Gaza grieves with tears for the tiniest victim
The terrorist group throws away the lives of its desperate people as a deliberate military tactic
The body of eight-month-old Leila al-ghandour, the youngest victim of the bloodiest clashes in years between Palestinians and Israeli security forces, is cradled by her mother Mariam at a morgue in Gaza City yesterday. Palestinian officials said the baby died in an Israeli tear gas attack, a claim disputed by Israeli forces. Sixty three Palestinians have been killed at the border this week.
Leila al-ghandour’s little face peeked out as her father carried her body from the mosque, wrapped in a white funeral shroud and the green, black and red Palestinian flag.
Her uncles and male cousins passed her small corpse between them as they marched through the streets of the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City towards the graveyard. With each step they chanted their praise of God and their defiance of Israel.
According to her family, the eight-month-old was killed after inhaling a cloud of Israeli tear gas during Monday’s bloody protests on the border. They said her 12-year-old uncle had become confused and accidentally brought the baby to within yards of the barbed wire fence that Israel has vowed to defend with tear gas and snipers’ bullets.
Leila was one of 63 Palestinians killed at the border this week, Palestinian officials said. And she was the youngest.
“She is not the first martyr for Palestine and she won’t be the last. Her sacrifice is for Jerusalem and for the homeland,” her father, Anwar al-ghandour, told The Daily Telegraph.
Her 17-year-old mother, Mariam, wept silently as he spoke.
As the people of Gaza buried their dead yesterday, private grief often sat uncomfortably alongside public political spectacle. Those killed – almost all of them young men in their late teens or 20s – were not just the lost children of heartbroken parents. Each one was also a shaheed, a martyr, whose death belonged to the Palestinian people and to the cause of one day returning to their lost land.
It is this logic that led members of the local Fatah party to take Leila’s picture and print it on a 15ft martyr’s banner alongside photographs of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Yasser Arafat, the revolutionary leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).
The eight-month-old baby with the green eyes looked strange on the banner next to the two old politicians and the Fatah symbol, a pair of fists clenched around assault rifles. Leila was too young to know what Palestine is, and yet apparently old enough to have died in its service.
An Israeli military spokesman disputed that Leila’s death was caused by Israeli tear gas, saying: “We have several accounts that question the validity of this statement.”
They did not give more details. All across Gaza, mourning tents went up on street corners as families gathered to give voice to both their grief and their pride after losing a loved one in the protests against Israel and Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Dr Mahmoud Rantisi, a 60-year-old professor, smiled and waved his hand dismissively when asked about the death of his son Ahmed, who was shot in the chest on Monday as he tried to tear down the Israeli border fence.
“I am not sad, I’m very happy. We consider this event to be like a wedding for us. We even serve juice instead of coffee because it’s like a wedding,” he said. “We think our son didn’t just die. He moved on to another life. It’s mentioned in the Koran.”
The Rantisis are a prominent Hamas family in Gaza and hundreds of men lined up to shake the professor’s hand outside the mourning tent for his son. Female relatives mourned in a separate building, several walking past the tent with eyes red from crying.
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) estimated that around 4,000 people were on the Gaza border yesterday, compared to around 40,000 people on Monday during the American embassy opening ceremony. Young men burned tyres and hurled rocks towards Israeli forces. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli snipers, Palestinian officials said.
At the Malakah protest site an Israeli drone flew lazily over the several hundred protesters before dropping a salvo of tear gas canisters. It hovered for a moment as Palestinians fled and then turned back towards the border.
Doa’a al-harazin, 24, watched the drone angrily as it disappeared in the distance. Although she has no children of her own, she said that if she did she would encourage them to go to the border to protest despite the danger.
While the violence on the ground had mostly subsided yesterday, the diplomatic storm gathered strength.
Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador in Ankara in protest. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, accused Israel of “genocide” and denounced Benjamin Netanyahu as “the prime minister of an apartheid state that has occupied a defenceless people’s land [for] 60 plus years in violation of UN resolutions.” Israel responded by expelling the Turkish consul general from Jerusalem. “Erdoğan is among Hamas’s biggest supporters and there is no doubt he well understands terrorism and slaughter,” Mr Netanyahu said. “I suggest he not preach morality to us.”
In Britain, Prime |Minister Theresa May called the deaths in Gaza “tragic and extremely concerning” and called for an investigation. While Alistair Burt, the junior foreign office minister, said the US needed “to give a greater sense of understanding of some of the underlying issues”.
Jean-yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, suggested Mr Trump’s unilateral approach to the Israeli-palestinian conflict, in defiance of European allies, risked plunging the region into further chaos. “We are committed to the security of Israel but Israel’s security cannot justify this level of violence,” Mr Le Drian said. “The situation in the Middle East is explosive, violence is doing the talking, war could loom.”
The US meanwhile continued to stand firmly behind Israel, placing the blame for the violence on Hamas.
At Al-shifa Hospital, the main medical facility in Gaza City, exhausted staff said they could not sustain another day of violence like Monday. “I hope that things will stay quiet, if they don’t it will be a disaster for us,” said Dr Aymal al-sahbani, the
‘We think our son didn’t just die. He moved on to another life. It’s in the Koran’
head of the emergency department. The doctor said he had less than half the necessary drugs and only 30 per cent of the medical supplies such as bandages that are needed. An acute worry was a shortage of external fixation devices, a metal frame used on broken bones and torn tissue.
The vast majority of the wounded had been shot in the leg, Dr al-sahbani said, and without enough external fixation devices his surgeons might be forced to amputate. At least two dozen amputations have happened since the protests began, Palestinian officials say.
Ahmed Halles, a 19-year-old worker at a Coca Cola factory, was among those who had been able to get a stabiliser. He was shot in the left leg on Monday as he tried to bring stones towards the border fence for other young men with slingshots to fire towards the Israeli positions. “I was trying to break the siege of Gaza,” he said, referring to the 11-year blockade Israel has imposed on the strip. “I will go back as soon as I can walk.”
It is not clear if there will be more protests for the teenager to walk back to. The demonstrations which began on March 30 were always intended to reach a crescendo this week.
The Islamic holy month of Ramadan begins this week, bringing with it long, hot days of fasting. Israeli officials are cautiously optimistic that the demonstrations have now peaked.
“Today is the last day. I’m sad because I want the protests to keep going so we can take our rights,” said Saed al-samouni, a 19-year-old student. Asked if he was relieved to have survived weeks without being wounded or killed, the young man shrugged. “There’s no future for anyone in Gaza,” he said.
On Monday the Iran-backed terrorist organisation Hamas achieved its baleful objective when more than 50 people were killed. This is what it had hoped for when it dispatched thousands of Gazans, including women and children, to the border with Israel under orders to break through the fence. This carefully planned operation – which continued yesterday – had nothing to do with protest or the so-called right of return of Palestinians to Israel. It was only about grabbing headlines and creating a situation that the Israel Defence Force had to deal with by lethal force.
Knowing they cannot defeat the IDF by military means, this has been Hamas’s long-term strategy: to cause international outrage aimed at isolating Israel. Previously it has fired rockets and dug attack tunnels, both intended to murder Israeli civilians, leaving the IDF with no option other than to defend its people with force. Hamas’s use of human shields in each of these situations guaranteed civilian deaths.
Hamas has brought these tactics to a new and sickening low in recent weeks, making its human shields the actual weapons of war, with inevitably bloody consequences. This is the first government in history that has deliberately sought to compel its enemy to kill its own people.
You have only to look at yesterday’s world headlines to see that these tactics are more effective than before. While Western commentators, human rights groups and politicians can recognise rockets and attack tunnels as aggressive military actions, it is harder to understand the same thing of apparent demonstrations such as are frequently seen in most capital cities of Europe.
How has the IDF responded to this aggression, which in reality is very far removed from anything seen so far in Europe? Over recent days, I have visited IDF commanders and snipers at the border and observed their actions for myself. They have employed graduated measures, starting with warning Gaza civilians against approaching the border, by leaflet drops, phone calls, SMS and radio broadcasts. They even directly appealed to bus company owners not to bring people to the border.
When crowds still assembled and threatened the fence, non-lethal weapons including tear-gas and evil-smelling “Skunk” liquid were used. Despite the IDF’S deployment of drones to disperse these weapons more precisely, they are relatively ineffective in this situation.
Next the IDF fired over-head warning shots and then disabling shots aimed at ankles and legs. Only as a last resort, in the face of immediate threat by terrorists with weapons and explosives, have soldiers shot to kill.
As a British soldier with 30 years’ experience, including commanding troops facing violent rioters with terrorists among them, I know of no other effective means of handling this situation. Although human rights groups, media analysts and political leaders, including Jeremy Corbyn, have said the IDF should have acted differently, not one has suggested how.
Many have condemned Israel for using excessive and disproportionate force. I cannot assess every incident, but I can say for sure that this is not the case. The IDF has strict rules of engagement, similar to our own, which conform to the laws of war and, when appropriate, to human rights law. IDF commanders exercise tight control over use of force, and I stood beside a battalion commander on the border as he directed operations in his sector.
Those who say it would be no big deal if the crowds reached the border fail to understand the potentially catastrophic implications. If they succeeded in breaking down the fence, thousands would pour through, intent on violence against Israeli civilians. Among them would be armed terrorists with orders to reach border communities and carry out mass murder. Some villages are just a few minutes’ dash from the border. Hamas social media provided Google maps marked with routes from the border to the communities they intended to attack. Had that horrendous scenario occurred, the IDF would have defended these communities with lethal force and many more people would have died.
All of this is no doubt hard to fully understand, especially if you are conditioned to see Israel in a bad light. But those who wrongly accuse Israel of using too much force play into the hands of Hamas.
I am in no doubt that the international reaction to conflict in Gaza has validated Hamas’s human shield tactics and encouraged them to step up their violence. This has contributed to the death toll. Anyone who is genuinely interested in human rights and concerned to improve the wretched lives of the people of Gaza should support Israel’s lawful efforts to defend its sovereign territory and condemn Hamas, which so malevolently oppresses its people and throws away the lives of innocent men, women and children.