Walid Abu Oda holds flachettes, metal darts, from a shell that killed his son Ismail,16. In addition, his son`s friend Hussam Abu Sayed, 17, and Ibrahim Abu Sayed,
91, died in the attack in the northern Gaza Strip on 12 September 2010.
[MaanImages/Jared Malsin]
91, died in the attack in the northern Gaza Strip on 12 September 2010.
[MaanImages/Jared Malsin]
EXCERPT:
BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip (Ma’an) -- On 13 September, a day after Israeli tank shells decapitated his 16-year-old son, Walid Abu Oda went back to his family's northern Gaza farm in a vain search for the head.
Asked how he was coping with the loss, he said, "How do you think it feels to lose a son, to see your son without his head?"
The killing of Walid's son, Ismail Abu Oda, along with his friend Hussam Abu Sayed, 17, and his grandfather Ibrahim Abu Sayed, 91, is raising questions about whether Israel has taken sufficient strides to bring it's army into compliance with international humanitarian law.
The incident was similar to previous incidents, such as those described in judge Richard Goldstone's UN-mandated report on Israel's winter war on Gaza. Human rights groups say the September killings and others only underscore the importance of implementing the report's call for investigations and accountability.
A lack of credible investigations, by Israel or international bodies, into these and other allegations makes it likely that Israeli soldiers will continue to violate the laws of war in Gaza. The dearth of probes "makes it very easy for the soldiers and the commanders first to shoot and second to get away with it," said Mahmoud Abu Rahmah, a spokesman for the Gaza-based Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights.
Immediately following the shelling, the Israeli military announced it was merely “returning fire” at “suspects” who, they claimed, fired rocket-propelled grenades at Israeli forces.
Initial reports in the Israeli media repeated the military’s claims verbatim. "Shells kill three as IDF targets militant on Gaza Strip border,” declared the headline that ran in the next day’s edition of Haaretz.
“1 terrorist dead, 4 wounded in IDF response to Gaza attack,” reported The Jerusalem Post. Ynet: “IDF on Gaza incident: Suspects tried to fire anti-tank rockets." Not to be outdone, the settler-run Arutz Sheva announced: “IDF Kills Two in Firefight with Gaza Terror Infiltrators.”
While Haaretz identified the three victims as a grandfather and two teenagers, the other news portals simply reported, as fact, that the three were “suspects,” “militants,” “terrorists.”
Two days later the military backtracked, admitting what Palestinian witnesses had said all along: the three were civilians.
Brig. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg would later clarify in a statement sent to journalists that "we understand from a re-creation that we undertook that the three casualties were not involved in act of terror." The statement insisted, however, that one of the Palestinians had picked up an RPG launcher and aimed it at Israeli forces stationed along the border.
The case yielded a number of questions: Why did the army initially declare the three to be militants? Why did the Israeli soldiers decide to shoot in the first place?
The Israeli military did not respond to repeated requests for answers to these and other questions.
In Gaza, witnesses, relatives of the victims, and human rights experts told Ma’an that there was no basis for Israel’s claims that the three appeared to pose a threat to military forces.
All these sources stressed that the three victims visited the border area nearly every day, and were known to the soldiers stationed there. They also point out that the area where the shelling took place is in plain view of army installations on the northern border, a fact that Ma’an verified in a visit to the site. Ma'an found no evidence that anyone in the area was holding an RPG-launcher.
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