Growing concern over Israel's weapons use

[IndianaGreen]

Growing concern over Israel's weapons use

By Donald Macintyre in Atatra, northern Gaza Strip
Friday, 23 January 2009

After a week of ceasefire Israel is facing growing questions not only about phosphorus but what other weapons it used. For the many thousands of Gazan civilians seeking to rebuild their ruined lives the hope that a new US president will be more active in the region than his predecessor still seems barely relevant. And this is not only because of an injury total put by the ministry of health in Gaza at 5,300, or worries about long-term psychological damage to their children. They also face a protracted dispute between Israel, the Ramallah based Palestinian Authority, and much of the international community on the one hand, and Hamas on the other before multi-billion dollar task of reconstucrion can even begin. For most Gazans peace is a return to their previous impoverished life under siege —only worse.

In Gaza City, as the shops open and the Hamas policemen return to the traffic junctions it is possible to see some kind of surface normality. But to drive out here past the bombed out buildings on roads turned into barely passable dirt tracks by the Israeli tanks is to see a landscape described –without hyperbole—by the Red Cross as resembling an earthquake zone. About a mile from the Abu Kalima house, two donkeys still lay dead beside road, just as the decomposing body of Shahed Abu Khalima did for four days and those of her father and three brothers for nine until the Red Cross could reach them. The family say that while relatives got Sabah Abu Khalima through to hospital in the the first truck the second two vehicles were fired on from tanks a few hundred metres down the road, killing two members and leaving the rest of the passengers to flee and abandon the bodies.

Atatra has long been identified by the Israeli forces as a launching ground for Qassams, and maybe some of the ruined buildings a mile or more from the Abu Kalima home were booby trapped. But the family insists that no gunmen were operating round the home when it was shelled as the Israeli forces occupied their commanding position here overlooking Beit Lahiya. In Shifa, the wounded and bereaved Sabah, who voted Hamas in 2006, threatens to become a suicide bomber and says she wants Tzipi Livni to “burn as my children burned.” But her cousin Ibrahim, 58, says none of that. “We are all farmers,” he says.” We have no connection to the factions. Why are the Israelis doing this to us?”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/growing-concern-over-israels-weapons-use-1514347.html