This is Islam
al-Atamna. A girl of 14. She is sitting in her black mourning clothes.
Eight close relatives - including her mother, grandparents, uncles and
aunts - were all killed before her eyes, one after the other. They were
killed in the street after they awoke at home in horror at the sound of
the first shell that exploded and then fled outdoors, where the next
shells caught them. About 11 fell on a residential neighborhood, one
shell a minute, a rain of death, pursuing them in their flight.
Fatherless for some time already, the girl is left alone in the world
with her two little sisters and her 3-year-old brother Abdullah, whose
legs were severed and who is hospitalized in the Al-Hilal Hospital
in Gaza.
What should we say to Islam? What can we
say to Islam? That the chip in the radar system is to blame? That the
electronic component is responsible? Perhaps that the Palestinians are
to blame?
Since the accident the girl has not
fallen asleep for even a moment, which one can see in her frozen face.
Islam is now a girl in shock, whose entire world was destroyed last
Wednesday morning, with a total of 22 relatives dead and dozens
wounded.
Islam's town
is upside down. The roads are full of open pits, crushed electricity
poles, smashed cars, torn houses and a sewage system whose effluents
flow quietly in the streets.
After the six-day war waged by the Israel
Defense Forces against Beit Hanun during Operation Autumn Clouds - when
soldiers also took over Islam's house, imprisoning on the first floor
the 104 people who lived in the eight apartments in the building, all
relatives - people here expected to wake up last week to a new dawn, a
dawn without soldiers. The day before, IDF had left Beit Hanun after
"completing its mission" - nobody knows exactly what that mission was -
and the residents awoke to freedom. But just then the volley of shells
landed. Between 6:30 and 7
A.M., on the row of houses in the street that
ends in a recently planted orchard, a gift from the Japanese
government.
Now the survivors are sitting in the
street of death, all of whose fatalities are members of one family, the
Al-Atamna family. There has never before been such killing, of 22
members of one family, not even under direct Israeli occupation.
In the hospitals in Gaza,
Egypt
and Israel
the wounded, about 40
in number, are moaning, many of them with
amputated limbs and head injuries, quite a number of them children. The
dead also include children, and mainly women: The mass poster that was
printed presents the portraits of the men and the children who were
killed, whereas the pictures of the women are replaced by paintings of
red roses, as is the custom.
Flowers and children. A boy in a suit, a
tie and glasses, Saad, 9 years old at his death; a boy in sunglasses,
Mohammed, 11 years old; and a boy without glasses, Mahdi, 13. And there
are the little ones: 3-year-old Maram and 8-month-old Maisa. All
victims. Mothers and their children, grandfathers and their
granddaughters, brothers and sisters, one after another, one shell
after another. The IDF regrets ...
The entrance to Beit Hanun is horrifying.
It is a town that is half destroyed and half deserted. Some of the
residents, those who had a place to go, fled while they were still able
to do so and have yet to return. Those who remain are walking around
the streets like victims of shell shock, trying to assess the damages.
A few people with initiative have already begun reconstruction: One is
building a new fence, another is clearing the ruins from his yard, and
technicians are repairing electricity and telephone cables, until the
next invasion. An old woman is drying loofa in her ruined yard, as
though nothing has happened.
A disaster area. The roads have turned
into sandy paths, the sewers bubble up in them, uprooted trees are
scattered alongside and there are overturned carts with their contents
spilling out. There is virtually no house whose fence was not hit. The
ancient mosque, Um al-Nasser, which was destroyed except for its
minaret and was the hiding place of the armed men, is surrounded by a
row of houses that were almost totally destroyed. The clinic opposite
the mosque was also damaged. "Kill, destroy, crush - you won't succeed
in breaking us," is the message on a yellow fabric poster, in the name
of the Fatah cell at the Al-Quds Open University.
The yard of the agriculture department is
a mess, the playground of the high school for girls is torn up. "You
are the members of the stronger nation," thunders the voice of the dead
leader Yasser Arafat from a loudspeaker mounted on a car that
circulated in the town on the second anniversary of his death. In no
other place did Arafat's words sound as pathetic as they did this week
in Beit Hanun. The same is true of the sight of the old woman who
emerges from the ruins of her home, sits on the sand and makes a "V"
with her fingers, a heartbreaking sign of an illusory victory.
The new cemetery: Here in the sands the
people buried 16 of the victims of the shelling and inaugurated a new city of the
dead for themselves. A row of graves decorated by palm branches, two
gray bricks on each grave and the pictures of the dead scattered among
them. One improvised sign was once a cardboard box from Angel's bakery,
regular white bread.
The pervasive atmosphere in the town is
gloomy. The mourners' tents are already empty, and the plastic chairs
have been piled up, until the next time there is mourning. The mourners
are only sitting now for Bassam Al-Atamna, Bassam who died late. He
died of his wounds last Friday at Ichilov Hospital
in Tel Aviv, after efforts to save him failed.
The mud-sewer road leads to the street of
death. A short distance before the end of that street the apartment
house is still standing, four stories, where most of the victims of the
shelling lived. At least three shells hit this house, 16 of its tenants
are no longer alive. But most of the residents were killed in the
street, after managing to flee from the building.
On the fourth floor, in the apartment of
the family of Amjad Al-Atamna, where two shells fell on two children's
rooms, tearing not-very-large holes in their ceilings, signs of the
killing are still in evidence. The children were crushed here to pieces
by the shells that landed on their heads while they were sleeping the
peaceful sleep of little children. The Arabic notebook of Khalil
Al-Atamna, wrapped in a cover with colorful cartoons, is among the
ruins. Kahlil is hospitalized in serious condition. A third shell hit
the wall of the stairwell, killing a mother and her two daughters while
they were fleeing. The three were catapulted from the stairwell into
the street.
The white IDF reconnaissance balloon
looks down from the sky straight into the yards of the homes on this
street. Did the balloon record the horror? Didn't they see up there
what the Artillery Corps was doing for about 15 minutes?
The IDF Spokesman told us this week that
the army does not know how many of the 11 shells that were fired hit
the houses and the street. The residents counted more than 10 shells
that hit and can show the evidence: on ceilings and walls and in the
craters that were created in the street.
Survivor Majdi Al-Atamna is most upset of
all: He says that one of the soldiers beat him - despite the pacemaker
in his heart - when they took over his house. He asked for an ambulance
and recalls that the soldier replied: "Let him die. It doesn't interest
me." A day after the soldiers and their dogs evacuated the house, he
lost a son and two brothers, and another son is hospitalized in serious
condition. "What did we do? They wanted to kill our family. Our entire
family."
Omar Al-Atamna woke up early Wednesday
morning in order to listen to the news on the radio. The IDF had left a
day earlier and he wanted to know what was new. Looking respectable in
his suit, he talks about how he was drinking tea when he heard the
sound of an explosion on the street. That was the first shell. Omar
opened the window on the second floor and saw black smoke rising from
one of the houses down the street. He quickly ran downstairs, but by
the time he reached the first floor he already heard another explosion.
The second shell. By the time he reached the street the next had
already landed.
"I understood then that shells had hit my
family," he recalls. Horrified, he ran in the direction of the smoke
that was now coming out of three houses, passed the home of his
relatives, a couple who are the town's dentists. It is important to
Omar to explain that four doctors lived in the first house, in order to
emphasize that they were "good families" - the kind that were not
involved in anything. The doctors' house was not hit, but the next one,
that of his cousin Saad, a taxi driver, suffered a direct hit. Saad is
now hospitalized in Egypt,
with a serious neck injury. Four of the taxi driver's children were
wounded and are now amputees.
Omar removes from his jacket pocket a
list written in pencil, with many erasures and scribblings. The list of
dead and wounded. He reads the names of the former, one after another,
like a shopping list: Abed Majdi, 9; Arafat Saad, 17; Mahdi Saad, 16;
Mahmoud Saad, 15; Mahmoud Amjad, 9; Naama, 56 and her daughter Sanaa,
33; Massoud, 55; Manal, 29; Samir, 25; Fatma Massoud, 16; and Fatma
Ahmed, 84, the grandmother of them all. Afterward he found another two
names jotted down in the margins - Maram, 3, and Maisa, 8 months. But
that was still not all of them.
Fourteen-year-old Islam recounts dryly:
"We were sleeping in the house, on the third floor. We woke up to the
noise of the first shell. The shell fell on the house of my Uncle Saad.
We thought that they wanted to fire more shells and fled in the
direction of the street. There another two shells fell on us; many were
killed and many were wounded. We remained in the street. I saw my
Grandma and my Mom collapsing in the street. When the ambulance came to
evacuate my aunt, another two shells fell. Some of us were killed and
some of us stayed alive. We saw how bodies were cut up before our eyes.
Another ambulance came and more shells fell. The ambulance took my
brother, whose two legs were cut off. He's 3 years old. I saw Mom
dead."
Taxi driver Raad Al-Atamna, a member of
the family and an old acquaintance of ours from the Erez checkpoint:
"Her uncle was also killed, and another uncle is in a hospital in Egypt.
Now she has nobody. What can I tell you, only God will look after her
and help her. Gideon, I'm begging God not to harm either a Muslim or a
Jew - no person should be harmed like us. It's a tragedy, a Holocaust
such as we have not had since 1956. I hope that what happened to us
doesn't happen to anyone else in the world."
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