In the Israeli Shooting Gallery that Is Gaza

Tweet AND NOW A FETUS--by Gideon Levy

"Last Wednesday was an ordinary day in the Katouni household. The father went to work, the kids went to school, and in the evening everyone went to bed - the parents in their bedroom and the three children in their room in the third-floor apartment. Shortly after two in the morning, Maha was startled awake by the loud sounds of gunfire from the street. She didn't even manage to turn on the light when she got up to run to the kids' room next door, to reassure her three little boys and keep them from getting scared. The gunfire was very heavy. The window of her room was open and her bed was close to the window.

"Maha got out of bed, took one step, and then the bullet struck her in the lower back. She fell onto the nightstand. Another bullet struck the nightstand. Soldiers from the Nahal patrol battalion were standing on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. "Wherever we are sent - to there we go," the poet Yaakov Orland once wrote in "The Nahal Anthem," sung by the Nahal entertainment troupe, which also sang "The Song of Peace."

"Rifat rushed to call an ambulance. The children, who had awakened, were hysterical, especially the youngest, 3-year-old Jad, at the sight of the blood trickling from the front and back of their pregnant mother, who lay wounded on the floor. The bullet had struck her from behind, passed through the fetus' head and the mother's intestines and exited through the abdomen.

"Family members say that about 45 minutes went by before the ambulance from the Medical Relief organization was permitted to approach. In the meantime, Maha's mother, Umm Ibrahim, tried to leave her home nearby to come to her daughter's aid. Umm Ibrahim says that when she tried to leave her house there was gunfire; she hurried back inside. "It's a miracle that I was saved," says the woman in the white headscarf. She could not reach her injured daughter and would not see her until two hours later, in the hospital.

"The pain is written all over Maha's face. One of her brothers somehow managed to cross the line of fire and get to her house; he tried to stanch the gaping wound in her stomach with a towel. Her husband, Rifat, was paralyzed with shock. Umm Ibrahim says that her son, who tended to Maha, could see through the hole in her abdomen that the fetus had been wounded in the head and was dead.

"The gunfire finally subsided at around three in the morning and they were able to take Maha out to the street, carried by her brother and the paramedic from the ambulance that had parked in the nearby alley. The brother says that on the way to the hospital they were stopped twice by soldiers, who wanted to check the wounded woman's identity and to make sure there were no wanted men hiding in the ambulance. Maha was barely conscious when she reached the hospital, but her mother says she understood right away that she had lost the baby.