- JAMAL Ed Keter says he did
not even see the Israeli Army helicopter that blasted him and a large group
of young men in a Gaza City street early yesterday morning.
- "We were too busy looking at the tanks and I knew
there were helicopters but I didn't see anything until it got us,"
he said as he limped out of Gaza's Shefa Hospital later that morning.
-
- Witnesses say the helicopter gunships that went into
Gaza City in support of about 50 tanks fired into crowds if anyone in the
crowd fired on them, but the 22-year-old insists nobody near him was armed.
-
- As he spoke, his face was swollen and riddled with about
20 small wounds, he was still dazed and a chunk of flesh was missing from
his right calf.
-
- He had joined the crowds when he first heard the tanks
rolling down his street near Gaza's largest market.
-
- When he got to his feet after the blast three people
near him were dead and 15 were injured.
-
- Fourteen-year-old Samed Atta Al Sharif lay nearby with
shrapnel in his belly and his intestines hanging outside his body.
-
- Jomaa Helmi Saqqa, a doctor at the hospital, said the
boy had been successfully operated on and would recover.
-
- "Two of the martyrs were brought in with their heads
missing ... they were shot from above from a helicopter," he said.
-
- Eleven of the 12 dead were aged between 20 and 25 but
the last victim had not been identified.
-
- When I saw his body in a back room the identification
problem was obvious.
-
- The middle of his face was missing as something had blown
out a neat circle from the bottom of his nose to the top of his eyebrows
leaving a 5cm deep hole where his nose and eyes should have been.
-
- The doctor was sure there would soon be a 13th death
as another man had a brain injury that the hospital was not equipped to
treat.
-
- In the surrounding streets, crowds stood quietly looking
at the debris of flattened shops and factories, homes pocked with heavy
machine gun bullet holes and four buckled bridges that have left a nearby
town cut off from road transport.
-
- One large building had lost an entire wall, exposing
a row of neat second-floor bedrooms with a middle-aged woman standing bewildered
in one looking out at the city through the hole where her wall used to
be.
-
- Mahmoud Madi, 42, sat shaking his head outside his family's
bus company.
-
- Israeli tanks and bulldozers had crushed three of the
company's best buses together to form a barricade against Palestinian gunfire.
-
- "We heard them doing it but what could we do? The
children and my wife were on the ground screaming so I stayed inside.
-
- "These were the best buses in Gaza. Who's going
to pay for them?"
-
- In a city where donkeys still pull carts and jostle with
beaten-up cars, they were indeed fancy buses.
-
- An Israeli army spokesman insisted the incursion was
carefully limited to taking out factories that might be used to produce
rockets for use against Israel.
-
- That does not quite explain what happened at the Ahli
Arab Hospital run by the Anglican Church in central Gaza city.
-
- One missile scored a direct hit on the hospital's church,
which sits in the middle of what is clearly a hospital. The missile destroyed
the church roof, leaving a large crater in front of the altar.
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- http://www.dailytelegraph.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,5895284%255E401,00.html
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