June 12, 2006

The horror of young Huda Ghalia

Globe and Mail (page 1)

A family picnic on a Gaza Strip beach turned to chaos when a shell blast
killed a Palestinian girl's parents and five siblings. Mark MacKinnon talked
with her

By Mark MacKinnon

Beit Lahiya, Gaza Strip -- Huda Ghalia sat under a fig tree in her family's
backyard and tried her best to make sense of what had happened to her
family. But her mind, it seemed, wasn't yet ready for the task.

The willow-thin 12-year-old, who saw her parents and five siblings die in
front of her on Friday when a shell reportedly fired by Israel crashed into
the beach where they were picnicking, repeatedly tried to reconstruct the
day her life was forever altered. The picture in her head was clearly
fragmented, and so awful she seemingly didn't want to consider the whole.

The worst came out first. "I saw my father's intestines come out of his
body," she said bluntly. "And then I saw my sister with pieces of a missile
in her arm and her body."

After pouring out her emotion for all the world to see on Friday --
screaming "Daddy! Daddy!" as she ran around the beach in the aftermath of
the attack as a television camera recorded her hysterical grief -- it seemed
she had little left yesterday.

As she spoke, her voice was low and her dark brown eyes were expressionless.


Her surviving relatives say she has been taking Valium since her nightmare
began.

Huda's tormented face, captured on film as she knelt and screamed over her
father's dead body, may be the image that restarts the Palestinian intifada.

Despite breaches on both sides, Hamas, the Islamic militia that now forms
the Palestinian government, has for 16 months largely upheld a truce to
which it agreed in early 2005.

Yesterday, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri confirmed that the ceasefire, or
hudna in Arabic, was over. "In front of this screaming child, how can we
silence ourselves?" he said in an interview at his Gaza City office. "The
hudna was over a long time ago. There is no hudna for us to break."

Huda's parents and siblings, including her eight-month-old brother, Haitham,
were among 18 Palestinians killed since Thursday night during intense
Israeli bombardments. Amidst international uproar over the deaths of Huda's
family, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz called a temporary halt to the
shelling over the weekend.

Israel, which is conducting an investigation and says it is possible that
the Ghalias were killed by Palestinian fire, had been pounding the northern
Gaza Strip with missiles and artillery shells for weeks in an effort to
prevent other Palestinian militant groups -- primarily Islamic Jihad -- from
firing homemade Qassam rockets. Dozens of the rockets have landed in or near
Israeli towns near the border, most of them falling harmlessly into empty
space.

Over the weekend, Hamas members joined in the firing of Qassams for the
first time in months, while the movement's leadership hinted at larger
attacks to come. At least 30 Palestinian rockets were reported to have been
fired yesterday, critically injuring one man.

The political rationalizing and aftershocks of what the Arab media has
dubbed the "Gaza Beach massacre" matter little to Huda. While she and her
brother Ayham escaped the attack physically unscathed, their stepmother,
Ali's second wife, and three of their other siblings were still in hospital
yesterday.

It wasn't even the first time the extended family had been hit. Early last
year, four of Huda's relatives were killed when Israeli shells hit their
family farm, again in an effort to quell Palestinian rocket and mortar fire.

Huda tried yesterday to tell her story from the start. The family went to
the beach Friday "because there's no other place for Palestinians to go for
fun," she said, her dark hair held in a ponytail by a red band.

It was a simple affair: the family shared a lunch of hummus, cold meats and
juice on the white sands of Gaza's Mediterranean Sea coast.

"We were sitting together," she started to recall, before lapsing into
silence and trying again. "I was playing with my brothers and sisters."
Then, still expressionless, she stopped talking altogether.

Her 18-year-old brother, Ayham, said his sister is suffering mentally from
what she had seen. He, too, saw his parents killed in front of him, but
while his sister's eyes were blank, his glowed with unconcealed rage as he
finished the story Huda could not.

His father, he said, took the family to the beach to escape the constant
noise of the shelling in and around their home in the battered north Gaza
town of Beit Lahiya. But the terrifying din followed them. As the explosions
got closer to where they were sitting, Ayham said, the family started to
pack up to get off the beach. They called for taxis to take them back to
town.

Then, what Ayham believes was a round fired from an Israeli gunboat that was
visible just off the Gaza coast crashed into the beach 200 metres from where
the family was packing up, causing panic. A second shell sent the family
running away from the road, and back toward where they had been picnicking.
The third shell was the fatal one.

Gritting his teeth under a wispy beard, Ayham said he supported Hamas's
decision to break the ceasefire after what had happened to his family.
"Israel is a powerful country. Usually, when it fires, it knows exactly
where its missiles will land. How could this have been a mistake? If they
did not intend to kill us, why did they shell us again and again?"

It's a version of events sharply at odds with that of the Israeli
government. Speaking after a weekly cabinet meeting, Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert expressed "deep sorrow" at what had happened on the Gaza beach,
but insisted civilians were not targeted.

"The Israel Defence Forces is the most moral army in the world," he said.
"It has never conducted a policy of harming civilians, and is not doing so
today."

The head of Israel's southern command, Major-General Yoav Galant, said an
investigation into the explosion had raised the possibility that the blast
was caused by a Palestinian militant group, and not Israeli shelling. He
said Israel had halted artillery fire eight minutes before the "commotion"
broke out on the beach.

"All I can say is that the question marks are getting bigger regarding
whether artillery fire caused the incident," he said.

However, the crater marks on the beach where Huda and her family were
picnicking appeared yesterday to support her brother's version that several
rounds hit the beach, the angle of impact suggesting they had come from the
direction of the sea. The beach was still strewn with at least three pairs
of shoes and a bright pink girl's shirt.

Israel's daily Haaretz newspaper acknowledged that it was "very unlikely
that a Qassam could have caused the kind of damage wreaked on the Gaza
beach."

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