How a Beit
Hanun family was destroyed
by Amira
Hass
Haaretz, Jerusalem
(November
15, 2006)
The first
shell that struck the house sent up a big
cloud of
dust and smoke. The parents and older
children
felt around in the sudden darkness of the
morning,
looking for the small children - to see if
anyone had
been hurt, to find and hold them, to run
with them
into the street.
Zahar, 33,
is now lying wounded in the hospital in
Beit Hanun;
she has undergone one operation to remove
shrapnel
from her abdomen and is waiting for another
on her leg.
She was unhurt by the first shell. So was
her
9-year-old son Sa'ed. They lived on the first
floor of
the house, in the east wing. After the first
shell, she
ran to where he was sleeping under the
window. The
light filtered in through the cloud of
dust, and
she saw his blanket was covered by fragments
of broken
glass. She pulled it off and found him
shaking.
"You weren't hit," she said, urging him to
run and
join her other children, May, Rami and Fadi,
who fled
with her downstairs.
Her
14-year-old daughter May helped her find her
headscarf,
skirt and pants, but she had no time to
cover her
head. Holding 5-month-old Maha, Zahar ran to
the lane
below the house. She gave the baby to a
sister-in-law
so she could put on her scarf, and then
the second
shell fell on the east wing of the house.
Was Sa'ed
killed by this shell or by the third one,
which also
struck the house dead on? She does not
remember.
She was hit by the fourth shell, which
struck the
veranda.
But at this
point, Zahar was still unharmed. She bent
over Sa'ed,
who was lying with all the other dead and
wounded in
the lane. A few seconds earlier, the other
family
members had run panicked into the street to get
out of the
house after the first shell. Zahar wiped
the blood
from Sa'ed's mouth and ran to the main
street,
calling for help. She ran back to her son to
try to
revive him, to wake him, and then the fourth
shell hit.
At first
she did not notice she had been wounded, that
she was
bleeding and her leg was torn down to the
bone. She
sat down among the bodies and tried to bring
Sa'ed back
to life. Her second son, Fadi, was injured.
She doesn't
know which shell did it. Her third son,
Rami, fled
into the garden of his uncle and neighbor,
Dr. Hussein
Athamneh, but the sixth shell found him
there. Rami
then ran into the street, toward the house
of his
uncle and aunt. The seventh shell found him
outside
their house, where it exploded.
The seven
shells killed 18 members of the Athamneh
family that
day.
The shells
had eyes
"It
was as if the shells had eyes: Wherever we ran,
they
followed us," said Tahani, Zahar's sister-in-law,
whose
12-year-old son Mahmoud was killed by the second
shell.
"The first shell woke us. I gathered the
children.
The son whose hand I was holding, Mahmoud,
is the one
I lost. We didn't know where to go. We ran
downstairs,
we were barefoot. My daughter said her
feet were
burning from the heat of the explosion. The
second
shell fell when we were already downstairs. I
went and
turned over the children's bodies, to see who
was who,
until I found Mahmoud.
"Not
even one day had passed since we buried my
brother
Mazen. The army detained him and thousands of
other men.
They took them for a short interrogation
and then
released them. He and our cousin were
arrested
together and freed together. They told them
at the
detention point in Erez that they could go
home. They
went home, but there was a curfew. So other
soldiers
shot him because they violated the curfew. My
cousin is
in the hospital, seriously wounded. And
Mazen, the
uncle of my son Mahmoud, is dead.
"Less
than one day after we buried his uncle, Mahmoud
was lying
on the floor among the dead. I tried to wake
him, but he
did not respond. Then the third shell hit.
I fled into
the house. The daughter of my
brother-in-law
also fled, but the shell followed her.
My
14-year-old nephew fled and the shell followed him.
It
exploded, and he saw his hand fall to the floor.
Now he is
hospitalized in Egypt.
Only people without a
conscience
could do that."
Hayat
Athamneh, 55, Tahani and Zahar's mother-in-law,
lost three
children and two grandchildren in the
shelling.
"When the shells had enough of us, they went
to the
house of our relatives, but, thank God, they
had fled.
When the shells had enough of our relatives,
they went
to our neighbors. My children also fled, but
the shells
found them. And my ears started to go deaf
from the
noise. I could not hear a thing. I could only
see. Black
smoke, a lot of black smoke.
"And
then I saw my son Mahdi, lying here in the west
part of the
house, near the garden." Athamneh bent
down,
picked up a bloodstained stone and kissed it.
"It is
my son Mahdi's blood," she said. "I saw him
lying here,
his brains on one side and his head on the
other."
Thousands
of mourners
Dressed in
black, Athamneh came from the mourners'
tent in the
yard of a neighboring building. For three
days,
thousands of mourners have streamed there from
all over
the Gaza Strip. Some of them went to look at
the
Athamneh family's house, passing through the lane
still
filled with rubble, shell fragments, shrapnel
and pools
of blood. On Friday afternoon, some of the
mourners
gathered outside the home of Bassam Kafarneh,
the
neighbor who was hit by a shell when he ran to
help the
first casualties. He died in an Israeli
hospital.
His mother, also hospitalized in Israel, is
in very
serious condition.
Athamneh
walked to where her son Majdi sits with other
mourners.
Praising the lord, she told the group how
her family
died and pointed to the places where every
person
fell. "I saw Tahani, Mahmoud's mother. I told
her that
Mahmoud was thrown on the floor here. Dead.
And I saw
my husband's brother Mas'oud and his wife
Sabah,
and Sanaa, whose husband died a year ago, and
Manal, the
wife of his son Ramez, and their two
daughters,
one eight months old and the other three. I
saw them
all. Dead.
"The
steel in the house was bent and torn from its
place. How
could people not be torn apart by those
shells?"
No tears
Athamneh's
eyes were dry as she told about her dead.
So were
Tahani's. Zahar, lying in a hospital bed
surrounded
by family and friends, began to cry only
when she
remembered that Sa'ed's new glasses were
ready. They
had ordered them a day or two before the
Israel
Defense Forces invaded.
The day the
shells fell, Athamneh's daughters Tamam
and Najat
had been sleeping in the house with their
children,
because their houses had been badly damaged
during the
last IDF invasion. No one is investigating
whether
they were hit by tanks or bulldozers, shells
or
missiles, or from an explosion when the soldiers
blasted
holes in the walls to pass between houses.
Four
hundred homes were damaged in Beit Hanun in one
week,
including 25 that were completely destroyed.
The
soldiers' invasion of the Athamneh family home has
also been
almost forgotten. At 10
A.M.,
on November 1,
a tank
entered the garden, destroying hothouses,
trees,
pipes and a generator, until it hit a wall. The
soldiers
made a hole in the wall and entered the
house,
gathered all the family members and sent the
women to a
room on the first floor. The men were put
in the
kitchen and bathroom.
The
soldiers collected all the cell phones, and with
leashed
dogs, searched all the rooms on all four
floors.
They called out the names of all the family
members.
Majdi, Zahar's husband, has a pacemaker. He
said he
felt ill and asked the soldiers to call an
ambulance.
He overheard one say someone was sick.
Another
soldier responded, "Let him die."
Majdi
showed the soldiers his medical papers. One of
the
soldiers hit him in the chest and his nose started
bleeding.
After two hours, the soldiers left. They
returned
three days later through the hole in the
wall. They
again gathered all the family members,
counted
them, searched and left after three hours.
"They
knew very well who was in the house, how many
children,
how many women. They knew very well there
were no
terrorists and no arms in this house," said
Majdi.
Majdi
showed visitors the walls and ceilings hit by
the shells,
the clothes strewn by the blast, the
broken
furniture and concrete. "I believe the soldiers
are happy
they killed us," he said. "They had an order
from
[Defense Minister Amir] Peretz and [Prime
Minister
Ehud] Olmert to kill us. They wouldn't do it
without
orders. What kind of a mistake is it, if 10
shells hit
one after the other, killing people in
their beds?
Not one shell was a mistake. I collected
the
martyrs. One by one. Avigdor Lieberman said Israel
must act
like the Russians in Chechnya.
He just joined
the
government, and they immediately started doing
what he said."