t cited due to lack of space. But on this occasion we shall especially remember the soldiers at a certain post in the eastern part of Khan Yunis.
On Saturday, January 17, 2009, at 8:46 (a day before the cessation of the attacks), I received the following letter from the United States in my inbox: “My father and two brothers were attacked yesterday [Friday, January 16th] while driving home from their farm. One brother [Kassab - 27] died, but the father [Mohammed Shurrab - 64] and the remaining brother [Ibrahim - 17] are now wounded and stranded in an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) controlled area. They were attacked between 1:00-1:30 P.M. local time during the cease-fire time, and emergency services are unable to reach them.”
The IDF did not allow an ambulance to approach this area; the letter writer, Amer Shurrab, believed that media pressure would help bring about such authorization. “We are very desperate, and trying as many avenues as possible to get aid to reach them. If you know even a foot soldier who might be able to push the ball by calling a local commander we would really appreciate any help,” he wrote.
Shurrab did not know that while he was writing this desperate appeal to a person he did not know, his second brother was already dead, after bleeding in his father’s arms for 10 hours. The bereaved brother also did not know that from 6 A.M. that same Saturday, Tom, a field worker for the Physicians for Human Rights nonprofit organization, was in touch with me.
This was a case of death on via live broadcast: Until the battery of the father’s cell phone went dead, Shurrab phoned his relatives in Gaza and the United States, as well as the Red Crescent and the Red Cross, Tom from PHR, and local journalists.
The humanitarian cease-fire, as it was called by the IDF, had lasted on that Friday from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. The father, who was driving, and his two sons passed an IDF checking position, and were allowed to continue on. Around 1 P.M. they reached the Abu Zeidan supermarket, in the Al Fukhary neighborhood in eastern Khan Yunis, whose residents had fled at the start of the ground attack. The neighboring house, the largest building on the street, had been turned into an army base two weeks beforehand. Shots were fired from this base at the Shurrab car. Wounded in his chest, Kassab got out of the jeep, collapsed and died. Ibrahim jumped out of the vehicle, and was then wounded in his leg by unrelenting gunfire.
The father was wounded in the arm, but managed to drag his surviving son to a nearby wall. He saw a tank, and soldiers coming and going. The soldiers could see him. At 11 P.M., 10 hours after the shooting, still pinned against the wall, the father noticed that his bleeding son was becoming cold and that his breathing was becoming labored. He managed to carry his son back to the gunshot-riddled vehicle, hoping it would be warmer there. But half an hour after midnight, between Friday and Saturday, the son drew his last breath, in his father’s arms.
All this occurred some 50 or 100 meters from the soldiers. Periodically, the newly bereaved father spoke on the phone with Tom who, stationed in his Tel Aviv home throughout the night, joined the Red Cross in efforts to persuade the army to allow an ambulance to come immediately to the scene. The European Gaza Hospital is located some two kilometers, a one- or two-minute ride, from this area.
Around 9:30 Saturday morning Tom was informed that the IDF had given authorization for the ambulance to come at noon that day.
At the time, the IDF Spokesman relayed that, “In general, during the cease-fire the IDF opened fire only when rockets were fired at Israel, or shots were fired at the IDF. We are unable to investigate and retrieve the facts of every incident, or to verify or deny each piece of information that is brought to our attention. The ambulance’s entry was allowed only after an assessment was made of the situation in the field, and a decision was reached that operational conditions allowed such entry. The wounded persons [!!] were evacuated by the Palestinian health ministry, and brought to the hospital in Rafah.”
I well remember those anonymous solders who destroyed the Shurrab family. Upon my arrival at the site on January 24, I discovered that they had left behind not only the usual images of destruction, and the routine filth, at the Palestinian home from which they fired shots against this family: They also left behind the inscription, “Kahane was right.”
Photo: Israeli soldiers celebrate together as they return to Israel from the northern Gaza Strip as Operation Cast Lead comes to an end, after taking the lives of 1,400 Palestinians; over 300 of whom children, Sunday, January 18, 2009. (AP)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx6u3tYPyo1qkc59eo1_500.jpg)
On anniversary of Gaza war, we will remember IDF soldiers who destroyed Palestinian families
BY AMIRA HASS • HAARETZ
On the third anniversary of the Cast Lead onslaught, we remember the anonymous soldiers who fired on a red car, in which a father, Mohammed Shurrab, and his two sons were returning home from their farm lands. It is not fair that the officer who then served as GOC Southern Command of the Israel Defense Forces, Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant, will be the only one remembered on this anniversary. Indeed, the list of fighters who should be mentioned and recalled is long.
We will remember the pilot who delivered the bomb that killed Mahmoud al-Ghoul, a high-school student, and his uncle Akram, an attorney, at the family’s home in northern Gaza. We will remember the soldiers who analyze photographs taken by drones, who decided that a truck conveying oxyacetylene cylinders for welding, owned by Ahmad Samur, was carrying Grad rockets - a decision that led to an order to bomb the vehicle from the air which, in turn, led to the deaths of eight persons, four of them minors.
We will remember the soldiers who turned the Abu Eida family home in eastern Jabalya into a base and place from which to shoot, and confined in one room an elderly invalid, a blind woman and two older women. We will remember how these soldiers did not allow these four persons to go to the restroom for nine days. We will remember the soldiers who herded members of the Samouni family into one house and were themselves positioned 80 meters from it when it was shelled, with all its residents inside, under orders from brigade commander Ilan Malka - someone else whom we will remember, of course.
The list goes on and on, and we ask forgiveness from those we haven’t cited due to lack of space. But on this occasion we shall especially remember the soldiers at a certain post in the eastern part of Khan Yunis.
On Saturday, January 17, 2009, at 8:46 (a day before the cessation of the attacks), I received the following letter from the United States in my inbox: “My father and two brothers were attacked yesterday [Friday, January 16th] while driving home from their farm. One brother [Kassab - 27] died, but the father [Mohammed Shurrab - 64] and the remaining brother [Ibrahim - 17] are now wounded and stranded in an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) controlled area. They were attacked between 1:00-1:30 P.M. local time during the cease-fire time, and emergency services are unable to reach them.”
The IDF did not allow an ambulance to approach this area; the letter writer, Amer Shurrab, believed that media pressure would help bring about such authorization. “We are very desperate, and trying as many avenues as possible to get aid to reach them. If you know even a foot soldier who might be able to push the ball by calling a local commander we would really appreciate any help,” he wrote.
Shurrab did not know that while he was writing this desperate appeal to a person he did not know, his second brother was already dead, after bleeding in his father’s arms for 10 hours. The bereaved brother also did not know that from 6 A.M. that same Saturday, Tom, a field worker for the Physicians for Human Rights nonprofit organization, was in touch with me.
This was a case of death on via live broadcast: Until the battery of the father’s cell phone went dead, Shurrab phoned his relatives in Gaza and the United States, as well as the Red Crescent and the Red Cross, Tom from PHR, and local journalists.
The humanitarian cease-fire, as it was called by the IDF, had lasted on that Friday from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. The father, who was driving, and his two sons passed an IDF checking position, and were allowed to continue on. Around 1 P.M. they reached the Abu Zeidan supermarket, in the Al Fukhary neighborhood in eastern Khan Yunis, whose residents had fled at the start of the ground attack. The neighboring house, the largest building on the street, had been turned into an army base two weeks beforehand. Shots were fired from this base at the Shurrab car. Wounded in his chest, Kassab got out of the jeep, collapsed and died. Ibrahim jumped out of the vehicle, and was then wounded in his leg by unrelenting gunfire.
The father was wounded in the arm, but managed to drag his surviving son to a nearby wall. He saw a tank, and soldiers coming and going. The soldiers could see him. At 11 P.M., 10 hours after the shooting, still pinned against the wall, the father noticed that his bleeding son was becoming cold and that his breathing was becoming labored. He managed to carry his son back to the gunshot-riddled vehicle, hoping it would be warmer there. But half an hour after midnight, between Friday and Saturday, the son drew his last breath, in his father’s arms.
All this occurred some 50 or 100 meters from the soldiers. Periodically, the newly bereaved father spoke on the phone with Tom who, stationed in his Tel Aviv home throughout the night, joined the Red Cross in efforts to persuade the army to allow an ambulance to come immediately to the scene. The European Gaza Hospital is located some two kilometers, a one- or two-minute ride, from this area.
Around 9:30 Saturday morning Tom was informed that the IDF had given authorization for the ambulance to come at noon that day.
At the time, the IDF Spokesman relayed that, “In general, during the cease-fire the IDF opened fire only when rockets were fired at Israel, or shots were fired at the IDF. We are unable to investigate and retrieve the facts of every incident, or to verify or deny each piece of information that is brought to our attention. The ambulance’s entry was allowed only after an assessment was made of the situation in the field, and a decision was reached that operational conditions allowed such entry. The wounded persons [!!] were evacuated by the Palestinian health ministry, and brought to the hospital in Rafah.”
I well remember those anonymous solders who destroyed the Shurrab family. Upon my arrival at the site on January 24, I discovered that they had left behind not only the usual images of destruction, and the routine filth, at the Palestinian home from which they fired shots against this family: They also left behind the inscription, “Kahane was right.”
Photo: Israeli soldiers celebrate together as they return to Israel from the northern Gaza Strip as Operation Cast Lead comes to an end, after taking the lives of 1,400 Palestinians; over 300 of whom children, Sunday, January 18, 2009. (AP)
On This Day — December 28, 2008: Five Palestinian sisters killed in Israeli airstrike while they slept
The five Palestinian sisters were fast asleep when a night-time Israeli airstrike hit the next-door mosque in Gaza. One of the walls collapsed on to their small asbestos-roofed home and they were all killed in their beds. The eldest sister, Tahrir, was 17 years old, the youngest, Jawaher, just four.
“They grow up day after day and night after night. Within a second, I have lost them,” the girls’ father [pictured, bottom photo], Anwar Balousha, said yesterday. The 37-year-old, along with another three of his children, was himself injured in the attack on the densely populated Jabalya refugee camp.
The funerals of the sisters – Tahrir, 17; Ikram, 15; Samar, 12; Dina eight; and Jawaher, four – were attended by family members and thousands of mourners. But with space running out in the cemetery, the five girls had to be buried in just three graves, one for the eldest and the others forced to share.
The Independent | Read the BBC’s report (Photos: Getty Images / Reuters)
IDF chief: Gaza war against Hamas was an 'excellent' operation
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz marked the three-year anniversary of Operation Cast Lead yesterday by hailing it “an excellent operation that achieved deterrence for Israel vis-a-vis Hamas.” However, he warned, cracks have emerged in that deterrence over time, and a second round of fighting in the Gaza Strip is not a matter of choice for Israel.
Such a round must be initiated by Israel and must be “swift and painful,” he said, adding, “I do not advise Hamas to test our mettle.”
Operation Cast Lead, referred to as an ‘excellent’ operation by Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, took the lives of 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, 3 Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli soldiers — 4 of whom died as a result of friendly fire.
