Israeli missile strikes, Palestinian victims

Journalist and student Moh’min Krekay lies in his hospital bed in Gaza City after losing both of his legs in an Israeli air strike.

December 22, 2008

Salah Oukal, 46, had gone outside to collect herbs for dinner on Decembe 17, harvesting in the dark, the power out again. It was just before 9pm and he was watering the trees next to his home in Tel al-Za’tar, Jabaliya, when the Israeli missile struck, killing him instantly. A second missile followed but did not explode. Oukal’s family spent the next hour searching without success for the father of three and the family’s sole provider. Only with the headlights of an ambulance was Oukal’s torn apart body finally retrieved.

The missile fired from the Israeli side of Gaza’s eastern border injured an additional three residents, including Oukal’s son Ahmed, 7, who suffered shrapnel wounds to his hand and head. Israeli authorities claimed that the missile was a response to rockets being fired from the area. However, Oukal’s family and neighbors report all had been quiet.

“He wasn’t one of the resistance fighters,” his teenage daughter explained. “And there weren’t any rockets being fired before he was hit. It was quiet, and the shelling was sudden,” she said.

On 7 December, a legal adviser to Israel’s ministry of defense, Ahaz Benari, told Defense Minister Ehud Barak that, “Artillery fire is permissible only in relatively open areas…artillery fire at urban areas is problematic, if the assessment is that the chance that the shell will hit the launchers is relatively low, while the risk that many civilians will be hurt is substantial.”

“His arm landed here in front of our window,” said Oukal’s neighbor, Abu Ashraf Salha, detailing how parts of Oukal’s mangled body flew in various directions. His house, along with Oukal’s and another neighbour’s, sustained significant damage from the missile’s impact just meters away. “It shattered our roof,” Salha explained, pointing to the pieces of asbestos tile littering the living room floor. “Everything in here was damaged, the furniture, the TV, the lights.”

“Three of my kids were lying [in the bedroom] when the roof caved in. Thank God they were not seriously hurt.”

Two reporters

On 16 December, Mohammad Abd al-Nadi, a journalist for al-Quds Radio, was hit by a missile fired from an Israeli drone as he walked along Salah al-Din Street. He was looking for a taxi in order to cover earlier shelling from an Apache helicopter, in the Beit Hanoun area in which two women were attacked. The missile strike left him with a fractured arm, a head injury, and cuts over his body.

“It’s the second time I’ve been targeted,” he explained from his al-Shifa hospital bed. “Two years ago I was also shelled by a drone, but  wasn’t seriously injured.”

Moh’min Krekay, 21 years old, was hit in an earlier strike on 7 December. It was 3:30pm and the journalist and student at Gaza City’s al-Azhar University was working on his family farm in Jabaliya. He was also hit by a missile fired from an Israeli drone. Four years prior, Krekay’s 20-year-old brother was struck and killed by a drone missile while at a summer camp in Jabaliya. His father was killed in 1987 and Krekay still lives at home, helping his mother with daily chores. Two weeks after the attack, he lies recovering in al-Shifa hospital, his stubs of legs bandaged. He remains resilient. “I will continue my studies, when I’m well enough,”  Krekay pledged.

Hamzi Shaheen received similar injuries resulting in the amputation of his legs, like Moh’min. Shaheen passed away on December 26, after complications resulting from his injuries.

The farmer

Zuhair Washa, 48 years old, father of nine children, including three currently enrolled in university. On December 20 at 7:30 am, Washa was working on his land in the Shejaeya neighborhood east of Gaza City, a considerable distance from the Israeli border, when an Israeli missile exploded near him, shattering the bones in the lower half of his right leg. The fractured leg and remaining nerve damage, as well as the wounds to his hands and body, mean that he will be unable to work and support his family for some time.

These victims were all targeted in rural and residential civilian areas where witnesses reported no resistance activity before or during the time of each attack. International law condemns the deliberate targeting of civilians as a gross violation of human rights, amounting to a war crime. Palestinian civilians in Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, al-Shejaeya, and across Gaza are all too familiar with these Israeli crimes of war, perpetrated with impunity.