Tag: Gaza

By Sarah Lyall
Published in the New York Times

LONDON, June 23 — Three years ago, in an incident that resonates now with the recent killing of seven members of a Palestinian family on a Gaza beach, a documentary filmmaker was shot to death in Gaza.

Then as now, the victims’ families blamed the Israeli military, which denied responsibility. A major difference is that the filmmaker, James Miller, was a British citizen, and after some prodding from his family, his government has taken up his cause.

At first, about the only thing not in dispute in the Miller case was that he was dead, shot on May 2, 2003, in an area of the Gaza Strip thick with Israeli soldiers. The Israelis said he was a casualty of war. His colleagues said he had been killed in cold blood.

His family fought to know more.

A resolution of sorts came in April at a coroner’s inquest here into the death of Mr. Miller, 34, an experienced filmmaker looking into the effects of violence on children for HBO. The jury’s verdict was that he was murdered.

The killer was identified as the commander of an armored personnel carrier in the Israeli Army who had admitted firing his gun that night, but no one in Israel has been charged, and many of the questions raised in the hours after the shooting have never been resolved.

Suspecting that answers might not be forthcoming, the Miller family sent a private investigator to the scene the day after the killing to do forensic tests — tests, the investigator said, that the Israelis never conducted. In the next few days the army bulldozed the site, destroying much of the remaining evidence, the investigator said.

The Israeli military’s criminal investigation, including the basic task of confiscating and securing the soldiers’ weapons for tests, did not begin until several weeks after the fact.

Lt. Col. Jana Modzgvrishvily, the military advocate for the Israeli Army’s southern command, said in an interview that after Mr. Miller’s death, the army immediately began a standard field investigation, followed by a full military criminal investigation.

She said nine soldiers in the two armored personnel carriers near the scene were repeatedly interviewed and subjected to lie detector tests. She confirmed that the weapons had not been secured for three weeks but said they had been subjected to extensive forensic tests.

It is not just the Miller family who denies that the Israeli inquiry was thorough and comprehensive. So, too, does the coroner at the London inquest, who urged the British government to begin an international prosecution against the commander of the personnel carrier under the Geneva Conventions. So does the British government itself.

The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, raised the case last month with Israeli officials, including the defense and justice ministers. He also brought up another case, that of Tom Hurndall, 22, a British antiwar protester who was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier in February 2003, three weeks before and a mile away from where Mr. Miller died.

In Mr. Hurndall’s case, the soldier, Sgt. Taysir Hayb, is serving an eight-year sentence for manslaughter. Lord Goldsmith said he needed “to consider myself whether there ought to be prosecutions here in either of these cases.” He said he did not want to raise expectations but was keeping an open mind.

Speaking of the Miller case, a spokesman for the British Foreign Office, asking that his name not be used in accordance with government policy, said: “We have pressed the Israelis at every level, and at every stage, to agree to a full and transparent investigation. We are disappointed that the investigation wasn’t carried out properly and hasn’t resulted in an indictment, and that the I.D.F. has decided not to discipline the person alleged to have shot James Miller.” The initials stand for the Israeli military’s official name, the Israeli Defense Forces.

Accounts of what happened diverged almost from the moment Mr. Miller was shot.

It was late at night in the ruined town of Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, and Mr. Miller was concluding his third visit for the film.

He specialized in documentaries about the downtrodden and the oppressed; his past work included “Beneath the Veil” (2001), about the war in Afghanistan, which won Emmy and Peabody awards; “Children of the Secret State” (2000), about famine in North Korea; and “Armenia: The Betrayed” (2002), about the massacres of Armenians in 1915.

Mr. Miller and his colleagues had spent the evening at a Palestinian house, filming Israeli bulldozers knocking down Palestinian buildings.

Two Israeli armored personnel carriers were in the area, investigating reports that a Palestinian tunnel under the Egyptian border was being used to smuggle weapons into Gaza.

The vehicles were fired on during the day, and the soldiers responded in kind. By 11 p.m. or so, things were quiet. The filmmakers decided to call it a night.

Wearing flak jackets and hats marked “TV,” waving a white cloth in the air that they illuminated with a flashlight and shouting that they were British journalists seeking to leave the area safely, Mr. Miller and two colleagues, Saira Shah and Abdul Rahman Abdullah, slowly walked toward one of the armored personnel carriers. But suddenly, according to Ms. Shah and Mr. Abdallah, a shot rang out close by.

A warning, they said they thought. They dropped to the ground. Thirteen seconds passed. Then there was a second shot. It hit Mr. Miller.

He lost consciousness almost immediately and was pronounced dead at an Israeli base. His wife, Sophy, at home with their children, then 3 and 1, and expecting her husband the next day, woke up to a phone call from a distraught Ms. Shah.

Soon it was all over the news. But while Mr. Miller’s colleagues said he had been shot in the front of the neck from the direction of one of the Israeli vehicles, the Israelis initially gave a different account. Mr. Miller walked into an exchange of gunfire, they said, and was hit in the back by a Palestinian bullet.

The next day, the Miller family dispatched Chris Cobb-Smith, a security expert and British Army veteran, to Gaza to investigate.

“The emphasis had to be on us to do the proper investigations, because it was obvious that the I.D.F. was not going to conduct their investigation with any impartiality,” said Mr. Cobb-Smith, whose examination of footprints, tank tracks and traces of blood and bullet holes, among other things, led him to conclude that the shot that had killed Mr. Miller had come from an Israeli vehicle.

He said no one from the Israeli Army had interviewed him about his findings. One of the most important pieces of evidence was a grainy video taken by an Associated Press Television News cameraman from the balcony of the building that Mr. Miller had just left. Seven intermittent shots can be clearly heard on the audio, 13 seconds apart, then 12, then 5, then 15, then 5, then 12.

“These shots were not fired by a soldier in response to incoming fire,” Mr. Cobb-Smith said. “They were slow and calculated and deliberate.” He added, “I have no doubt that it was cold-blooded murder.”

Interviewed at home in rural Braunton, Devon, Mrs. Miller said her husband had worked in hostile environments for 14 years and was known for his extreme caution. She says she has fought so hard not just for her husband, but because she is disturbed at what she sees as the lack of accountability in the Israeli Army in this and other cases.

The Israelis now agree that Mr. Miller was indeed shot in the neck, from the front. But they say there is no evidence that M-16 bullet fragments recovered from his body match the guns of any Israeli soldiers in the area.

And after analyzing the audiotape of the gunfire, an Israeli expert concluded that the first two shots had come from “an urban area” — from the direction of populated Rafah — rather than the Israeli vehicles. Mr. Miller was killed by the second shot.

“The evidence from the military investigation concluded that there was no involvement of I.D.F. soldiers in the killing of James Miller,” Colonel Modzgvrishvily said. “When talking about the death of innocent civilians it is of course very tragic, but unfortunately it is the nature of war.”

Freddy Mead, a British ballistics expert sent by the family, likewise could not link the bullet that killed Mr. Miller to any particular weapon. But Mr. Cobb-Smith said that conclusion was meaningless because of the delay in seizing the soldiers’ weapons and the lack of a credible chain of evidence in the investigation.

The army’s 94-page report shows that the investigation focused almost immediately on the commander of one of the Israeli personnel carriers, the only one who fired his weapon around the time Mr. Miller died.

But although the commander, identified in the report as First Lt. H., gave conflicting accounts in six separate interviews of when and why he had fired, he was adamant — as was every other soldier — that they could neither see nor hear the Britons approaching.

Mr. Miller’s colleagues disputed that, saying the soldiers knew they had been filming from the balcony and had taunted them from their vehicles. The evening was clear, they said; the soldiers had night-vision equipment.

The military’s judge advocate general recommended that the commander, who has since been identified by the Miller family as First Lt. Hib al-Heib, be disciplined for improperly using his weapon. But the recommendation was rejected.

The London inquest, held as is the custom in Britain when a citizen dies in violent circumstances abroad, took place this spring. The coroner, Dr. Andrew Reid, criticized Israel for not participating and joined Mr. Miller’s family in calling for the British government to consider an international prosecution of the Israeli soldier. The Millers have filed a civil suit in Israel.

Anne Waddington, Mr. Miller’s older sister, said that while the jury’s conclusion was reassuring, it was not enough.

“We’ve struggled for three years to put the pieces of this tragic jigsaw together,” she said in an interview. “We have all pursued justice all of our lives, and James was the biggest and best of all in doing that. For the circumstances of his death to be treated with such disdain by the Israelis is something we cannot forgive.”

After Mr. Miller died, his colleagues finished the film, with an ending he had never envisioned: his own killing. Its title was “Death in Gaza,” and it won a host of awards, including three Emmys.

UPDATED, 18th June: A follow-up report from HRW and an investigation by the Guardian, that cast further doubt on the Israeli military’s “investigation” of itself, can both be found at the end of this report.

Human Rights Watch report: “Israel: Investigate Gaza Beach Killings”

Artillery Strike Probably Killed Palestinian Family

(Gaza City, June 13, 2006) – Israel should immediately launch an independent, impartial investigation of a June 9 Israeli artillery strike on a beach north of Gaza City, Human Rights Watch said today. Seven Palestinian civilians picnicking on the beach were killed that day and dozens of others were wounded.

Human Rights Watch researchers have visited the site to examine the fatal crater and have interviewed victims, witnesses, security and medical staff.

“There has been much speculation about the cause of the beach killings, but the evidence we have gathered strongly suggests Israeli artillery fire was to blame,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “It is crucial that an independent investigative team, with the necessary expertise, verify the facts in a transparent manner.”

The independent investigation should involve the use of external, international experts. Human Rights Watch called on the Palestinian Authority to permit such an investigation, including allowing access to the site by the investigative team. Israel has carried out an internal army probe into the incident and released its findings this evening, saying the explosion was not caused by an Israeli artillery shell. However, such internal investigations by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have generally fallen short of international standards for thorough and impartial investigations and have rarely uncovered the truth or held to account the perpetrators of violations, as documented in a 2005 Human Rights Watch report, Promoting Impunity: The Israeli Military’s Failure to Investigate Wrongdoing.

The head of the IDF’s southern command, General Yoav Galant, has said that IDF forces fired six artillery shells at an area described as approximately 250 meters away from the fatal incident between 4:32 p.m. and 4:51 p.m. on Friday, June 9. Human Rights Watch investigations indicate that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the allegations that the civilians were killed by artillery shells fired by the IDF.

The attack at the beach comes amidst an intensified Israeli response to Qassam rocket attacks by Palestinian armed groups operating in the area. Human Rights Watch, which is also investigating the use of Qassams against Israeli civilians, has previously called on Palestinian armed groups to cease such unlawful attacks. The Qassam attacks violate international law because they fail to discriminate between military targets and civilians. Qassam rockets are highly imprecise, homemade weapons that are incapable of being targeted at specific objects.

Human Rights Watch researchers currently in Gaza interviewed victims, witnesses, Palestinian security officers and doctors who treated the wounded after the incident. They also visited the site of the explosion, where they found a large piece of unoxidized jagged shrapnel, stamped “155mm,” which would be consistent with an artillery shell fired by the IDF’s M-109 Self-Propelled Artillery.

Human Rights Watch spoke to the Palestinian explosive ordnance disposal unit who investigated three craters on the beach, including the one where the civilians were killed. According to General Salah Abu `Azzo, head of the Palestinian unit, they also gathered and removed shrapnel fragments consistent with 155mm artillery shells.

Eyewitnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch described between five and six explosions on the beach between 4:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., the time frame when the IDF fired artillery onto the beach and when the seven civilians were killed. Two survivors said they heard the sound of an incoming projectile and saw a blur of motion in the sky before the explosion that killed the seven civilians. Residents of northern Gaza are familiar with the sounds of regular artillery fire.

Doctors also confirmed to Human Rights Watch researchers that the injuries from the attack, which were primarily to the head and torso, are consistent with the heavy shrapnel of artillery shells used by the IDF. Doctors said the shrapnel they removed from Palestinian patients in Gaza was of a type that comes from an artillery shell.

According to readings from a Global Positioning Satellite taken by Human Rights Watch, the crater where the victims were killed was within the vicinity of the other artillery craters created by the IDF’s June 9 artillery attack and was the same shape and size. One crater was 100 meters away from the fatal crater, and the rest were 250 to 300 meters away.

Some Israeli officials have suggested the explosion may have been caused by a mine placed by Palestinian militants, rather than one of their artillery shells, despite the fact that they cannot account for the final landing place of one of their six shells.

However, according to on-site investigations by Human Rights Watch, the size of the craters and the type of injuries to the victims are not consistent with the theory that a mine caused the explosion. The craters are too large to be made by bounding mines, the only type of landmines capable of producing head and torso injuries of the type suffered by the victims on June 9. Additionally, Palestinian armed groups are not known to have, or to have used, bounding mines; the Palestinian government bomb squad said it has never uncovered a bounding mine in any explosive incident.

Since its September 2005 pullout from Gaza, the IDF has regularly struck northern Gaza with artillery shelling, in response to Qassam rocket attacks from the area by Palestinian armed groups. In the last 10 months, Israel has admitted to firing more than 5,000 artillery shells into the area. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs puts the number at 5,700 IDF shells fired since the end of March 2005.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, IDF artillery fire has killed 47 Palestinians, including 11 children and five women, and injured 192 others since September 2005. It has also damaged dozens of homes in northern Gaza.

Human Rights Watch researchers visiting the area say almost every house on the periphery of areas of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia in northern Gaza has holes in it indicative of Israeli artillery shrapnel. In a June 10 interview with the New York Times, General Aviv Kochavi, the Israeli commander for the south, indicated that the purpose of the artillery shelling is to deter future attacks and punish area residents: “The message we are trying to convey, you can call it deterrence, but it’s ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there is an equivalence: so long as you shoot qassams at us, we’ll shoot at you.’”

International law requires attacking forces to distinguish between soldiers and civilians, targeting only the former. It prohibits indiscriminate attacks, which use a method or means of warfare that cannot distinguish between the two groups. It also prohibits disproportionate attacks in which the civilian harm outweighs military necessity.

“The IDF has a legal duty to do everything feasible to verify that targets are military objectives and to avoid civilian deaths,” Whitson said. “The investigation should determine how the beach picnickers died and whether international law was violated. If that’s the case, it must consider how best to compensate the victims and how to prevent future deaths.”

Human Rights Watch researchers have been in Sderot and Gaza on a fact-finding mission documenting the impact of Palestinian Qassam fire from Gaza into Israel and Israeli artillery shelling into northern Gaza. In Israel, the team was in Sderot when the town was hit by two Palestinian Qassams on Thursday, June 8, and also witnessed two more Qassams hitting Nativ Ha’asara the same day; there were no apparent injuries as a result of those attacks. Since Human Rights Watch’s visit to the Western Negev, the Israeli media has reported that 54 Qassam rockets have been fired at Sderot. According to news reports, on Sunday one rocket seriously wounded Yonatan Engel, a 60-year-old resident of Sderot.

Eyewitness Accounts

According to witnesses, the Ghalya family went to the beach on June 9 for a family outing. After shells fell nearby, the father, `Ali, hurriedly gathered his family together and called for a car. An explosion then occurred in the middle of the family group.

“Their legs I could see inside. Their intestines I could see spilling out,” said Mohammed Sawarka, 28, who rushed to the scene to help. “A 1-month-old child was dead inside its carriage.” He also found a hand in the sand. Doctors at the Shifa Hospital corroborated this testimony.

Amani Ghalya, 22, suffered severe abdominal injuries and lost her arm. Her sister, Latifa, 7, has brain damage. Both were still in the intensive care unit on Sunday, June 11. Their mother Hamdia, 40, `Ali’s second wife, suffered a compound fracture and lost a chunk of flesh in her arm. She also pointed to shrapnel wounds to her abdomen and upper leg.

The family members killed in the attack, and their ages, were: `Ali `Isa Ghalya, 49; Ra’issa Ghalya, 35; Haitham Ghalya, 1; Hanadi Ghalya, 2; Sabrin Ghalya, 4; Ilham Ghalya, 15; and `Alia Ghalya, 17.

Shrapnel from the blast also pierced a nearby car where Hani Radwan Azanin’s daughters Nagham, 4, and Dima, 7, were hiding. They suffered serious injuries to their backs and arms. Human Rights Watch visited the car and found multiple shrapnel holes and a piece of shrapnel.

“All of the patients are suffering from multiple injuries. There was massive destruction of bone, muscle, skin,” said Dr. Nabil Al-Shawa of Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, who treated some of the victims. The research team took photographs of some of the survivors, available on the Human Rights Watch website.

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Israel: More Evidence on Beach Killings Implicates IDF

Palestinians Agree to Independent Inquiry

(Gaza, June 15, 2006) – A digitally dated and time-stamped blood test report of a victim treated at a Palestinian hospital that admitted wounded from the June 9 killings on a Gaza beach suggests that the attack took place during the time period of an Israeli artillery attack, Human Rights Watch said today. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have denied responsibility for the killings, saying that although they fired six artillery shells onto the beach between 4:32 p.m. and 4:51 p.m., the fatal incident must have occurred after that.

Human Rights Watch first challenged this conclusion, concluding that the IDF most likely caused the killings, in a press release based on an investigation by its researchers in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch researchers examined the computer-generated record from the Kamal Adwan hospital, which documents the blood test of a victim from the beach incident being taken at 5:12 p.m. on June 9. Furthermore, hand-written hospital records log patients from the incident as having been admitted starting at 5:05 p.m. If the records are accurate, based on the time needed to dispatch an ambulance and drive from the hospital to the beach and back, this suggests that the fatal explosion took place at a time when the IDF said it was firing artillery rounds. Both sets of records also directly call into question the account of the IDF that ambulances did not reach the beach until 5:15 p.m. that day.

Altering the records would require re-setting the computer’s clock and re-writing pages of the hospital’s admissions log. Human Rights Watch researchers said that the pages they saw documented patients un-related to the beach incident, followed by two pages of victims from the beach. The first of those were admitted at 5:05 p.m. The researchers saw no evidence that the times might have been altered.

Israeli military officials have also suggested the explosion, which killed seven members of the Ghalya family and wounded many others, might have been caused by a mine. But Human Rights Watch researchers also examined blood-crusted shrapnel given to them by the father of a 19-year-old male who suffered abdominal wounds in the beach explosion. They determined that the shrapnel is a piece of fuse from an artillery shell.

“The likelihood that the Ghalya family was killed by an explosive other than one of the shells fired by the IDF is remote,” said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. “This new evidence highlights the urgent need for Israel to permit an independent, transparent investigation into the beach killings.”

Human Rights Watch received a fax today from the office of Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, saying that the president’s office, which is holding much of the shrapnel removed from the blast victims, would cooperate and share evidence with an independent inquiry team.

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Who really killed Huda Ghalia’s family?

Guardian investigation undermines military claim that Israeli shells could not have been responsible for death of girl’s family

Chris McGreal in Beit Lahia, Friday June 16, 2006, The Guardian

Heartrending pictures of 10-year-old Huda Ghalia running wildly along a Gaza beach crying “father, father, father” and then falling weeping beside his body turned the distraught girl into an instant icon of the Palestinian struggle even before she fully grasped that much of her family was dead.

But the images of the young girl who lost her father, step-mother and five of her siblings as picnicking families fled a barrage of Israeli shells a week ago have become their own battleground.

Who and what killed the Ghalia family, and badly maimed a score of other people, has been the subject of an increasingly bitter struggle for truth all week amid accusations that a military investigation clearing the army was a cover-up, that Hamas was really responsible and even that the pictures of Huda’s grief were all an act.

However, a Guardian investigation into the sequence of events raises new and so far unanswered questions about the Israeli military probe that cleared the army of responsibility. Evidence from hospital records, doctors’ testimony and witness accounts challenges the military’s central assertion that it had stopped shelling by the time seven members of the Ghalia family were killed.

In addition, fresh evidence from the US group Human Rights Watch, which offered the first forensic questioning of the army’s account, casts doubt on another key claim – that shrapnel taken from the wounded was not from the kind of artillery used to shell Gaza.

The pictures of Huda’s traumatic hunt for her father garnered instant sympathy around the world and focused unwelcome attention for Israel on its tactic of firing thousands of shells into Gaza over recent weeks, killing more than 20 civilians, to deter Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli towns.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, initially apologised for the killings but the military swiftly realised it was confronting another PR disaster to rival that of the killing of Mohammed al-Dura, the 12-year-old boy who died in his father’s arms amid a barrage of gunfire six years ago and became the first iconic victim of the intifada.

Conflicting accounts

The army quickly convened a committee to investigate the deaths on the beach and almost as swiftly absolved itself of responsibility.

The committee acknowledged the army fired six shells on and around Beit Lahia beach from artillery inside Israel. But it said that by coincidence a separate explosion – probably a mine planted by Hamas or a buried old shell ó occurred in the same area at about the same time, killing the family.

The army admitted that one of the six shells was unaccounted for but said it was “impossible”, based on location and timings, for the sixth shell to have done the killing. The investigation also concluded that shrapnel taken from some of the wounded was not from artillery used that day.

The military declared its version of events definitive and an end to the matter. Others went further and saw a Palestinian conspiracy. An American pro-Israel pressure group, Camera, which seeks to influence media coverage, went so far as to suggest that the film of Huda Ghalia’s trauma was faked: “Were the bodies moved, was the girl asked to re-enact her discovery for the camera, was the video staged?”

But the army’s account quickly came in for criticism, led by a former Pentagon battlefield analyst, Marc Garlasco, investigating the deaths for Human Rights Watch.

“You have the crater size, the shrapnel, the types of injuries, their location on the bodies. That all points to a shell dropping from the sky, not explosives under the sand,” he said. “I’ve been to hospital and seen the injuries. The doctors say they are primarily to the head and torso. That is consistent with a shell exploding above the ground, not a mine under it.”

Mr Garlasco produced shrapnel from the site apparently marked as a 155mm shell used by the army that day.

Timing a key issue

The key part of the military’s defence hinged on timings. It says it fired the six shells toward the beach between 4.30pm and 4.48pm, and that the artillery barrage stopped nine minutes before the explosion that killed the Ghalia family.

The military concluded that the deadly explosion occurred between 4.57pm and 5.10pm based on surveillance of the beach by a drone that shows people relaxing until just before 5pm and the arrival of the first ambulance at 5.15pm.

Major General Meir Kalifi, who headed the army’s investigation committee, said the nine-minute gap is too wide for Israel to have been responsible for the deaths. “I can without doubt say that no means used by the Israeli defence force during this time period caused the incident,” he said.

But hospital admissions records, testimony from doctors and ambulance men and eyewitness accounts suggest that the military has got the timing of the explosion wrong, and that it occurred while the army was still shelling the beach.

Palestinian officials also question the timing of video showing people relaxing on the beach undisturbed just before 5pm if the army, by its own admission, was dropping shells close by in the previous half an hour.

Several of those who survived the explosion say it came shortly after two or three other blasts consistent with a pattern of shells falling on the beach.

Among the survivors was Hani Asania. When the shelling began, he grabbed his daughters – Nagham, 4, and Dima, 7 – and moved toward his car on the edge of the beach. The Ghalia family was gathered on the sand nearby awaiting a taxi.

“There was an explosion, maybe 500 metres away. Then there was a second, much closer, about two minutes later. People were running from the beach. I carried my girls and put them in the car but I forgot my mobile phone and I ran back to get it,” said Mr Asania.

“Maybe two minutes later there was a third shell. I could feel the pressure of the blast on my face it was so strong. I saw pieces of people. I looked at my car and my girls were screaming.”

This sequence is backed by others including Huda’s brother, Eyham, 20.

Annan Ghalia, Huda’s uncle, called an ambulance.

“We were sitting on the sand waiting for the taxis, the men on one side and the women on the other. The shell landed closer to the girls,” he said. “I was screaming for people to help us. No one was coming. After about two minutes I called the ambulance on my mobile phone.”

The first ambulance took children to the Kamal Odwan hospital. Its registration book records that five children wounded in the blast were admitted at 5.05pm. The book contains entries before and after the casualties from the beach, all of whom are named, and shows no sign of tampering.

The hospital’s computer records a blood test taken from a victim at 5.12pm. Human Rights Watch said altering the records would require re-setting the computer’s clock.

The distance from the beach to the hospital is 6km. Even at speed, the drive through Beit Lahia’s crowded back streets and rough roads would not take less than five minutes and would be slower with badly wounded patients on board.

Dr Bassam al-Masri, who treated the first wounded at Kamal Odwan, said allowing for a round trip of at least 10 minutes and time to load them, the ambulance would have left the hospital no later than 4.50pm – just two minutes after the Israelis say they stopped shelling.

Factoring in additional time for emergency calls and the ambulances to be dispatched, the timings undermine the military’s claim that the killer explosion occurred after the shelling stopped.

A second Beit Lahia hospital, the Alwada, also received a call for ambulances. Doctors say records were completed after treating the patients so they have no written account of timings.

But the first ambulance man to leave the hospital, and a doctor summoned to work, say they have a clear recollection of the time. The ambulance driver, Khaled Abu Sada, said he received a call from the emergency control room between 4.45 and 4.50pm.

“I went to look for a nurse to come with me but he couldn’t because there had been a shooting in a family feud and he was treating people,” he said. “I left the hospital at 4.50pm and was at the beach by 5pm.”

The Alwada’s anaesthetist, Dr Ahmed Mouhana, was woken by a call from a fellow doctor calling him to the hospital.

“I looked at the time. That’s what you do when someone wakes you up. It was 4.55pm. Dr Nasser couldn’t tell me what was going on so I called Abu Jihad [Mr Abu Sada] and asked him. He said he didn’t know but I should get to the hospital quickly as it sounded bad,” he said.

Mr Abu Sada remembers receiving the call while driving to the beach. Dr Mouhana left for the hospital immediately.

“It only takes 10 minutes from my house so I was there by 5.10pm or 5.15pm at the latest. I went to reception and they had already done triage on the children,” he said.

If the hospital records and medical professionals are right, then the emergency call from the beach could not have come in much later than 4.45pm, still during the Israeli shelling.

From the number of shells counted beforehand by the survivors, Mr Garlasco, the former Pentagon analyst, believes the killer shell was one the army records as being fired at 4.34pm.

A military spokesman, Captain Jacob Dalal, said the army stood by its interpretation of timings.

Military investigators said shrapnel taken from wounded Palestinians treated in Israeli hospitals was not from 155mm shells fired that day.

“We know it’s not artillery,” said Capt Dalal. “We donít know what it is. It could be a shell of another sort or some other device.”

The military has suggested that the explosion was rigged by Hamas against possible army landings but Palestinian officials say that would only be an effective strategy if there were a series of mines or Hamas knew exactly where the Israelis would land.

Mr Garlasco said the metal taken from the victims may be detritus thrown up by the explosion or shards from cars torn apart by shrapnel. He said shrapnel collected at the site of the explosion by Human Rights Watch and the Palestinian police was fresh and from artillery shells.

The former Pentagon analyst said that after examining a blood-encrusted piece of shrapnel given to him by the father of a 19-year-old man wounded in the beach explosion, he determined it was a piece of fuse from an artillery shell.

“The likelihood that the Ghalia family was killed by an explosive other than one of the shells fired by the Israeli army is remote,” he said.

Capt Dalal defended the army’s investigation.

“We’re not trying to cover-up anything. We didn’t do the investigation to exonerate ourselves. If it was our fire, we’ll say it,” he said.

Military account

4.30 to 4.48pm: Six shells fired at beach
4.57pm: Video drone records calm on beach
4.57 to 5.10pm: Explosion kills Ghalia family
5.15pm: Drone records arrival of first ambulance

Eyewitness account

4.30 to 4.40pm: Two shells hit the beach
4.40 to 4.45pm: Explosion kills Ghalia family
4.45 to 4.50pm: Ambulance man receives emergency call
4.50pm: Ambulance leaves hospital for beach
4.55pm: Palestinian doctor called to hospital
5.05pm; First casualties arrive at hospital
5.12pm: Hospital computer records blood test of beach casualty

Public Statement, 12 June 2006

Amnesty International is calling on Israel to end immediately its reckless shelling and air strikes against the Gaza Strip, which have killed and injured scores of unarmed Palestinians, including several women and children, in recent months.

In the latest such attack on the afternoon of 9 June 2006, seven members of the same Palestinian family were killed and ten of other civilians were injured when Israeli forces fired several artillery shells at a beach in the North of the Gaza Strip. The beach was crowded with Palestinian families enjoying the first week-end of the school holidays.

Ali Issa Ghalia, his wife Raissa and their five children – a one-year-old son and four daughters aged two, four, 15 and 17 – were killed and other members of their family, including two children, were injured when an Israeli shell landed where they were sitting. Some 30 other civilians, including a dozen children, sitting nearby were also injured in the blast.

Amnesty International urges the Israeli authorities to ensure that the investigation they have reportedly launched is thorough and impartial, that the findings are made public, that those responsible for the lethal shelling of unarmed civilians are brought to justice, and that measures are put in place without delay to prevent any recurrence of such killings.

The seven members of the Ghalia family were the most recent among a growing number of victims of increasingly frequent and disproportionate Israeli attacks against the Gaza Strip.

Seven-year-old Hadeel Ghaben was killed when an Israeli artillery shell landed on her house in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia on 10 April. Her mother and her eight brothers and sisters, all of them children, and two other children from the neighbourhood were also injured in the attack.

In another attack, on 19 May, a missile fired by Israeli forces at a vehicle travelling on a busy street in Gaza City killed and injured six members of the Aman family. Seven-year-old Muhand, his mother Na’ima and his grandmother Hanan were killed and his four-year-old sister Mariya and his uncle Nahed were left paralysed.

Since the end of March, Israeli forces have fired some 6,000 artillery shells and more than 80 missiles into the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places in the world.

According to Israeli officials the intensive shelling and air strikes are in response to the firing of more than 200 home-made rockets (qassams) into the South of Israel by Palestinian armed groups operating within the Gaza Strip. These rockets, which Palestinian armed groups claim are fired in response to Israeli attacks, are indiscriminate and endanger civilian life. Although, in practice, such rockets have almost always fallen into open spaces, one rocket fired on 11 June injured three Israeli civilians. Amnesty International reiterates its call on the Palestinian Authority to prevent further such rocket or other attacks by Palestinian armed groups against Israeli civilians.

Since the beginning of 2006 Israeli forces have killed more than 130 Palestinians, many of them unarmed and including more than 20 children. In the same period 16 Israelis, two of them children, have been killed by Palestinian armed groups.

While Israeli officials contend that soldiers only open fire when their lives are at risk and only respond to the source of Palestinian fire, the large number of unarmed Palestinians, including more than 600 children, killed by Israeli forces in the past five and a half years indicates otherwise.

Israeli authorities have expressed regret for some of the killings of Palestinian civilians – usually in cases which attract international media attention – claiming they occurred as a result of mistakes. Yet the Israeli authorities, who are responsible for the conduct of their armed forces, are fully aware that the use of certain weapons and munitions in such situations invariably results in the killing or injuring of bystanders, including children.

Many killings of Palestinians in reckless shootings, tank shelling and air strikes by Israeli forces have been unlawful. They have been carried out by Israeli forces pursuant to government policy, evidenced by the knowledge and approval of government authorities who are fully aware of the consequences of such practices.

Expressions of regret by the Israeli authorities ring hollow in the face of their continued failure to change their forces’ practices and to put in place the necessary safeguards to prevent such killings.

Amnesty International reiterates its call on the Israeli authorities to:

– take concrete measures to put an immediate end to reckless, random and disproportionate fire by Israeli forces;

– ensure that all killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces are promptly and independently investigated and that anyone found to be responsible for the unlawful killing of civilians is brought to justice.