Posted on 07/24/2002 9:07:19 AM PDT by dead
WE found them in the morgue, the victims of Israel's air strike on Gaza, tiny bodies lying on slabs that were too big for them.
The Palestinians opened the refrigerators to show us the bodies. They were the bodies of children.
They pulled back the covers over one to show the tiny head of a baby, eyes screwed up as if in sleep. Part of the back of its head was missing.
In the next refrigerator lay Mohammed al-Hwiti. They said he was 4 years old. He too could have been asleep. He was still dressed in a bright blue top.
In the refrigerator below was his brother, Subhi. He was 3.
Nine children died when an Israeli missile ploughed into the packed residential neighbourhood around midnight Monday.
On the floor of the morgue, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, lay the target of the missile, Sheik Salah Shehada. The morgue staff pulled back the flag. Inside were fragments of raw flesh. The body had been torn apart.
In a second flag beside him, lay a bundle of the body parts of his wife, Leileh, and their 14-year-old daughter.
Shehada was a man with the blood of children as young as these on his hands. He was the head of the military wing of Hamas, the militant group which has been behind more suicide attacks than any other.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon yesterday described the air strike that killed him as "one of our biggest successes" because it "hit perhaps the most senior Hamas figure on the operational side".
It was an unavoidable step to protect its citizens from suicide bombers, Israel said.
More than 140 people were wounded, and at least 14 died. All but Shehada and one other of them were civilians, we were told.
"Are these terrorists?" one of the morgue staff asked angrily, pointing to the bodies of the children.
Pushing our way out of the morgue, we had to struggle through a growing crowd that was getting angrier by the minute. Hundreds of young men, their faces hidden under black hoods, fired guns in the air.
"Are you prepared for revenge?" someone screamed through a loudspeaker, and they roared back in answer.
They formed a funeral procession for the dead, thousands of them kept coming in - a great sea of people. They brought the bodies out of the morgue, and one young man held the body of a baby aloft above his head, swaddled in a Palestinian flag and keffikah.
The din was deafening. Above their heads, flew the green banner of Hamas, the black of Islamic Jihad, the red of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the yellow of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
The message was clear - all the militant groups, Islamists and secularists were united in their anger, and in their determination for revenge.
They draped the coffin of Shehada under a green Hamas banner and paraded him slowly through the streets.
We found the father of the two dead brothers, Mahmoud al-Hwiti, in the hospital. His face was badly torn apart and he found it difficult to speak.
His brother, Mohammed, told his story. Mahmoud's two tiny sons were killed, and his wife. Four children survived.
The two brothers, Mohammed and Mahmoud, lived with their families in the houses next door to each other. All Mohammed's family escaped alive.
When we went to find their homes all that remained was rubble. The houses where the missile struck had been flattened, reduced to piles of dust and stones.
Just before midnight on Monday, this was a packed residential neighbourhood, full of people trying to sleep in the intense summer heat.
Gaza City is teeming with Palestinians who have nowhere else to go. The locals said about 20 people were living in each house.
"We had no idea we lived next to a guy from Hamas," Mohammed said.
It seems Shehada, who knew he was at the top of the Israelis' hit list, was living here in secret. The Israelis will say that Shehada deliberately targeted Israeli civilians, that their air strike was directed against a militant with blood on his hands.
But there was no way Israel could fire a missile into this warren of houses without terrible civilian casualties. They must have known that.
(Independent News Service)
But they probably would have been........
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