Women and children victims once again
Gaza City – The bomb’s targeting was certainly precise – none of the surrounding buildings had been badly damaged. But whatever military rationale might have lain behind the air strike at 2.50pm, it was women and children who made up the majority of the nine dead in the ruins.
Last night Jamal al-Dallu sat silently in a house further down the street, unable to talk. Above, a low but incessant buzzing in the sky revealed the presence of watching drones.
Bulldozers guided by arc lights searched a mountain of rubble for his four children. Neighbours said that Jamal, the oldest, was 5. Sara, the youngest, was 9 months. There were also two women among the nine dead – all from his extended family.
On the ground were remnants of the lives of the Dallu children. Clothes and a mangled bicycle. Blood and dust everywhere.
The Israeli Government’s insistence that the targets of its precision munitions are scrupulously chosen to avoid collateral damage came under greater scrutiny yesterday. Twenty-five people were killed in Gaza during the day, taking the total to 69 dead and 400 injured. Palestinian medical officials said that more than 25 were women, children or the aged.
In the city’s main hospital Garda Qurtub, 31, said that history was repeating itself. On January 15, 2009, during Operation Cast Lead – the last time Israel and Hamas fought in Gaza – her 6-year-old son Ahmed was cut down and killed by shrapnel. Yes- terday morning her son Mahmoud, 6, was outside the house when a bomb landed nearby.
‘‘Everything came again,’’ she said. ‘‘Some other children brought him, full of blood. I thought I would lose him like the last time. I was just screaming.’’
Mahmoud’s injuries were also from shrapnel, to his side, but they were not fatal. He lay in a morphine-induced doze till a spasm startled him awake and he briefly clutched fearfully at his mother.
Asked if there was a discernible difference to Israeli air strikes, which in 2008-2009 claimed more than 1300 lives, she thought not. ‘‘Who are the dead? Women and children,’’ she said. ‘‘Who are the injured? Women and children.’’
At the Dallu household there was panic as rumour spread that Israeli forces had announced that they would target the area again.
‘‘The Jews told our neighbours that they will shell their house,’’ said a 50-year-old woman called Umm al-Abed Shinawi, scrambling to fix her headscarf as she left.
Nearby, 32-year-old Jamila dragged her four children, all crying, towards an ambulance and begged the drivers to take them to Shati refugee camp by the sea.
But the panic seemed to be unfounded and eventually most of those who had left trickled back as the rescue workers wrapped up their mission, placing the bodies into emergency vehicles for transport to the Shifa hospital morgue, the blood on their clothes not yet dry.