GAZA CITY — The boy loved riding with his father and his father wanted to take him along. He works so much he never gets time to spend with him. Venturing outside together, they were savagely killed in one of the random Israeli missile attacks in Gaza, creating another heart-wrenching tale in the fenced-off Strip.
"We see them all the time, but we cannot stay inside forever," Yusef al-Yazji, a mourning relative of the pair, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Saturday, January 19.
"We have to work to support our families. We are not wanted men, so we did not think we had to hide," he added after paying last respects to Mohammad and his eight-year-old son.
The pair were killed in an Israeli missile raid Wednesday night, January 17, targeting a car carrying Hamas resistance fighters.
It was indeed a week of funerals in Gaza with at least 37 people, including children, toddlers and women, killed in the past seven days.
Israel has launched an aggressive military operation in Gaza to stop Palestinian rockets fired on neighboring Israeli towns. Palestinian civilians take the brunt of the random raids.
Two more Palestinians were killed Saturday in a pre-dawn Israeli air strike in northern Gaza.
A December report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tsaleem said a third of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in 2007 were civilians.
Israeli and Palestinian rights group have slammed the chief of Israel’s internal security service (Shin Bet) for considering children and civilians killed in indiscriminate Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip over the past two years "terrorists."
No Error
Children were clapping their hands in joy at the wedding of another Gaza’s couple defying the Israeli siege and aggressions. Suddenly, a buzz was heard overhead and the cheerful scene turned bloody.
"I could not believe what happened," Mohammed Abdel Jawad, the groom, told AFP.
"We were sitting in front of our house, talking and joking. Suddenly there was this big explosion and a huge cloud of smoke. No one could see anything, we just heard crying."
One woman was killed and more than 50 were wounded, mostly women and children, when Israeli planes bombed an abandoned Interior Ministry building in Gaza on Friday.
"It felt like an earthquake," said Umm Fahmi, a woman who lives across from the blast site.
"My house did not only shake, it jumped from its foundations and back down," she said, peering through the dust at the concrete and steel remains of the bombed-out complex.
"How could they (Israelis) drop such a bomb in a residential area on top of people’s heads?"
Gazans are wondering is there any way out of the Israeli inferno they have been drawn into.
On Thursday, another deadly missile raid targeting resistance fighters killed an elderly woman, Maryam al-Rahil, riding a donkey cart and her son.
"They could see there was a donkey cart with an old woman riding in it, bundled up because of the cold, and they hit it anyway," said Mohammed al-Rahil, the son’s uncle.
"This was not an error."
(IslamOnline.net + News Agencies)
