Grief turns to rage as Beit Hanoun buries its dead
Pastor Dale Morgan
Grief turns to rage as Beit Hanoun buries its dead*
· Militants call for revenge at funeral of 18 victims
· Olmert blames artillery strike on 'technical failure
Rory McCarthy in Beit Hanoun
Thursday November 9, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Thousands of Palestinians crowded the streets of Beit Hanoun in northern
Gaza today, some firing guns into the air, as they buried 18 members of
a single family who died in an Israeli artillery strike.
As ambulances brought the dead from hospital morgues into the town, one
distraught man carried in the air the body of a small child wrapped in
white cloth. The child’s head hung exposed as he walked through the
chanting crowd.
In Jerusalem, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said a “technical
failure” was to blame for the strike before dawn yesterday in which
several artillery shells hit houses in a residential street in Beit Hanoun.
The deaths, all from the extended Athamna family and among them 14 women
and children, provoked a wave of international condemnation and renewed
threats of violence from Palestinian militant groups.
“It was not a planned attack,” Mr Olmert told a business conference. “It
was a technical failure of the Israeli artillery. I checked it, and I
verified it.” He expressed regret but went on to say that military
operations would continue in Gaza as long as Palestinian militants fired
rockets at Israeli towns.
The explanation was of little comfort to some in the town today who
spoke in terms of violent revenge. “The reaction should be even harder
than the attack,” said Hijam Basyani, 40, standing at the spot where the
shells had struck. Three of her cousin’s sons died in the incident. “You
cannot imagine our feeling when we see this blood, these children
killed. You feel ready to explode.”
“We have to fight Israel,” said Islam Odwan, 19, a student from Gaza’s
Islamic University, who was in the procession. “When they leave us
alone, then we will stop.”
Posters appeared this morning on walls across the town with photographs
of some of the men, mostly militants, who died in battles with Israeli
troops during a six-day operation in the town that ended a day before
the artillery strike. Residents had been confined to their houses and
several buildings had been damaged and orchard gardens torn up by tanks
and bulldozers. Israel said it had been trying to halt the firing of
crude Qassam rockets into Israeli territory and that it had uncovered a
large number of weapons and hit some rocket launching cells.
Muhammad Ramadan, an Arabic language professor at the Islamic
University, described how Israeli soldiers blew a hole in the wall of
his bedroom and took up positions in his house for a day during last
week’s operation. “We need to respond and it has to be a military
action. This is for our honour,” he said. “How many attempts at
negotiation have there been, and how many UN resolutions? But what
happened? Nothing.”
Gaza’s militant factions have used the incident to call for an increase
in attacks on Israel and the Israeli authorities said today there had
been a marked rise in threat warnings. A gay pride march scheduled to
take place today in Jerusalem was cancelled and the event confined to a
sports stadium because police said they were overstretched.
Ismail Radwan, a spokesman for Hamas, which won Palestinian elections
early this year, said militant groups had to respond. “The Palestinian
military groups are ready to respond,” he said. Asked if that meant a
return to suicide bombing, he said: “The military wing of Hamas can
choose and decide what is the right way to respond.”
Others, however, were more moderate and said there should be a return to
negotiations. “We want peace, but we want an equal and fair peace,” said
Khalil Masri, 65, who runs a private health clinic in Beit Hanoun. He
said he opposed a return to the campaign of suicide bombing. “Violence
only creates violence. The Palestinians and Israelis are both living
here. We need two states living side by side and that day will come, I
am sure of that.”
As he spoke, the bodies of the dead were lowered into graves dug into a
sandy expanse of land on the outskirts of town. The graves were marked
with palm fronds.
In the Israeli press there was criticism of the military, with the
left-leaning Ha’aretz newspaper describing the attack as an “atrocity”
and a “fearsome and senseless killing” for which Israel was responsible.
But Ephraim Sneh, the deputy defence minister, told the Jerusalem Post
that the “moral responsibility” for the deaths lay with militants who
operate from within civilian areas.
Others were more forthright. “When you fire rockets, shells fall. When
one of them strays it is a shame, it is disastrous, it is bad, but that
is how it is,” wrote journalist Ben Caspit in the popular Ma’ariv
newspaper. “Every other method has been tried, and failed. With
scoundrels you behave like a scoundrel, and with murderous, bloodthirsty
terrorism that wants to wipe you off the map, you have to respond
accordingly: wipe it out.”