Few noticed its maneuvering until in an instance, giggles turn to screams, laughter to terror and the serenity of vanilla sands bled red as the gun boat’s shell exploded within the Ghaliya family’s picnic.

The Smoke Clears

A sulfuric pungency clings like a fog mixing with drying blood and acidic burnt flesh, quickly replacing the crisp salty air and friendly breezes. As the smoke clears, crimson stained sand settles revealing a mangled kite perched atop several pairs of children’s sandals, discarded sand sifters, beach toys and body parts. The scene testifies a strange eulogy of the carefree and happy circumstances present minutes before.  Now seven people, including three small children are dead.  On beach blankets surrounding ground zero, another forty lie bleeding and wounded. 

A young girl writhed and wailing (Picture to your Right) drops to her knees in anguish beside the body of a slain man. "Father, father, father!" twelve year old Huda Ghaliya screams. But Forty-nine year old Ali Ghaliya cannot answer his daughter’s pleas.  He, his thirty-five year old wife Raifa and Huda’s four siblings Haitham (6-months), Handi (18-months), Sabreen (7 years) and Elham (15 years) lie in pieces, dead on the shores of the Mediterranean. No stranger to tragedy, two years before Huda lost two other relatives when an Israeli shell hit their Beit Lahiya farm. Mustering her courage, shaking in disbelief, Huda speaks, her voice wavering as she describes her family’s last moment. "I was eating corn…,” she sniffles. “And my mother was nursing Handi. My sister (from her father’s first marriage) was laughing and hugging her baby, Mohammed. Three year old Sabreen sat making domes for her sand mosques as my sister Elham laughed at her.”

Twelve year old Huda Ghaliya screams beside the body of her father, killed just minutes before by an Israeli artillery shell as the family enjoyed a picnic on the beach in Gaza.     Orphaned at twelve, Huda Ghaliya lost her entire family in one day.  Members of the Palestinian Government have adopted Huda and vow to help her grow up in safe and loving family.

Huda pauses, her clothes still stained in blood.

"I walked a few meters away eating my corn; then a rocket hit my family. I didn’t know what happened. All I saw was my mother and sisters" she adds tears streaming swiftly over her cheeks and falling to the ground.

"I saw them bleeding. I saw hands, legs and heads mixed with our belongings, I'm afraid, afraid,” she cries uncontrollably as a nurse walks up to comfort her.

Adham Abu Heen, also a witness, his voice constrained by shock mumbles in disbelief, "Yellow corn mixed with red stained mud sand; pieces of flesh covering blankets where they sat together. I didn’t know what to do. I grabbed something to help. I don’t remember if it was arm or a leg—horrible, horrible. How can I ever go to the beach again?” he asks, his eyes void and searching.

Official Response

President Abbas condemned the attack stating, "What the Israeli Occupation Forces are doing in the Gaza Strip constitutes a war of extermination and bloody massacres against our people".

Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri stated, "The Zionist Occupation insists on killing and doesn’t distinguish between civilians and freedom fighters".

For sixteen months Palestinian resistance held back from retaliating against multiple Israeli attacks on civilians.  As more children die, more people demand action, revenge and retribution. The militant factions appear to have had enough, issuing the statement, “The earthquake in the Zionist towns will start again; the aggressors will have no choice but to prepare their coffins or their luggage".

Israel held accountable to the attack presented three excuses.  First stating it was an accident.  Then it was defending itself by targeting a location it said was used to fire qassam rockets into Israel. But qassam rockets have a maximum range of four kilometers and Israel is farther away. Now it suggests Palestinians, who do not have access to the weapon used, are responsible.  More excuses obscure the real question: who benefits?

Hamas refused to engage Israel in tit-for-tat, despite the weekly bombing raids by its occupation forces, the confiscated Palestinian tax money, closed the borders and attempted to starve the population.  Retaliation was withheld in favor of diplomacy.  But with a naval ship firing into a crowded beach, if Hamas does nothing, it will be seen as inept. If it acts, retaliation conforms to the Israeli adopted Orwellian newspeak that Hamas cannot govern or live in peace.  The set-up has begun. Hamas called for the end of the apartheid state Israel.  The west only hears “Israel”. The Sunday New York Times headline screams, “Ending Truce, Hams Fires Rockets into Israel” while conveniently omitting that Hamas was the only party observing the truce.  The weekly death tolls of Palestinian civilians since February 2005 by IOF forces prove conclusively, Israel never has.

Seven people are dead.  Forty are wounded. A girl not yet a teenager is orphaned. By attacking a crowded beach Israel has insured conflict. Diplomacy, the hallmark of a civilized society lies shredded beneath the propeller of a gun boat. In its wake, the Israeli government now has an excuse to avoid negotiations.  And the people of Gaza entering their fortieth year under Israeli apartheid have their rallying cry: a family’s blood soaked sandals lying in crimson sand.

This article first appeared in June 12, 2006 in Norwegian, Norway's Morgenbladet

Postscript:

The Israeli government has denied responsibility for this attack, absolved itself and refuses to allow outside investigations. 

However an independent investigation by human rights groups produced the following:

"As the military investigation team insisted that artillery fire had stopped by the time the explosion occurred and suggested it had been caused by a bomb planted in the sand, Amir Peretz, the Defence Minister, declared: " The accumulating evidence proves that this incident was not due to Israeli forces."

But the official interpretation was strongly challenged by a former Pentagon battle damage expert who has surveyed the scene of the beach explosion. He said yesterday that "all the evidence points" to a 155mm Israeli land-based artillery shell as its cause.

Marc Garlasco, who worked in war zones including Iraq and Kosovo during his seven-year stint in the US Department of Defence....Mr Garlasco said that most of the serious injuries of the victims in the Gaza hospitals that he had visited were to the torsos and heads, which were inconsistent with a land mine or of a bomb embedded in the sand. "If this had been a landmine I would have expected to see serious leg injuries," he said. Mr Garlasco said that while he could not rule out the theoretical possibility that Palestinian militants had rigged up an unexploded 155mm shell to make an explosive device of their own, that too would have normally produced many more severe leg injuries.

Mr Garlasco produced a four to five-inch, mainly blackened shell fragment which he collected about 100 yards from the scene of the explosion and in which the figures 55 and the letters "mm" are clearly discernible. While acknowledging that this was not itself definite proof that the shell had killed the Palestinians he said some fragments and shrapnel which the Palestinian police explosives department say they took from the scene where the victims were killed were definitely from a 155mm shell."
London Independent, June 16, 2004
 

And Israeli Commentator Dr. Tanya Reinhardt further explains the purpose of the death of Huda's family in the following commentary which appeared in Ynet's Hebrew edition June 21, 2006:

A Week of Israeli Restraint*
Tanya Reinhart

Yediot Aharonot, June 21, 2006, Translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall (Footnotes added)

In Israeli discourse, Israel is always the side exercising restraint in its conflict with the Palestinians. This was true again for the events of the past week: As the Qassam rockets were falling on the Southern Israeli town of Sderot, it was "leaked" that the Israeli Minister of Defense had directed the army to show restraint.1

During the week of Israeli restraint, the army killed a Palestinian family who went on a picnic on the Beit Lahya beach in the Gaza Strip; after that, the army killed nine people in order to liquidate a Katyusha rocket. But in the discourse of restraint, the first killing does not count, because the army denied its involvement, and the second was deemed a necessary act of self-defense. After all, Israel is caught in the midst of Qassam attacks, and must defend its citizens. In this narrative, the fact that Israel is content merely to bombard the Gaza Strip from air, sea and land is a model of restraint and humanity that not many states could match.

But what is driving the Qassam attacks on Israel? For 17 months, since it declared a cease fire, Hamas has not been involved in firing Qassams. The other organizations have generally succeeded in launching only a few isolated Qassams. How did this evolve into an attack of something like 70 Qassams in three days?

The Israeli army has a long tradition of "inviting" salvoes of Qassams. In April of last year, Sharon took off to a meeting with Bush in which his central message was that Abbas is not to be trusted, has no control of the ground, and cannot be a partner for negotiations. The army took care to provide an appropriate backdrop for the meeting. On the eve of Sharon's departure, on 9 April 2005, the Israeli army killed three youths on the Rafah border, who according to Palestinian sources were playing soccer there. This arbitrary killing inflamed a wave of anger in the Gaza Strip, which had been relatively quiet until then. Hamas responded to the anger on the street, and permitted its people to participate in the firing of Qassams. On the following two days, about 80 Qassams were fired, until Hamas restored calm. Thus, during the Sharon-Bush meeting, the world received a perfect illustration of the untrustworthiness of Abbas.2

At the beginning of last week (11 June), Olmert set out on a campaign of persuasion in Europe to convince European leaders that now, with Hamas in power, Israel definitely has no partner. The USA does not appear to need any convincing at the moment, but in Europe there is more reservation about unilateral measures. The Israeli army began to prepare the backdrop on the night of the previous Thursday (8 June 2006), when it "liquidated" Jamal Abu Samhanada, who had recently been appointed head of the security forces of the Interior Ministry by the Hamas government. It was entirely predictable that the action may lead to Qassam attacks on Sderot. Nevertheless, the army proceeded the following day to shell the Gaza coast (killing the Ghalya family and wounding tens of people), and succeeded in igniting the required conflagration, until Hamas again ordered its people, on 14 June, to cease firing.

This time, the show orchestrated by the army got a bit messed up. Pictures of the child Huda Ghalya succeeded in breaching the wall of Western indifference to Palestinian suffering. Even if Israel still has enough power to force Kofi Annan to apologize for casting doubt on Israel's denial, the message that Hamas is the aggressive side in the conflict did not go unchallenged in the world this time. But the army has not given up. It appears determined to continue to provoke attacks that would justify bringing down the Hamas government by force, with Sderot paying the price.

Even though it is impossible to compare the sufferings of the residents of Sderot with the sufferings of the residents of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya in the North of the Gaza Strip, on which 5,000 shells fell in the past month alone3, my heart also goes out to the residents of Sderot. It is their destiny to live in fear and agony, because in the eyes of the army their suffering is necessary so that the world may understand that Israel is the restrained side in a war for its very existence.

=====

* This op-ed went to press an hour before the Israeli air force killed three more children in a crowded street in North Gaza, on Tuesday, June 20.

1. On Monday, June 12, the headlines announced that the Defence Minister Peretz blocked an initiative of the army to launch a massive land offensive in Gaza (e.g. Amos Har'el and Avi Issacharoff, Ha'aretz, June 12, 2006). In the inside pages of the weekend papers, it turned out that this was a "media spin" produced by Peretz bureau "based on a security consultation held the previous night" (Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel, Lost innocents, Ha'aretz, June 16-17, 2006).

2. This sequence of events is documented in detail in my book The Road Map to Nowhere, to appear in July, 2006 (Verso).

3. Alex Fishman, Senior security analyst of Yediot Aharonot reports that at the beginning "the artillery shelling of the Gaza strip was debated", but then, "what started ten months ago with dozens of shells a month that were fired at open areas today reached astronomical numbers of shells. The battery that fired the six shells on Friday [June 9] fire an average of more than a thousand shells a week towards the north of the Strip. This means that the battery which has been placed there for four weeks has already fired about 5000 (!) shells" (Yediot Aharonot Saturday Supplement, June 16, 2006).