Gaza's child victims

Warning Video's containing images of injured and murdered children

Source: Al Jazeera English

Israeli Troops Killed Gaza Children Carrying White Flag, witnesses say

Above an Israeli Soldier terrorises a very young
Palestinian boy at Gun point

Nasser Abu Freeh was one of the first to see the Israeli soldiers as they entered this pastoral Gaza neighborhood overlooking the Israeli border on Jan. 3, hours after the Israeli government ordered the first ground forces into Gaza.

Abu Freeh's two-story hilltop home is a favorite spot for Israeli soldiers, who used it as a command post during three previous attempts to deter Gaza militants from firing crude rockets into Israel from the surrounding cattle farms, orange groves and dirt alleys.

Scouts from the militant Islamist group Hamas also favored the hilltop as a place to watch for approaching Israeli soldiers, and the fighters tried to lure the Israelis into a trap by planting land mines outside Abu Freeh's home.

As the Israelis moved in, neighbors said, the Hamas scouts put up little resistance and quickly fell back into the more densely populated part of the neighborhood.

Within hours, the Israeli soldiers took over Abu Freeh's house, moved the seven people living there into one room and began interrogating the adults. The questioners were angry because one of their soldiers had been killed nearby in the early hours of the ground offensive, and they wanted to know what traps Hamas had set for the Israeli forces.

"Where are the tunnels?" Abu Freeh said the soldiers asked in Arabic. "I will kill you if you don't tell me."

Israeli tanks and bulldozers soon took up hilltop positions around Abu Freeh's home, and Khaled Abed Rabbo's five-story house in the valley below was one of those in the line of fire.

More than 70 members of his family crowded into one apartment for days. On Jan. 7, Abed Rabbo said, the shelling intensified, and they heard an Israeli solider calling for people to come out of their homes.

Abed Rabbo said he gathered his wife, their three daughters and his mother, Souad. Souad Abed Rabbo said that she tied a white robe around a mop handle and two of her granddaughters waved white headscarves as they walked outside.

When they opened the door, they saw an Israeli tank parked in their garden about 10 yards away.

"We were waiting for them to give us an order," Khaled said last week as he stood in the ruins of his home. "Then one came out of the tank and started to shoot."

Souad Abed Rabbo said she was shot as she pushed her son back inside and her granddaughters fell on the stairs. When the shooting was over, she said, 2-year-old Amal and 7-year-old Souad were dead.

The allegation is one of at least five such white flag incidents that human rights investigators are looking into across the Gaza Strip. It's part of a growing pattern of alleged abuses that have raised concerns that some Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes during their 22-day military campaign in Gaza.

"The evidence we've gathered in two of the cases so far is exceedingly strong," said Fred Abrahams, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch working in the Gaza Strip. "All the research so far suggests they shot civilians that were leaving their homes with white flags."

Along with the white flag incidents, Human Rights Watch is calling for an international investigation into widespread charges that Israel prevented medical teams from helping wounded Palestinians trapped in their homes and needlessly demolished hundreds of houses, including dozens in Ezbt Abed Rabbo.

"This was not a rogue unit," said Abrahams. "The needless civilian deaths resulted from concrete decisions made by the military."

The Israeli military, which Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called "the most moral army in the world," said it's investigating the increasing number of war crimes allegations, but it rejected any suggestion that its soldiers had targeted civilians.

"IDF forces have clear firing orders," the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement in response to questions from McClatchy. "But in the complex situation in which fighting takes place inside towns and cities, placing our forces also at great risk, civilian casualties are regrettably possible."

Throughout the war, Israeli officials said Hamas militants put Palestinian civilians in danger by booby-trapping homes and firing on soldiers from crowded buildings.

However, residents living near Khaled Abed Rabbo all said that Hamas forces quickly abandoned the outlying neighborhood once the Israeli forces took over.

With his daughters bleeding to death, Abed Rabbo said, the family screamed for help.

Samieh al Sheik, an ambulance driver who lived in an adjacent home, heard the shouting. Without thinking about what could be waiting outside, Sheik said he ran to his ambulance, turned on the emergency lights and drove toward the screams.

As he turned the corner and headed for Abed Rabbo's home, Sheik said he came face-to-face with the Israeli tank unit. The soldiers ordered him to get out of the ambulance and told him to walk straight out of the neighborhood.

"I didn't see what happened to the family that day because I couldn't reach them," said Sheik, who returned to find the ambulance crushed under a demolished building.

Faced with his dying children, Abed Rabbo gathered up the wounded and sought to escape, even if the Israelis opened fire.

With Israeli soldiers shooting at the ground near their feet, Abed Rabbo said, the family walked more than a mile to the main road, where they finally found help. His surviving 4-year-old daughter, Samer, was one of the few to be allowed out of Gaza to receive special medical care in Brussels.

Halima Badwan was less fortunate. As Abed Rabbo rushed his surviving daughter to the hospital, she lay dying in a house nearby.

Halima and her husband, Ahmed, a retired 63-year-old Palestinian Authority general, were among nine people who'd gathered in one room during the fighting. The previous day, Ahmed Badwan said, a tank round had smashed into the room, killing a neighbor and seriously injuring his wife.

Badwan didn't think he could carry his wife to safety. Red Cross officials in Gaza said that Israeli military officials repeatedly denied their requests to send medical teams to the neighborhood.

So, when the Israeli military began declaring a short "humanitarian pause" to the shooting each day, Badwan said he took his wife's gold necklace and left her lying nearly unconscious in the ruins of their home.

As he walked out of his neighborhood, Badwan said, he stopped at a nearby ambulance station and asked for help. The International Committee for the Red Cross was powerless to do anything.

Iyad Nasr, a Red Cross spokesman in Gaza, said Israeli soldiers had fired at ambulances that tried to reach some areas, even when medical officials had received approval from the Israeli military to enter certain neighborhoods.

"Our request for Ezbt Abed Rabbo was just pending and pending and pending and pending day after day," Nasr said.

Israel's widespread denial of access to medical crews in Gaza appears to be a breach of humanitarian law, said Yuval Shany, a legal scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

"In international law, there is obligation to facilitate access to the wounded and even to treat the wounded," Shany said. "In this area, I think there was a deviation from the international standard and this should be investigated."

When Badwan, Abed Rabbo and scores of other residents of Ezbt Abed Rabbo finally returned to their neighborhood after Israel declared a unilateral cease-fire on Jan. 17, they were stunned to discover that their neighborhood was reduced to rubble.

Using bulldozers, tank shelling and explosives placed in the houses, the Israeli military had leveled entire blocks of homes.

Badwan found his wife's body buried under the rubble of their building.

The destruction didn't come as a complete surprise to Taysir Abed Rabbo, who lived in a two-story home near Badwan's that Israeli soldiers had used as a temporary post.

Abed Rabbo, a member of the Palestinian Authority presidential guard, was among dozens of men who were rounded up nearly a year ago during an operation called Operation Warm Winter and taken to Israel for interrogation.

The interrogators gave Abed Rabbo a prophetic warning.

"They said if we did not stop the rocket fire, they planned to make this area 'a red area,'" said Abed Rabbo, who said he wasn't sure at the time what the Israelis meant.

Israeli leaders are moving swiftly to insulate their soldiers from any penalties for their actions during the offensive, which left more than 1,200 Palestinians dead, destroyed more than 4,000 buildings and caused $2 billion in damage.

The Israeli military has barred reporters from printing the names of military leaders who took part in the Gaza campaign, known as Operation Cast Lead, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has created a legal defense unit to protect any soldiers accused of war crimes.

Source: Information Clearing House

Israel Kills 40 Palestinian's At UN School

Above Palestinian Baby
Injured in Gaza

(Left) A boy, who fled his house with his family seeks refuge at a UN school in Gaza [Reuters]

Scores killed as Gaza school hit

Israeli strikes have killed at least 40 people who took refuge inside a UN school in the Gaza Strip, medics have said.

The strike on Tuesday hit a school run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, in the northern town of Jabaliya.

Medical sources at two Gaza hospitals said two tank shells exploded outside the school, spraying shrapnel on people inside and outside the building, where hundreds of Palestinians had sought refuge from the Israeli attacks.

The toll quickly rose as rescuers struggled through the rubble.
 

In addition to the dead, several dozen people were wounded, the officials said.

Doctors said all the dead were either people sheltering in the school or residents of Jabalya refugee camp, in the north of the Gaza Strip.

John Ging, director of operations in Gaza for Unrwa, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said three artillery shells landed near the school where 350 people were taking shelter.

Ging said Unrwa regularly provided the Israeli army with exact geographical coordinates of its facilities and the school was in a built-up area.

"Of course it was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties," he said.

The Israeli military said it is looking into the reports.

Earlier in the day, two people were killed when an artillery shell hit a school in the southern town of Khan Yunis and three people were killed in an air strike on a school in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, medics said.

More than 640 people have been killed and 2800 others wounded in the 11-day operation, most of them civilians.

A top UN humanitarian official has condemned the violence and demanded an investigation.

Widening the operation

The Israeli military also appears to be broadening its assault on the Gaza Strip as heavy artillery fire is reported from the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis.

Palestinian witnesses said Israeli tanks have moved into Khan Younis, the second biggest urban area in the Strip after Gaza City, in what seems to be an attempt to isolate it from Rafah.

Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Gaza, said Khan Younis is strategically significant on several levels - including that Palestinian fighters can fire missiles into Israeli territory from there.

He stressed reporting teams cannot confirm the reports as they are unable to reach the south from Gaza City in the north because the Strip has been effectively dissected by a column of Israel troops.

Mohyeldin also said Palestinian factions had reported that the Israeli navy was attempting to land near the central coastal city of Deir al-Balah – the scene of more intense fighting - on Tuesday.

"There was very intense shelling overnight and people woke to the presence of ground forces in and around Khan Younis this morning," he said.

Four Israeli soldiers were killed and 24 wounded in battles around Gaza City on Monday night, the Israeli military said early on Tuesday, bringing the Israeli death toll to eight.

Nowhere to hide

Fierce clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters were also reported in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip and two black plumes of smoke could be seen rising over the area.

Fares Akram, a Gaza city resident, told Al Jazeera there was "no safe place in Gaza" as "the Israeli war planes don't stop dropping bombs and firing missiles into Gaza".

Akram says his wife, who is nine-months pregnant, is living in fear of going into labour both because of how dangerous it is to leave their home and because "she knows hospitals in Gaza are in chaos".

He said that while Gazans appreciated demonstrations staged across the Arab world in protest at Israel's actions in the Strip, most believe that while the US backs the Israeli offensive the assault will continue.

In addition, the humanitarian situation in Gaza – already poor following the 18-month Israeli blockade of the strip that left the territory desperately short of fuel, food and medical supplies – is worsening.

John Ging, the head of Unrwa, said he was "shocked" by "the brutality of the injuries" he had seen during a visit to the Shifa hospital in Gaza.

'Absence of accountability'

He said: "There are very real shortages of medicine. This hospital has not had electricity for four days. If the generators go down, those in intensive care will die. This is a horrific tragedy here, and it is getting worse by the moment.

Ging described the situation as "the consequences of political failure and complete absence of accountability for this military action" and appealed for political leaders in the region and around the world to "take on the responsibility".
 

A number of diplomatic initiatives are under way in the region, with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, visiting Israel and Syria on Tuesday for talks aimed at brokering a ceasefire.

Sarkozy, speaking with Bashar al-Assad, his Syrian counterpart, called on Syria to use its weight to influence Hamas.

"Syria needs to apply its weight to both sides, but in particular to Hamas that the missile attacks stop,” he said in the Syrian capital, Damascus.

"Syria has to convince Hamas to make a choice for peace, reason and logic and that they themselves become the agent of reconciling Palestinians. We have to get to the point where we can solve this problem.

"There are still a few hours left for us to carry on talking, but I am convinced if both sides are prepared to take the first step, the fighting can stop. The images we have seen are unbearable for all of us.

"It is up to each side to make the first step, with help from Europe, Turkey and Egypt... to escape the spiral of violence and replace it with a spiral of peace."

Israel launched its offensive on the Strip after a fragile six-month ceasefire with Hamas – the Palestinian faction that controls Gaza – ended on December 19.

Both sides blame each other for the failure of the ceasefire, with Israel saying Palestinian fighters breached the truce by firing rockets into southern Israel.
 

Hamas, and other Palestinian groups, say the truce could not be extended because Israel failed to lift its crippling siege of the Strip.

Source: Aljazeera