Monday, March 3, 2008

Assault on Gaza: Day of grief and defiance

By Donald Macintyre in Jabalya, northern Gaza
The Independent

".....Among those buried yesterday were six members of one family including its head, Abd el-Rahman Mohammad Ali Atallah, and his 60-year-old wife, Suad, two sons and two daughters, who were killed late on Saturday afternoon when their house was destroyed by three aerial bombs which residents near by said also injured four children including a two-day-old infant. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, which documents all Palestinian deaths, and is opposed to all attacks on non-combatants including in Israel, said 49 of the dead since Wednesday were civilians.

As thousands of Gazans streamed on foot through streets abnormally empty of cars because of severe fuel shortages to and from near-continuous funerals in Beit Lahiya and Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan cemetery, Fatima Abed Rabbo, 23, told how she was shot in the left shoulder as she stood by her one-year-old daughter, Doha, at her home in Jabalya during the bloody first hour of the Israeli incursion shortly after midnight on Saturday.

Lying on her bed at the Kamal Odwan hospital, where the first 40 dead victims of the assault were brought on Saturday morning, Mrs Abed Rabbo said the shot had come through the door of her balcony at about the same time as her friends and neighbours Jaqueline and Eyad Abu Shbak, a teenage brother and his sister, were killed in their home......."

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