The death and disorientation of the children of Gaz

[Comadreja]

The death and disorientation of the children of Gaza : In their homes, in the street, in UN-run schools, Palestinian youth are not safe from Israeli bullets http://education.guardian.co.uk/schoolsworldwide/story/0,14062,1306747,00.html

Raghda Alassar's classmates did not hear the Israeli bullet that tore into the nine-year-old's brain as she wrote an English test. But as a pool of blood spread across her desk and spilled on to the floor, a wall of screams rose from the classroom of the UN elementary school for girls in Khan Yunis.
At that point Raghda was still crying for help. By the time she was hauled into the trauma room of a neighbouring hospital she was silent.

For five crucial days the army blocked Raghda's transfer to an Israeli hospital with the facilities to offer a glimmer of hope. An infection set in.

On Tuesday doctors told her father, Adnad, that she was brain dead.

"The bullet entered under her eye and went out the back of her head," Mr Alassar said.

"It took them a long time to stop the bleeding, and her heart stopped and they gave her shocks. From that moment she was like a dead body, although she wasn't dead."

"I find it so difficult to believe what happened to my daughter. She was at school, just carrying her notebook, not a gun. What is my daughter - nine years old - guilty of that she has to be shot? It's state terror against the whole population."

In recent weeks the Israelis have again been preoccupied with terrorism, from the murder of 16 people in the Beersheba bus bombings to the slaughter of Russian schoolchildren in Beslan, which received blanket coverage.

During the six months of relative peace for Israelis, until the Beersheba bombings, the army killed more than 400 Palestinians. Most were fighters, but they also included about 40 children under 15. Palestinians say this also is a form of terror...cont.

People crushed by law have no hope but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous...: Edmund Burke