Ha'aretz, December
3, 2004
Twilight zone / Suffer the little children
By Gideon Levy
In the present intifada, 323 Palestinian children under the age of 14
have been killed by IDF fire. Three recent examples from Nablus
Why waste ammunition? A few days ago, an Israel Defense Forces soldier
fired at two boys in the casbah of Nablus. Just a lone bullet that penetrated
the body of one of the boys, exited, penetrated the second boy, and killed
both of them. Two 15-year-old boys standing with their arms around each
other on the street that descends to the marketplace.
The soldier didn't "confirm the kill" after his two victims
fell; perhaps that is why nobody on our side was shocked by this horrific
double killing. But in two homes in the casbah of Nablus, dead children
were being mourned. One, Amar Banaat, was his mother's only child, born
after 15 years of infertility; the other, Montasser Hadada, had lost his
father only three months ago. On the wall, next to the picture of the
two children, there is also one of their good friend Hani Kandil, who
was killed in the same place in the casbah several months ago. Three pictures
of dead children on the wall.
Not far from there, in the casbah, they are mourning another child who
was killed, who died with a huge hole in his chest. This is the home of
Khaled Osta, who was 9 years old. Muataz Amudi, aged 3, was fortunate:
The bullet just pierced his leg as his father carried him in his arms
in the middle of the night, fleeing after the soldiers told them to evacuate
their home.
Nablus is mourning its children. Those among us - including the chief
of staff - who were so horrified by the affair of the "confirmed
killing" of 13-year-old Iman al-Hamas in the Rafah refugee camp -
including the chief of staff - can have the same reaction 323 times over,
once for each of the 323 children under the age of 14 (according to the
statistics of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, PHRMG) who
were killed in this intifada by IDF fire. Anyone who thought that the
case of Iman al-Hamas was exceptional should know that killing children
is a routine matter, without commissions of inquiry and without public
interest. Nablus alone has buried 29 children, two of them on Shabbat
two weeks ago.
Ravens caw among crevices in the rocks to which the houses of the Ras
al-Ayin neighborhood cling. The houses are adjacent to caves almost in
the heart of the city. Six weeks ago, on the night of September 20, the
members of the Amudi family woke up, as usual, to the deafening sounds
of explosions. After they recovered, they heard the soldiers calling the
residents with a microphone and telling them to evacuate their homes.
That's also routine. The soldiers were deployed on the street and on the
cliff above the caves.
Bader Amudi, 28, rushed to the bed of his little son. Muataz was fast
asleep, and Bader picked him up and rushed toward the door with his sleeping
son in his arms. His mother and his wife stayed behind to hide the jewelry
and the gold, for fear of looting by the soldiers. Bader opened the door,
managed to go down a step or two, and was immediately met by shots. One
bullet tore the baby's leg, and wounded his father in the hand. The father
put his son down on the staircase, and in panic went inside to his wife
and his mother. They claim that it took a long time until a Palestinian
ambulance was allowed to take the bleeding child to Rafidia Hospital.
Muataz is brought into the room. He has red cheeks and looks well cared
for, sitting in his stroller. A day after the soldier shot him in the
leg and shattered it, he was taken for treatment to an Israeli hospital,
Hadassah Ein Karem. After he was operated on, his parents were promised
that he would be able to walk on his own again. Meanwhile, he has difficulty
walking. There is a big, ugly scar on his thigh.
The IDF spokesman: "On September 20, during the course of the arrest
of three senior wanted men, an IDF force closed in on the home of the
wanted men, and called on everyone to leave. After the men left the house,
a suspicious figure was identified trying to escape via a rear exit, which
faces a cliff. Because of his suspicious behavior, the force opened fire
directed at his lower body, according to the procedures for opening fire.
The shots injured the suspect's son, whom the soldiers didn't see while
they were shooting, because of the angle at which he was standing. The
injured child was treated on the spot, and in the evening was transferred,
in coordination with the IDF, to a hospital in Israel, suffering from
a slight injury."
A house in the heart of the casbah. This is where the members of the Osta
family lived. The father, Jemal, 43, works for the Red Crescent as a guard,
and as a paramedic when necessary. Toward the end of the summer, on August
17, Jemal was called to the casbah with his ambulance to evacuate an injured
person from one of the alleyways. He arrived quickly, took out the stretcher,
but the soldiers chased him away, waving their weapons. For almost a quarter
of an hour he stood waiting with the stretcher until headquarters informed
him that the injured person had been evacuated by another route. He had
no idea that it was his eldest son.
A photo of a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy on the wall - Khaled Osta, dead
at the age of 9. His hair is parted on the side and he has a satisfied
look. Here's the last picture, in a Red Crescent summer camp, a few days
before his death: wearing glasses, drinking yogurt. After his father made
his way back to the Red Crescent headquarters, his brother called him
and informed him that Khaled had been injured, but only slightly. At the
same time, one of the neighbors took the bleeding Khaled in his arms and
ran two kilometers through the alleys of the casbah, until he reached
a road far from the soldiers, where another ambulance was waiting.
Another photo: The dead child Khaled, with a huge hole, of unusual dimensions,
gaping on the left side of his chest - the entry hole of the bullet, the
grenade or the shell. What tore such a huge hole in the child's body?
His father lifts the sofa and from a hiding place removes a black plastic
bag, in which he has saved a gas grenade that was found next to the wounded
Khaled: "Special 40 mm bullet. Series 30-30. To be fired only from
an M203 launcher," it says in Hebrew on the silver grenade. It is
unlikely that this is what killed Khaled; but this is the case of the
grenade that was fired, and was found alongside Khaled, and since then
his father has been saving it inside the sofa. In the picture, Khaled's
blue eyes are shut.
Why was he shot? It was the afternoon, recalls neighbor Wafa Halawi, and
in the alley outside, a group of about 20 children were playing. Halawi
saw them from her barred window. She noticed soldiers approaching in a
jeep from the west, and rushed to call to her children to come inside.
She says she saw two soldiers get out of the jeep and throw tear gas and
a stun grenade at the group of children. Khaled was eating a sandwich
that his mother had made for him; one can still see the remains of it
in the photo of his death. The soldiers were standing in the street above,
the children in the alley below. The chances that the children would throw
stones up at the soldiers from below on such a steep incline - the street
is much higher than the alley - do not seem likely.
When the neighbor couldn't find two of her children, a son and a daughter,
she ran to the alley to look for them. She noticed the bloodstains that
led to the home of the Osta family next door. The neighbor followed the
trail of blood until she saw Khaled bleeding at the entrance to his house.
The child had managed to traverse the 20 meters that separated the place
where he was injured from his home, until he collapsed at the entrance.
The neighbor called the members of the family to come out, and Khaled's
mother and sister rushed to the horrifying scene. At the same time, Khaled's
father was standing on the street above, prevented from approaching.
Jemal says that 20 days after he lost his son, he saw an Israeli soldier
who had fallen from an asbestos roof during the course of an IDF operation
in the Yasmina neighborhood, next to the casbah. The soldier fell without
his comrades noticing, and Jemal rushed to him and called on the other
soldiers to help. "Here fell the martyr Khaled Osta" reads the
writing on the wall of the alley, and there is a picture, of a 9-year-old
child with a hole in his chest, pasted on the wall.
The IDF spokesman: "An IDF investigation into the circumstances of
the death of Khaled Osta reveals that he was killed between 3 and 3:30
P.M. During those hours, there was no shooting being done by an IDF force,
except for the firing of a lone bullet at 19-year-old Mafar Sader, who
was throwing bricks at the IDF force. It is not certain that the child
was injured near his home; it is possible that he was injured in a distant
location, and somehow or other reached the place where he was found, after
he was injured. A Red Crescent investigation reported that the child was
found dead when they arrived. To sum up, after the extensive investigation
that was conducted, it is not clear what caused the child's injury."
The mourners' tent at the entrance to the casbah. Amar Banaat was 4 years
old when his father died of an illness. From that time on, his mother
Sabah raised him alone. She waited 15 years for the birth of her only
son, and her Amar lived for 15 years, until he was killed. Sabah has a
13-year-old daughter, Safaa.
On Shabbat, November 20, about two weeks ago, Amar went down to the street.
It was 6:30 P.M., and his mother had given him NIS 5 to buy candy. Amar
rushed to the grocery store of Montasser Hadada, a boy his own age, and
a classmate. The two were friends, and recently shared the same fate:
About three months ago, Montasser's father was killed in a traffic accident.
Every day after school, Montasser would rush to the family grocery store,
to help his mother and take the place of his deceased father. Amar came
here to buy a candy bar.
"I wish that the mother of the soldier who killed him would lose
him," says Sabah, the bereaved mother, thirsting for revenge in her
grief.
Montasser was hit first, and the bullet, the same bullet, also pierced
Amar's body. The IDF announced the following day that the two boys were
armed. Here they snicker bitterly: Skinny, 15-year-old Amar was armed?
And where is his weapon now? Sabah hisses: "I would like to see the
soldier, to tear out his eyes. That was my only son, I saved money all
my life in order to raise him. May God kill [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon
and all his soldiers, too. I'm left alone in the house."
They say that after the soldier shot at the two boys, he got out of the
jeep, approached the bodies, and left. "Protected jeeps, protected
tanks, and here a child throws a stone, what damage can he do?" shouts
the uncle, a resident of the nearby Askar refugee camp, who helped to
raise Amar.
"We're not terrorists, we're people who want to live in freedom and
respectability," says the uncle, calming down somewhat. "Children
see their friends killed before their eyes. Let them just leave us, let
them leave our lands."
Sabah: "Where should our children play? Where? If only Sharon could
feel our suffering. Every night, every night they shoot. What kind of
country is this? Where's the justice? By what right do they come to our
homes? By what right do they kill our children? Enough."
The IDF spokesman: "During the course of IDF activity in Nablus on
November 20, fire was opened at an IDF force, bombs and Molotov cocktails
were thrown. The force identified an armed Palestinian man and aimed concentrated
fire at him. The armed man and his brother, wanted Fatah activists, were
injured by this shooting. Another armed man was identified east of the
casbah, the force fired one concentrated shot at him, and identified a
hit, which apparently killed the armed man.
"After interrogating the forces about the incident, in which another
Palestinian boy was killed afterward, and according to the findings of
the Coordination and Liaison Administration regarding the location of
his injury and the time of his arrival at the hospital, it turns out that
during the said time, there was firing in the eastern part of the casbah
on an IDF force in two incidents: one from a Kalashnikov rifle and the
second from pistol fire. The force did not return fire, because it could
not identify the source of the shooting. Therefore, the death of the last
Palestinian cannot be linked to IDF activity in the area."
Montasser's brother Maher, 20, was an eyewitness: He saw a group of about
10 children and teenagers together in the alley, including Amar and his
brother, who had left the grocery store. He saw the soldiers who appeared
suddenly, and he turned to go home. He tells me that nobody was shooting
or throwing stones at the soldiers. Suddenly he heard a shot. Amar was
killed instantly immediately and Montasser died while he was rushing him
to the hospital. Both were bleeding from the mouth.
