Operation Cast Lead Part 2 The Initial Assault
Between 11.20 and 11.35 a.m. on the 27th of December 2008 three missiles struck a yard where police cadets were graduating. Forty-eight were instantly killed and five wounded. Twenty-three other police stations were simultaneously targeted. Eighty-nine policemen were killed at one, twenty-eight at another, and nine at a third.
There was a lot of collateral damage to this initial assault: 10-year-old Kamelia al-Burdini was killed when a wall linking his house and a police station collapsed while five, including Abd al-Hakim Rajab Muhammad Mansi, 32, and his son, Uday Hakim Mansi, were slain at a fruit and vegetable market close to a police station on Salah ad-Din Street. Amnesty International reported: “On the 27th of December 2008, the first day of the Israeli military offensive against Gaza, scores of civilians were killed within hours of the beginning of the air strike campaign. Among the casualties were a large group of students from the UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency) Vocational Training Centre, located in the UNRWA compound in the center of Gaza City. At about 1.20 p.m. a missile struck the street outside the training center, where a group of students who had just left the center after an exam were waiting in the street outside the UN compound for UN buses to return to their homes in different parts of the Gaza Strip. Eight students, aged 17 to 20, were killed and some 20 others were injured, one of whom died three days later. Three young men from the al-Rayes family, who lived across the road, were also killed. The three, Allam, 18, his brother Hisham, 24, and their cousin Abdallah, 20, were standing outside their home, in front of the family’s small grocery shop.”
“The predictable retaliation was quick in coming: “The three Israeli civilians killed in rocket attacks during Operation Cast Lead” Amnesty International reported “were victims of the longer-range Grad-type rockets. Beber Vaknin, a 58-year-old metal worker from Netivot, was killed in his home on the 27th of December 2008. He was standing by the entrance of his building and was fatally wounded by shrapnel from a rocket, which struck the third floor of the building across the street from his home.”
Two days later, two more civilians were killed in separate rocket attacks for which Hamas claimed responsibility. Hani al-Mahdi, a 27-year-old construction worker from the Bedouin minority, was killed and 16 other workers were injured when a rocket exploded just before 9.30 a.m. at a construction site in Ashkelon. Irit Sheetrit, a 39-year-old mother of four who worked as a secretary in a school in Ashdod, was killed when a rocket exploded near her car in the center of Ashdod shortly after 9 p.m. Her sister, who was with her, was wounded but survived.
There was a method to the madness of IDF targeting. One pilot said: “When I’m with the squadron, I don’t see a terrorist who is launching a Qassam and then decide to fly out to get him. There is a whole system that supports us, that serves as eyes, ears and intelligence for every plane that takes off, and creates more and more targets in real-time, of one level of legitimacy or another. In any case, I try to believe that these are targets [determined according to] the highest possible level of legitimacy ... In any case, I arrive at the squadron, I get a target with a description and coordinates, and basically just make sure it isn’t within the line of our forces. I look at the picture of the house I am supposed to attack, I see that it matches reality, I take off, I push the button and the bomb takes itself exactly to within one meter of the target itself.”
People on rooftops were regarded as legitimate targets. The air force had the go ahead to fire at anyone seen on a roof. No distinction was made as to whether they were civilians or terrorists and no time was taken to find out.
The level of destruction soon rendered targeting haphazard: “I entered al-Atatra after seeing aerial photos and didn’t identify anything, and my photographic memory is not that bad. I remembered that 200 meters further on down the track there should be a junction, with two large houses at the corners, and there wasn’t. I remembered there was supposed to be a square with a Hamas memorial monument, and there wasn’t.”
“There was rubble, broken blocks ... it got to the point where we would try to report to field intelligence about a figure sticking out its head or a rocket being launched, and the girl (at field intelligence) would ask, “Is it near this or that house?” We’d look at the aerial photo and say, “Yes, but the house is no longer there.” “Wait, is it facing a square?” “No more square.” She would ask us if this was the third or fourth junction, and we’d tell her the houses are all crushed over the junction and you don’t see a single junction. It got to the point where we could hardly see our way. Later I went in to the lookout war-room and asked how things worked, and the girl-soldiers there, the lookouts, resented the fact that they had no way to direct the planes, because all of their reference points were razed. So, they would direct them in general terms or rely solely on coordinates. They found their reference points on aerial photos shared by the pilots and the war-room, and very approximate, which also annoys me. What is this, approximation? It’s highly possible that now the pilot will bomb the wrong house ... it was my own take on things. She tells him, “take some 800 meters east of the sea and so and so meters at such and such an azimuth from this or that line,” and you say, “Wait, if he does not use the compass and other instruments in his cockpit for these measurements, then possibly he’ll miss targets, it’s not so far-fetched. This is not the “smart bomb” we had been working on so hard. Could be he’s using such a bomb but aiming at the wrong target.”
From the perspective of the soldiers on the ground the violence was insane. When one was asked whether the destruction of property and buildings was just for kicks he replied: “That’s what we saw the air force doing.” It was also unceasing: “This was fire-power such as I had never known. I can’t say that when I had been in Gaza the air force wasn’t used ... there were blasts all the time. Whether distant or near, that’s already semantics. But our basic feeling was that the earth was constantly shaking. Explosions were heard all day long, the night was filled with flashes, an intensity we had never experienced before.”
The consequences for the civilian population were terrifying. Amnesty International stated: “Five sisters from the Ba’alusha family – Jawaher, Dina, Samar, Ikram and Tahrir aged four to 17 years – were crushed to death under the rubble of their home in Jabalia, in northern Gaza. The house collapsed when the Israeli army bombed the next-door Imad Aqel Mosque at about 11.45 p.m. on the 29th of December 2008. The family had received no warning and were asleep. Two other sisters, 11-year-old Samah and 17-year-old Iman, who were sleeping in the same room, were injured. The parents and two other siblings, a two-week-old baby girl and a 16-month-old boy, were sleeping in another room and mostly sustained light injuries. Other nearby houses were also damaged in the strike ... Five-year-old Lama Talal Hamdan, her sister Haya, 12, and their brother Isma’il, eight, were killed near their home on the 30th of December 2008. At about 8 a.m., after breakfast, their mother sent the children as usual to carry the rubbish bags to the rubbish dump about 200m from their home in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza. Moments later the family heard two massive explosions from F-16 bombardments, about half a minute apart, which made the whole quarter shake. The children’s father told Amnesty International: “We didn’t realize that our children would be targeted and might be hit when we sent them out. We found the bodies buried beneath the dust thrown up by the bomb in the bare ground. The two girls died at once and Isma’il died the following day in hospital. I don’t know of any fault they committed; they weren’t carrying rockets, they were just children.””
According to Amnesty International: “In the Yebna refugee camp in Rafah, in the south of Gaza, the home of the al-Absi family was bombed by an F-16 aircraft at about 1 a.m. on the 29th of December 2008, as the 10 members of the family were asleep. Three of the family’s children — Sidqi, aged four, Ahmad, 10, and Muhammad, 12 — were killed and their four sisters and their parents were injured, some of them very seriously. The children’s mother, 41-year-old Afaf, remained in a coma in a hospital in Egypt (at the time of writing), and her 15-year-old daughter Zakya still requires further reconstructive surgery to her left arm. Two-year-old Naama was thrown by the force of the blast onto the roof of the adjacent house. Only one of the children, who was sleeping in a room further away from the main impact of the strike escaped without injury. One of the adjacent houses, that of the al-Kurd family, was also partially destroyed. The 10 members of the family were visiting relatives and thus escaped injury. One room of another adjacent house was also damaged. A young couple and their baby who were sleeping in the room sustained light injuries.”
When the Israeli ground invasion began on the 3rd of January the violence intensified. Arik Dubnov, who was in the reconnaissance company of a reserve brigade of the Israeli army, said: “From the first briefings before going in, it was clear that the army had changed its entire mindset. Instead of getting the usual precautions on not harming civilians, we were told about the need to make a very aggressive entry. We were told: “any sign of danger, open up with massive fire”. In previous training, we prepared for fighting against guerrilla forces, but this time they told us that we would be facing Hamas fighting in full military formation — something that, obviously, did not happen. Some of us were very uncomfortable with these orders, others were pleased that finally the IDF was taking off the kid gloves...”
Prayers had ended and the sermon was just beginning at the al-Maqadmah mosque, near the north-west outskirts of Jabaliyah camp, close to Beit Lahia, when, on the evening of the 3rd of January 2009, an explosion blew off one of the wooden doors, killing 15 and wounding 40. The missile hit a boy who’d been sitting at the entrance. His legs were subsequently found on the roof of the mosque.
Amnesty International reported: “Three paramedics — Anas Fadhel Na’im, Yaser Kamal Shbeir and Raf’at Abd al-Al — were killed in the early afternoon of the 4th of January in Gaza City as they walked towards two wounded men. A 12-year-old boy, Omar Ahmad al-Barade’e, who was showing them where the wounded men were, was killed in the same strike. Yahia Hassan, the driver of one of the ambulances, told Amnesty International: “It was about 3-3.30 p.m. We were called to pick up some injured men in an orchard near a house in the Dahdouh area in the south of Tal al-Hawa (Gaza City). We parked the two ambulances next to a house, left the lights flashing and me and the other driver waited by the ambulances while Anas, Yaser and Raf’at went to pick up the injured. A child was on the dirt road indicating to them where the injured men were lying. As our three colleagues got near the child, a missile hit and then another. They were all killed, our three colleagues and the child; pieces of their bodies flew about. Then missiles were fired near the ambulances and we could not go to pick up their bodies and had to drive away without them; we had to leave our dead colleagues behind. As we left more missiles or shells were fired towards our ambulances.”
One IDF soldier testified: “There was a clear feeling, and this was repeated whenever others spoke to us, that no humanitarian consideration played any role in the army at present. The goal was to carry out an operation with the least possible casualties for the army, without its even asking itself what the price would be for the other side.”
Amnesty International reported: “On the 4th of January, another ambulance crew was attacked in Beit Lahia, in the north of Gaza. In mid-morning the ambulance had answered a call to rescue several young men, some injured and some dead, who were in Abu Obeida Street after an Israeli strike. The ambulance was staffed by driver Khaled Yousef Abu Sa’ada, 43, and two paramedics, 26-year-old Ala’ Usama Sarhan and 34-year-old Arafa Hani Abd al-Dayem, a father of four and a science teacher by profession, who had been volunteering with the emergency services for eight years.”
“Driver Khaled Yousef Abu Sa’ada told Amnesty International: “We came about 15 minutes after the missile strike. None of those lying in the road had any weapon; they were just civilians, all young men; their bodies were scattered ... The paramedics picked up the first injured man and put him in the ambulance; then they picked up a second man and were transferring him from the stretcher to the ambulance when the shell hit the ambulance. Arafa fell, badly injured and the patient had his head and legs blown off.””