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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
17, 2006
Journey to Beit Harun
After
the Rain of Death
By GIDEON LEVY
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."
Gideon Levy writes for Ha'aretz.
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