RAFAH TODAY Column by Mohammed Omer

Tweet GAZA CITY, - Tamer was nine, and no child soldier. He did not live in the area from where home-made rockets are launched into Israeli territory. The day he was killed, he was at least two kilometres from the place Israeli troops had entered Gaza, and met with return fire by Palestinian resistance.

His tragedy was that the family home was near Deir al-Balah in the middle of the Gaza Strip, close to the area the Israelis have set up as their Kussfim base.

"We were all inside the house when shooting started," Tamer's aunt Etaf tells IPS. "It was right after members of the Palestinian resistance stopped shooting at Israeli troops," she said, pointing towards the scene of those clashes a couple of kilometres away. But the Israelis marched into this area as well, hardly for the first time.

Members of the family decided to crawl out into the rain after a bullet hit a gas cylinder, Etaf said. "But Israeli soldiers continued to fire on us from a tank and Hummer military jeep." After some time, seeing that the gas cylinder had not exploded, Etaf said she crawled back into the house. Tamer followed, but never made it. "I saw Tamer shot, with a bullet in his head."

"He wanted to become a doctor when he grew up," says his mother Sabah Abu Shaar.

Like Tamer, other children are dying, and their mothers' dreams with them. A six-month infant named Mohammed al-Bourai was killed when an Israeli missile crashed into the house Wednesday this week, moments after he'd been fed. The family house happens to be close to the offices of Gaza's ministry of interior, and to the house of de facto Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Hanyieh.

The same day, three other Palestinian children were killed in an air strike. The following day, four Palestinian children were killed near the Jabaliya refugee camp while playing soccer. Two of the boys, all aged 7 to 14, were from the same family. A child's body was found in eastern Gaza, a victim of Israeli shelling.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs says in a Gaza fact sheet that 80 Palestinians were killed in January of this year, and 82 were injured. The January deaths included four children and five women. The Israeli casualties through the month were nine injuries from home-made rockets.

Just over the past three days, Israeli air strikes have killed at least 35 Palestinians, among them nine children. Many more are injured, and some are in critical condition.