Letter to Richard Medhurst #14
Operation Cast Lead Part 12 “Some of the people were on fire and parts of their bodies were melting away.”
Operation Cast Lead Part 12 “Some of the people were on fire and parts of their bodies were melting away.”
According to Amnesty International: “Izzeddin Wahid Mousa, his wife Samira, their 14-year-old daughter Nour and their three sons, aged between 23 and 28, were killed in the evening of the 14th of January 2009 in a strike by a missile fired by a drone as they sat in their small yard in a densely built-up area of the Sabra district of Gaza City. A fifth child (male), who was also sitting in the yard, and seven other family members (one brother, three sisters, and the wife and two small children of one of the brothers), who were in a room next to the yard at the time, were all injured. Fathiya, one of the injured daughters told Amnesty International: “It was 8.30 p.m. on the 14th of January; the area was quiet except of course there was always the noise of F-16s, Apaches, drones. There was no electricity. All the family was in the yard or the house listening to the news, negotiations in Egypt, martyrs, etc. The missile hit. Four were dead at once; my brother’s body was all in pieces. We want to understand something: why did they hit our house? It is in a residential area. We are neither Hamas nor Fatah. We are all civilians. None of us did anything. My father was opposed to firing rockets against the Israelis; he wanted peace, and they killed him. We have nothing to do with the resistance. Until now we don’t understand, we don’t understand why. We want peace; and we want an investigation; we want to know why me, and my sisters have been orphaned. Why did they kill our parents, our family? What life will we have now? Who will take care of us?”
An IDF soldier reported: “Nearly no one ran into the enemy. I know of two encounters during the whole operation. The soldiers, too, were disappointed at not having had any encounters with terrorists.”
One of the targets of Israeli attack was the field office compound of UNRWA in the southern Rimal area of Gaza City. On the morning of the 15th of January 2009, it was shelled. At least three high explosive and seven white phosphorous shells, most probably 155mm, hit the workshop and warehouse area while five exploded in the compound where between 600 and 700 civilians were taking shelter. The compound contained, among other things, a substantial fuel depot. Its underground storage facility had about 120,000 liters of fuel while fuel tankers above ground had around 49,000 liters at the time. The compound also stored large quantities of medical supplies, food, clothing and blankets in the warehouses. Only through the heroism of the staff was a catastrophe averted and the fuel didn’t ignite.
Muhammad Abu Shamla, 46, arrived for his job as an UNRWA security guard at 7:30 that morning. He told Human Rights Watch that he heard explosions from artillery from shortly thereafter until 9 a.m.: “At first I didn’t know where the shells were falling but the walls were shaking. After about 30 minutes we moved [to another building] because we thought it would be safer there. Then a colleague told us there was a fire inside the compound threatening fuel trucks. We went out to help. The smell was terrible, like garbage. There was a fire in the garage. We started moving the cars that hadn’t caught fire. There were clouds of black smoke everywhere. I saw one shell in the ground that hadn’t exploded. I didn’t sleep at all that night; I kept running around to fight the fire. The fires were still raging on and off when I left the compound the next morning at 9 a.m.”
Human Rights Watch reported: “UNRWA Gaza Field Administration Officer Scott Anderson told Human Rights Watch that he was in the compound when the shelling started: “I don’t know when exactly the first shell hit us, but the shells were getting close by 8 a.m., and I called the IDF coordination unit at Erez to try to get them to stop it. The pattern of shelling was that it started over the Gaza Training College, in the western part of the UNRWA compound, and then the shelling moved to the west and walked its way over the whole compound. It was hitting the compound itself for around an hour.””
Anderson, a retired US Army officer, speculated that the IDF was “walking” the artillery fire across the area — firing shells along an arc at evenly spaced intervals. According to Anderson, the main concern just after the attack was that the compound’s 120,000-liter diesel fuel depot and six fuel tanker trucks, two of them full at the time, might catch fire: “Two of the fuel tankers were parked right next to the wall of one of the warehouses that caught fire. I saw a burning fragment land under one of the trucks, and I and a colleague ran out with fire extinguishers, thinking we could put it out, but we couldn’t. So we had to bat it away from under the truck with sticks. We figured we’d be dead anyway if the truck went up. Then there was another shell; I saw that one myself, right overhead, and the shell landed just at the end of the parking lot. After that we evacuated everyone, and we drove the fuel trucks around 800 meters down the road to an empty lot that had already been shelled. The people here only had light injuries, we were lucky.”
According to UNRWA, the attack wounded one UN worker and two civilians who had sought shelter in the compound.
During the night of the 14th of January, and into the morning of the 15th of January Israeli armed forces began a barrage of artillery fire near Al-Quds hospital, Tal el-Hawa, Gaza City. 55-year-old Muhammad al-Sharif, a paint factory owner, told Human Rights Watch: “My daughter told me there was a car on fire with people in it. I looked out and saw a young man who had lost control of himself trying to push his way into the burning car. When I got to the car he had fallen down and he was on fire. The shelling was ongoing and I dragged him to an alley and tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t talk. One of his eyes had burned away and he was horribly injured.” The young man, Mohammad al-Haddad, 25 had been trying to rescue his family but all: his father, Uday al-Haddad, 55, branch manager for Palestine Bank, his mother Ihsan, 44, his brother, Hatim, 24, accounting student at Islamic University and sister, Ala`a, 14, were killed. Human Rights Watch reported: “According to Mohammad al-Haddad, the IDF started shelling Tel al-Hawa at 7 a.m. on the 15th of January. He and his family waited in their home on Islamic University Street until 11 a.m., he said, when Israel announced it would begin a temporary unilateral ceasefire. At that point, they got into their gray 1996 Volkswagen Golf. “We drove about 100 meters to the intersection at the end of our street, when we were hit. The power of the explosion threw me from the car. I lost consciousness, but then I went back to the car, and that’s where Mr. al-Sharif said he found me. After that I woke up in the hospital.” In addition to losing his left eye, al-Haddad suffered third-degree burns to his legs, hands and forehead, and a broken jaw.” The shelling continued.
Human Rights Watch reported: ““Pieces of something hit the kitchen window and burned through the glass, starting fires,” the journalist Fathi Sabbah said ... “We threw water on them but they would not stop burning so we pushed them out the window.” White smoke billowed in, he said, filling the apartment and choking the family: “We did not know what to do. We were afraid the area was under attack and so we took refuge in the center of the building, at the elevator, thinking it was the safest place because it was away from the windows.” ... The 15th of January shelling of Tel al-Hawa also struck the compound of the al-Quds Hospital, run by the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The hospital was treating about 50 patients at the time and sheltering roughly 500 local residents who had gone there to seek shelter from the fighting. The administration building and top two floors of the main hospital building were gutted by fire caused by air-burst white phosphorus munitions.””
Between 8 and 9 a.m. doctors in the main building were in the principal meeting room when shells landed on either side of the building. The initial explosions blew out the office windows and they watched with horror as white phosphorous wedges burned near a container of diesel. ““I saw pieces of flaming shrapnel falling,” Muhammad Abu Musabbih, 28, the Director of Disaster Management Services for the hospital, told Human Rights Watch. He said: “Flaming pieces fell one and a half meters from the oxygen station; many fragments fell around the compound. More flaming fragments fell near the electricity generator where we store 20,000 liters of fuel. We used water and sand to put the fires out. We feared that if the fire spread to the oxygen and fuel it would lead to an explosion.” Medical personnel began to fight the fire in the administration building along with members of the hospital‘s emergency medical team, using bucket brigades to relay water and sand. They found that fire extinguishers made the fire worse, so they tried to create a firebreak by cutting in two a second-story walkway that linked the administration building and the hospital. Shortly thereafter, another white phosphorus shell hit the hospital itself and the roof burst into flame.”
Soon afterwards a tank shell hit the rear of the middle hospital building, which was made of corrugated iron, penetrated the inner concrete wall of the hospital and destroyed the pharmacy. At around 4 p.m. the evacuation of the hospital was begun.
““As firefighters contained one area and moved to another the wind would reignite the fire and they had to rush back to places they had already finished,” Abu Musabbih said. “It was not until 6 a.m. the next day that the fire was completely extinguished.””
Tariq al-Baradei, 24, an information technology student at the Islamic University said: “I got into an ambulance with an 8- year-old girl who was bleeding from the head. I looked out the window and saw a group of injured people walking on the street; there were so many. I could not recognize the streets of Gaza. I saw it burning but I didn’t believe it could be the hospital building.”
Around 6 a.m. on Saturday, the 17th of January, the IDF started firing at least three white phosphorus shells, over and in the immediate vicinity of an UN-run elementary school in Beit Lahiya. At the time, the school was housing roughly 1,600 people. Ali al-Shamali, 46, said he saw a shell crash through the school roof and land in a classroom on the top floor. “Less than ten minutes later, another phosphorus shell hit the school, and we rushed upstairs,” he recounted. “Then another three or four white phosphorus shells hit, and one hit the market next to the school.” The shell that hit the classroom immediately killed two young brothers, Bilal al-Ashqar, 5, and Muhammad al-Ashqar, and severely wounded their mother Nujud, 28. She was wounded in the head and right hand, which was later amputated at a hospital. The boys’ cousin Mona, 18, was wounded in the leg, which was later amputated. Dozens of burning wedges landed in the courtyard and a classroom on the second floor caught on fire. Yusuf Daoud stated: “The smoke was white with some yellow, and the odor was awful ... It seems to affect little children and older people, especially.”
Nimr al-Maqusi related: “The scene was beyond description ... The people in the school were running around in a panic. They had left their homes and sought shelter in the school but now this shelter, too, was not immune. Some of the people were on fire and parts of their bodies were melting away.”
The conflict ended on Sunday, the 18th of January, when Israel declared a ceasefire.