Sunday, May 17, 2009

Paradise lost

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Last update - 23:21 07/05/2009

Paradise lost

By Amira Hass

 

GAZA - One of the first - if not the first - official request submitted to the Israel Defense Forces was to investigate the killing of Palestinian civilians in Operation Cast Lead. The request was sent on January 9 to the military advocate general, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mandelblit, and was signed by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. Mandelblit never responded.

 

The request relates specifically to the killing of Akram al-Ghul, 48, and of Mahmoud, the 17-year-old son of Akram's cousin Salah al-Ghul, in an aerial bombardment. Akram is the father of Fares al-Ghul, consultant to Human Rights Watch in Gaza. The target was a stylish white house on a farm in the northwest Gaza Strip. The time: 4:20 P.M. The date: Saturday, January 3, 2009.

 

For everyone outside Gaza, January 3 is already "the past." For Salah al-Ghul, January 3 is now, forever. This is a typical feeling in Gaza, even four months after the offensive. By January 3, the eve of the ground invasion, the aerial attacks had been going on for a week. But the farm's proximity to the border ("We're closer to [Kibbutz] Zikim than we are to Gaza City") lent a sense of security to the family.

 

Salah al-Ghul knew that the IDF, the Shin Bet security service and the Civil Administration were well-acquainted with him and his extended family. He was sure there was coordination and communication between these bodies. Tanks had entered the area before and never fired a single shot at the house. "They went about their shooting while we roasted corn in the yard," he says.

 

With a few keystrokes, any IDF commander could bring up all the information collected about them by the Civil Administration and the Shin Bet: These were refugees from the village of Harbiye (now the site of Zikim), one of whom leased a large tract of land from the Egyptian authorities in the 1960s, which was divided among his family over the years. Some of the refugees built houses among the orchards and fields. During the second intifada, these homes and their approximately 180 inhabitants were subject to a state of confinement in their own village, due to their proximity to the settlements. The Civil Administration and the IDF were in direct contact with one of the Al-Ghul family members, to coordinate the residents' comings and goings, to bring in food and to pass broken water pumps through the checkpoint. They exchanged phone numbers. The database should also show that one house was once hit by a Qassam, but the occupants were not harmed.

 

Salah al-Ghul knew that the computer also contained other information: which members of the family belonged to which Palestinian organizations, who had been arrested (he himself spent 14 months in prison in the 1980s, for membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and who had been killed. The computer may not have provided information, however, about how poor his family in the Shati refugee camp was, about his father's blindness or about the fact that his mother supported the family as a seamstress. Or about how he left school at age 13 to work, first on a kibbutz and later in the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv, to help support the family, and that he will never forget his employer, fishmonger Eliahu Malach and his wife Tikva.

 

But the computer surely revealed something about Al-Ghul's upward mobility: When in 1994 he registered as a businessman and owner of a rental-car company. Every request for a business permit, to import a vehicle, to make a bank transfer, to leave the Gaza Strip for Israel, the West Bank or abroad, every telephone number - everything is recorded in the detailed database accessible only to the Israeli security authorities.

 

Before 2005, Al-Ghul could not build on his land because of its proximity to the Jewish settlement of Dugit. Right after the disengagement, he began building his "paradise on earth," as he called it: No military patrol could have failed to take notice of this house, in which he invested much hope and money. He installed powerful spotlights, which he bought in Israel, to illuminate the entire area and uprooted a grove near his house to keep the rocket-launching crews at bay. He and his neighbor and relative Abu Ziyad clashed several times with armed men (including a few relatives) who tried to approach, and warned them not to come back.

 

'Covered in blood'

 

When the aerial assault began, on Saturday, December 27, his wife and his other children were in their apartment in the Sheikh Radwan refugee neighborhood; they couldn't join Al-Ghul. His son Mahmoud was studying for exams and his father preferred that he come to the farm, because he sometimes got into fights with Hamas activists in the neighborhood.

 

Akram Al-Ghul was a judge in the Palestinian Authority, but after the Hamas military takeover of Gaza in June 2007, he quit his job and went into business with his cousin Salah. The tight closure on the Strip led to a downturn in the rental-car company's business. Salah began thinking about other business possibilities that wouldn't be dependent on Israeli permits and border crossings. He decided to open a dairy, an expensive proposition, since the closure meant the price of each calf had tripled. But he and his cousin-partner Akram loved the work.

 

The aerial assault caught them as they were caring for their cows (many of them pregnant) and camels. On January 3, at around 4 P.M., Salah and his coworker Nasser were in the cowshed, about 50-100 meters south of the house. Mahmoud and Akram had gone into the house to make coffee. Suddenly, recalls Salah, "I heard the noise, darkness covered the earth, I thought a Qassam rocket or a tank shell had landed, I yelled to Nasser: 'Run and take cover in the house, I'll meet you there.' I didn't think the house was the target. We moved forward a few meters, the wounded cows were mooing, I couldn't see anything except for flying bits of metal and rocks and cow blood. I heard the F-16 getting further away. Then I saw that I was all black and covered in cow blood. The dust began to settle and I saw that the house was gone, and so were Mahmoud and Akram. They found Mahmoud on my brother's land 300 meters away. They found Akram in bits and pieces."

 

Since January 3, he can't get the thought out of his head: "An F-16 doesn't take off by mistake. It's not random. A decision was made. A lone house, with a few hundred meters away from other houses. And only this house is hit? What makes it so dangerous that, unlike other houses in the Gaza Strip, whose occupants were warned by phone to evacuate before the bombardment or shelling, and here no one calls to issue a warning? They have our phone number. They know us."

 

Haaretz sought to understand, too. A question was first sent to the IDF Spokesman's Office on March 25, along with a precise description of the location. On April 8, this answer was received: "We cannot conduct an in-depth investigation of these claims on the basis of a general description of the area, without receiving exact information regarding the location of the building that was hit."

 

On April 20, Haaretz submitted the GPS information for the house's location. This week, on May 5, the IDF Spokesman provided this response: "An investigation conducted by the Southern Command shows that the target in question was identified as a Hamas observation post directing attacks at IDF forces and therefore it was imperative to operate against it. Being aware of Hamas' mode of operation, the IDF planned the attack beforehand in order to minimize the damage to the noncombatant civilian population."

 

Fares al-Ghul, Akram's son, said in response to the IDF statement: "Armed militants didn't dare to enter the area because the residents always stopped them. There was no violence in the area at the time of the bombardment [aside from the IDF bombardments - A.H.]. The killing of my father, a Fatah member, and of young Mahmoud does not prove there was any Hamas presence there."

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Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

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