“I have constant pain in my head, eyes and ears. I have been having nose bleeds for the past three years. I can still feel the shrapnel move inside my brain”
Amal al-Samouni (11) sitting in front of her house in Zeitoun neighborhood (Photo: Palestinian Center for Human Rights)
On 4 January 2009 at around 6:00 Israeli forces surrounded the house where Amal al-Samouni (11) and 18 members of her extended family were sheltering, in Zeitoun neighborhood east of Gaza City. Israeli soldiers ordered the owner of the house, Amal’s father Attia al-Samouni (37), to step outside with his hands up. Upon opening the door he was immediately killed by shots to the head and chest. Soldiers then started firing bullets into the house, killing Amal’s 4-year old brother Ahmad al-Samouni and injuring at least 4 other people, of whom 2 were children.
Over the following hours, soldiers ordered over 100 other members of the extended al-Samouni family into the house of Wa’el Fares Hamdi al-Samouni, Amal’s uncle. On 5 January 2009 Israeli forces directly targeted the house and its vicinity, killing 21 persons and injuring many others. Amal, who was inside, was wounded by shrapnel to the head and buried under the rubble, lying between injured, dying and deceased relatives. On 7 January ambulance personnel, who were prevented from entering the area until then, evacuated her to hospital.
Between 4-7 January 2009, 27 members of the Samouni family were killed, including 11 children and 6 women, and 35 others were injured, including Amal’s twin brother Abdallah.
Amal survived those 4 horrific days but is left with permanent injuries and trauma. “I remember my brother and father and how they were murdered in every moment,” says Amal as she thinks back on the attacks and the three days she spent buried under the rubble of her uncle’s house without food or water. Amal does not need a lot of words to express how she feels: “before, we used to live together as a happy family. Now I don’t feel happy anymore.”
Amal did not only lose her father; the family’s home was also destroyed by the army. “For one year we lived with the parents of my mother, in Gaza’s Shaja’iya neighborhood. Then we lived in a storage room for 1.5 years. It didn’t have a floor. There was just sand. Since 6 months we are living where our old house used to be. It is not even half the size of our old home. I didn’t want to return to our neighborhood because of what happened. My family didn’t want to either but we had no choice.” Like many other members of the al-Samouni family, Amal’s household now receives some help from relatives living in their neighborhood, but is still struggling to manage financially. The living conditions of Amal and her family have somewhat improved over time, although the house still lacks equipment like a refrigerator, washing machine, and a closet for the children’s clothing. Amal’s father, Attia, was a farmer. He grew vegetable crops on a rented plot, which used to provide the family income.
As the reconstruction of life and livelihoods continues in the al-Samouni neighborhood, Amal continues to struggle with her injuries. The pieces of shrapnel embedded in her brain cause her severe pains. “I have constant pain in my head, eyes and ears. I have been having nose bleeds for the past three years. I can still feel the shrapnel move inside my brain,” she says. Local doctors say it would be too dangerous to remove the pieces, but Amal cannot accept this quite yet. She has a strong wish to travel abroad to see a doctor. “I want to be sure about my situation and have another doctor look at my situation. I want to try everything possible to end my problem and pain. Other children are sometimes able to travel for fun. My wish is serious; I won’t travel for amusement but for medical treatment.”
The continuous pain has a profound impact on Amal’s mood, her relationship with her siblings, and her performance in school. “When I have a lot of pain I become nervous and angry.” Her mother Zeinat (38) adds that “she then easily becomes angry with her younger siblings and beats them. Recently she and I visited a hospital again to see how she could be helped. The doctor prescribed tramal [a sedative] but I will not allow her to take medicine like that.”
“When I am sad I go to my aunt’s house to see my cousins, or I prepare my books for school,” says Amal. “Before the war I was excellent in school. Now my scores are not so good anymore.” While speaking of her dropped scores Amal becomes very emotional. The teacher told her mother that Amal is not able to focus in class. This semester Amal failed two subjects. “I have pain in my eyes when I look at the blackboard,” Amal says, very upset. Despite her difficulties in school, Amal knows what she would like to study for: “when I am older I want to become a pediatrician and help to treat wounded people.”
PCHR submitted a criminal complaint to the Israeli authorities on behalf of the al-Samouni family on 8 May 2009. To-date, only an interlocutory response has been received, noting receipt of the complaint. Despite repeated requests, no further information has been received.
During Operation Cast Lead Israel committed massive war crimes for all the world to see. Among these crimes the use of White Phosphorus in densely populated areas, use of Depleted Uranium, bombing civilian targets of all sorts without military necessity, destroying civilian infrastructure with no military justification and the infamous massacre of the Samouni family… among many other crimes.
In the aftermath of Cast Lead, Justice Richard Goldstone, a Zionist Jew, was commissioned by the United Nations to write a report on the alleged war crimes. Although the report did not go nearly far enough in exposing the brutality of all the crimes committed, crimes committed by the fourth largest military in the world against a essentially defenceless and captive population, it did allege that Israel (and Hamas) was almost undoubtedly guilty of war crimes and possibly, crimes against humanity.
4 February 2011 | Nathan Stuckey, International Solidarity Movement Gaza
After spending six weeks waiting in Cairo I entered Gaza two weeks ago. I never would have guessed that Egypt would explode so soon after I left. Congratulations to the people of Egypt. The trip from Cairo to the border at Rafah was uneventful; we weren’t stopped at a single military checkpoint. The border was easy, no questions from the Egyptians and the Palestinians only wanted to know where I would be staying, what I would be doing, and how long I would be here. They were very friendly.
Life in Gaza has been a bit surreal so far. On the day I arrived the ISM moved to the new apartments by the harbor. I share a nice two bedroom with a great sun porch with Adie, a British ISMer. The women live upstairs in a rather nicer three bedroom. It is a little strange to live on my own in Palestine, in the past I had always lived with local families. It is in an area with a lot of foreigners. The local stores are relatively well stocked, but everything is quite expensive, so most people really can’t afford to buy anything.
Drones and F16’s can often be heard in the air overhead. Thankfully, since I arrived, there haven’t been any strikes that I know of. Gaza is densely populated but the streets are very quiet. Unemployment is brutally high because of the siege, few imports, and exports are impossible, so you don’t see many cars or people on the street. They don’t have jobs to go to, and they don’t have any money to shop with.
The apartment has a generator, so it took me a few days to realize just how often there is no electricity in Gaza. If you don’t have a generator there is electricity for less than half the day, and you never know when you will have it. As part of the siege on Gaza, Israel limits the amount of electricity supplied to the region, they also bombed Gaza’s power plant during Cast Lead, Israel’s last major assault on Gaza, which further restricts residents from producing their own electricity. Not having electricity when you want it is a real pain; it definitely lowers productivity. Today our landlord came by and said that because the tunnels from Egypt were closed supplies of gas for the generator will be quite limited. No more hot water or refrigerator when the generator is running.
My first task in Gaza was going with Adie to teach the Samouni children English. Many of you have probably heard the story of the Samouni family. During Cast Lead the Israeli army herded the family into a house, and then shelled the house. Ambulances were not permitted to help the wounded. Twenty six members of the Samouni family were killed. You can read a longer account of their story here. The children are really cute and really eager to learn. It really wasn’t until my second visit that I began to notice all that was wrong with the picture. So many of them have missing limbs, disabilities, and massive scars which you don’t immediately notice. Amal, whose name means hope, has recently started failing her classes. She used to be a very good student, but after the massacre she can’t concentrate, she still has shrapnel inside her head. The missing fathers aren’t just away at work, not all of the brothers and sisters you see in family pictures are with us today.
Later that week I visited a family in Khuzzaa. Our guide was a 21 year old university student named Shathem. Her father was recently kidnapped by Israel during an incursion. She lives at home with her mother and sisters. One of her sisters is getting married soon, so the house is a whirl of activity. Khuzzaa is right next to the buffer zone, and Shathem’s family lives on the edge of the village closest to the buffer zone. Israel has declared that no one is allowed to come within 300 meters of the border, this is the buffer zone, violating the buffer zone is likely to get you shot. Of course, the buffer zone is on Palestinian land, not Israeli land, similar to the wall in the West Bank-annexing Palestinian land for “security.”
Unfortunately for the villagers, not only has Israel banned them from going to much of their land, the soldiers are not really a very good judge of distance. 300 meters, 500 meters, one kilometer, apparently all of it looks about the same when you’re looking through the sights of your M16. In Khuzzaa, the school is on the edge of the newly declared buffer zone. The soldiers shoot at the school. We met a young woman who had been shot in the knee on her way to school one morning. Her neighbors have been forced to put giant stone shutters on their windows to stop the soldiers’ bullets from coming into their living room. The town has erected 20 foot tall concrete blocks on the streets that face the border to stop the soldier’s bullets from killing even more people.
Over the weekend we went down to Faraheen to help a farmer who lives by the buffer zone. Most of his land has been lost to the buffer zone. We joined Jabur, his wife Leila, their son, their five daughters, and assorted cousins in planting onions in a field next to the buffer zone. It is easy to forget just how much work farming can be, a full day of crouching while I transplanted onions left me with two very sore legs. All day long the IDF wandered up and down the border with their bulldozers, and giant armored trucks, thankfully they never crossed the border. We had lunch at the house by the onion field that Jabur had to abandon because it was too close to the buffer zone. He has since moved into town, too much shooting at his old house.
Jabur’s wife Leila walks with a pronounced limp. As is far too common, at first I didn’t really notice, then, I assumed that maybe she has arthritis or something. It wasn’t until the second day that I noticed just how severe it was. It turns out that during the first intifada she had come upon some Israeli soldiers beating local children for throwing stones. She tried to intervene to help the children and one of the soldiers shot her in the hip. Hearing Leila’s story I was reminded me of a recent article on one of the first videos to shock people with the brutality of the occupation, you can read the article at Ha’aretz, or watch the video below. I am in constant shock at the number of scars and wounds from the occupation you see here. Often, at first, I don’t notice, then someone moves, or some skin exposed, and the endemic violence of the occupation is in front of you again.
The next day it was raining in the morning, so instead of planting more onions I taught two of Jabur’s daughters English. They were very competitive; they kept trying to distract each other as soon as I asked a question so that they could be the first one to answer it. They study English in school, but there are 43 students in each class, so learning a language is rather difficult, they obviously do not get much time to speak. Their vocabulary and reading skills are quite good though. About noon, the rain stopped, so back to the fields to plant more onions. That evening we came back to Gaza City and home sweet home. Going home was probably a very good idea, because I spend the next couple of days sick.
The buffer zone might not seem like such a big deal, after all 300 meters isn’t very far is it? But 300 meters isn’t really 300 meters, farmers complain that the soldiers shoot at them from even a kilometer away, and anything closer than 500 is quite dangerous, because who knows were exactly 300 meters start, not you, and not the soldier doing the shooting. Gaza is only about 8 kilometers wide, so 500 meters is a significant chunk of land. It is a total disaster for farmers whose land is in the buffer zone. God help those whose homes are next to the buffer zone, or even worse in it.
I think the most surprising thing about Gaza so far has been how liberal it is. The levels of gender-based segregation are much lower than I expected. I am meeting, and talking to young women. This did not happen in the West Bank, and it did not happen much in Syria. I’m sure that part of this is that the families we are in contact with are more liberal than average, but the whole society seems much less conservative than I expected. You see women in the streets, in the stores, working, and in cafes smoking shisha.
Children of the Samouni family scrambling in the rubble of their Gaza homes days after they lost 29 family members in the 2009 bombings
When the story of the Samouni family of Zeytoun broke, news stations and media gathered to cover what was the epitome of the tragedy that hit Gaza during Operation Cast Lead – the Israeli military’s 3 week bombing and ground assault over the new year of 2009. The huge numbers of children left orphaned amidst the rubble on ’Samouni Street’ reached out to a worldwide audience. As is typical in Gaza, extended families are large and close; the Samounis, a family of mainly farm workers, numbered over a hundred and lived along an entire street. In just 3 days of intense Israeli bombing and shelling of their neighbourhood, they lost 29 family members as most of their houses were razed to the ground. The Samouni family deserves our attention, most of all for the resolve of the remaining family members and the ways they cope. The girls and boys now take care of each other, mothers and guardians at the age of ten or eleven.
I visit them twice weekly to teach English, and to play and draw with them. Originally just for 11 year old Mona Samouni, but now it’s a class of six and they’re keen to learn. Each time I walk the few hundred metres along Samouni Street I get an eerie feeling as I recall the television footage showing the air filled with dust around the rows of flattened houses, twisted metal wire, piles of broken breeze blocks with bits of clothes and school-books sticking out from under them. What flashbacks it evokes for families still living there I’ll never know.
But I’m not walking alone for long. Many children come and warmly take my hand, and we walk to the three story building at the end of the street. The only one left standing after the assault, it was forcibly evacuated by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) for use as a base. There I meet Mona Samouni. She is thoughtful, still very playful, and eager to talk English. I’d been introduced to her by a Gazan documentary maker following her story. She’d previously taken Jeremy Bowen around the ruins of her house in his BBC documentary ‘Gaza, Out of the Ruins’.
I don’t ask Mona about what happened to her a year and a half ago, but whenever we draw there is only one thing on her mind. She draws pictures of herself with her parents and brothers, with a big sun shining. Then she draws them motionless beside her in the rubble. Apart from cousins, uncles and aunts, she lost 3 brothers, a niece, and both parents.
Mona was one of over 100 members of the Samouni family to be rounded up by Israeli soldiers at the beginning of the assault and forced into Wael Samouni’s house. Throughout the night of January 4th munitions rained in on the Samouni’s area, and three Apache helicopter missiles or tank shells (depending on the report) struck the single floor house into which the Samounis had been corralled. 21 were killed and over 30 were injured. Eight more were killed in separate incidents: those fleeing the area did so against the orders and gunfire of watching soldiers who shouted, in classical Arabic, “Go back unto death.” They replied that they would carry on and “die on the road.” The Samounis suffered more dead during the 2 day attack than the total Israeli victims of rockets fired by militants over a period of 9 years. The issue of what happened on Samouni Street is no longer contentious; the family’s version has been corroborated by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nation’s Goldstone Report.
Mona Samouni drawing
The family’s first victim had been Mona’s Uncle Ateya al-Samouni, on January 4th. He had walked outside when Israeli troops started firing on his house and asking for the owner. With arms raised, ID in one hand and an Israeli driving license in the other, he was shot dead in front of his children. During the firing his 4 year old son Ahmad was severely injured and two others were shot. The Red Crescent ambulance that came for him – responding to one of 145 calls from the neighborhood – was barred from entering until January 7th. Ahmad died the next day, having been forbidden from leaving the Wael house.
12 year old Mahmoud and his 10 year old sister Amal are still haunted by the sight of their father shot as he walked out. Amal told us, “Our mother started to scream and cry. The soldiers came in and destroyed the furniture of the bedroom, set fire to the furniture in another room. We begged them not to shoot, we are kids please don’t shoot. Then they started to shoot. That’s when Ahmad, Farraj and Fauzi were also shot.” Their story is presented in the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary “Children of Gaza”.
13 year old Almaza Samouni remembers seeing her family piled on each other in the ruins of the bombed house, bleeding, with both her parents dead. Her story was covered in Al Jazeera’s, ’A Girl Called Jewel’
When the Red Crescent finally arrived in the Samouni’s area together with other family members, they found the entire street had been bulldozed. Picking through the rubble, an adult and two children were found alive in what remained of Wael’s house: Nafez Al Samouni whose wife thought he had died, 16 year old Ahmed Samouni and 10 year old Amal. Ahmed had been lying injured, unable to walk, curled among his dead mother and brothers. Like many other children, Amal and Ahmed have been left with mental and physical scars. Slivers of shrapnel remain permanently lodged in Amal’s brain, giving her headaches, nosebleeds and sight problems. Despite finally getting out of Gaza to receive treatment, Ramallah and Tel Aviv both told her there’s nothing that can be done for her.
Drawing by Mona Samouni
From the time I’ve spent with them, it’s clear the Samouni children have the courage to carry on. What surprised me was how little help was available for them; some still live in tents or asbestos shacks. Most of all though, I was shocked at how much the children have to fend for themselves – often when I teach, I don’t see an adult for my entire visit. For all the global media attention, and apart from occasional physiotherapy or counseling visits, there has been no replacement for their enormous loss. Literally nothing.
As the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights puts it, ’The attack on the Al-Samouni family was widely publicized . yet the survivors got no real help. What little they received has now stopped except for limited assistance from local organizations. The family now lives in deep poverty with no source of income, and no publicity about their plight.’
Fida Qishta, an independent Gazan documentary maker made a short and very moving film “Where Should the Birds Fly?” from footage she shot during Operation Cast Lead about Mona Samouni and what happened to her family. In it, while walking through the ruins of her home, Mona recited a verse by the Palestinian writer, Lutfi Yassini:
I’m the Palestinian child,
I carried the grief early,
All the world forgot me,
They closed their eyes of my oppression,
I’m steadfast,
I’m steadfast.
Fortunately, through another fearless Mona from Gaza, a grass-roots Palestinian group working closely with an international partner would provide some respite. Their work put to shame the many who closed their eyes and forgot Mona and the other Samouni children.
Doctor Mona El Farra and the Middle East Childrens Alliance
When the older Ahmed Samouni asked me if I could organize some summer schooling for the Samouni children I initially tried the United Nations Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA). Although from a poor neighbourhood, and with much of their life and homes in ruin after the bombing, the Samounis were not eligible for help. This was because unlike most Gazans, they were not a refugee family forced out of pre-48 Palestine by the then nascent Israeli army.
Samouni children Mona and Amal (centre) with Dr Mona El Farra
So I spoke to Dr Mona El Farra, a Gazan Dermatologist who has been tenaciously dedicated to health, children and women’s issues in Gaza for over 20 years since she began as a volunteer with the Red Crescent Society. She is the Projects Director for the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) and I knew about her work with MECA through its Gaza partner organisation Afaq Jadeeda, or ’New Horizons’, where I also teach.
A remarkably resolute woman, Doctor Mona is involved in many grass-roots organizations throughout Gaza that provide the vulnerable with support. Originally from Khan Younis in Southern Gaza, her work continues to be with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and with MECA, who most recently funded the ’New Horizons’ psychosocial support program “Let the Children Play and Heal”. Last year the program reached over a hundred thousand children, helping to address their psychological needs after the 2009 Israeli attacks on Gaza through expression and participation in art, dance, music, story-telling, theatre and puppetry.
Once they heard of the situation with the Samouni children, Dr Mona and New Horizons Coordinator Ehab Abu Msalam immediately visited them to hear of Ahmed’s desire for an educational project.
“So we had this idea to teach them 6th grade primary school classes” Says Ehab,“to give them support in the most important subjects: Arabic, English language and Mathematics.”
Over 100 Samouni Children were taught in the ‘Learning on the Rubble’ Tent set up on Samouni Street
They acted fast. It took only days for New Horizons to have set up the month long ’Learning on the Rubble’, marquee classrooms at the end of Samouni Street. Operating four days a week, they taught, provided meals and organised trips for over 120 children from the area. Some of the older children like Mona Samouni helped organise the younger kids.
“We decided to call it ’Learning on the Rubble’, said Dr Mona,”because all that you see of the area is the ruins of houses, people living in tents. We thought it was important to give it that name despite what had happened, to show that the desire and willingness of people to live and to come up from the ruins is stronger than death.“
When I visited, the bright green marquee next to Mona’s house was a hive of activity; hands up in the classrooms, singing and physical games in the activity room, with some other kids handing out boxes of drinks and sandwiches.
I asked Dr Mona about how they managed to organize such a well tailored programme so quickly.“I went to visit” she said,“I had a meeting with the families there, asked about their needs. They were worried about the children’s missed education because of the trauma – losing your father or mother or both is a severe trauma – and I wondered how many years it would take them to get back to normal. So I quickly gathered the team from New Horizons, and spoke to MECA, who work with children all over the Middle East. On the one hand, the speed comes from our grass-roots work, the experience of many years, getting the trust of people inside and outside of Gaza. Equally MECA trusts the work of their Palestinian partners, were supportive enough to offer the funding immediately so we could cross the bureaucratic lines and set up before Ramadan and school begins.”
“The classes are educational but also fun, open air, mixing formal education with informal classes. The program also helped to fund 6 teachers who were willing to carry on as volunteers such was the warmth they had received from the Samouni children. This is the beauty of it; we are able to get volunteers in difficult circumstances because people see the value of the work, empowerment and participation being at the core of our philosophy over dependency and charity. I visited the place three or four times and every time I had a great feeling about the program.”
And the children? Most that I saw were excited, showing a terrific keenness to learn, cherishing the opportunity before them.“We are happy with our classes because it’s important to know how to read and how to write, we must have a good education in order to continue to struggle for our land that was taken away”, said 10 year old Mohammed Samouni.“We learned mathematics, English, and Arabic to be better in school. We hope these classes can continue.” Said Amal.
According to Ehab, it was also an opportunity to understand the real needs of the children:
“Children feel afraid in this place because every one of them has something lost here, so you’ll see that they want to be near you to have more safety, so we tried to give them what we could and we helped them to know how they can help themselves.”
Without question the most fun was had on the daytrips, with over 100 of the Samounis and some other local families brought in on coaches to a beach resort – a day dedicated to fun. They went in boats, had a great time in the sea, participated in some of the magic, singing and puppet shows before food and refreshments arrived.“We swam and were very happy with this trip and it’s very important to have a day like this playing and being more happy”, said Maysaa Samouni 11 years old.
Majdy performing magic tricks for the Samouni Children
One of the volunteers and magician, Majdy, said,“We are happy to work to help all the Palestinian children who want help – not just the Samouni family, that’s what we must do. We ask everyone around the world and all of organizations to do the same thing to help the children in Palestine and Gaza.”
But Dr Mona added that dealing with such trauma needs a lot more than what they could offer in this short time: “The importance is in the follow up for the children which involves a lot of effort, one month is not enough. We need to try again and again to follow up. For this we don’t need huge amounts of money. We need the will, having grass roots communications, the vision and knowledge on how to invest the money in the best way – that’s how it started.”
“Those children need love and sympathy and care and despite their smiling faces there’s a lot of stories of horror and agony they’ve passed through. We’re trying to let them heal. Let them forget. I’m not sure they’ll be able to forgive. Because what happened was a crime against humanity and against the civilian families who lived there.”
Drawing by Mona Samouni
For someone so young, Mona Samouni has reflected a lot on how to articulate her loss, her words and drawings full of thought and clarity. When I asked Mona what message she had to give to children in Western countries, she said:
“My message is to show as much love as you can to your parents, because I lost my parents and I am not able to care for them anymore.”
The caring and outward nature of the message epitomized the way the kids had not yet succumbed to the introspection and bitterness such a loss could bring about. What shines through when we see them is the support they have for each other in the absence of so many parental figures, the open hands they hold on to us with when we visit. My English classes often descend into an Arabic class for me, interspersed with hiding behind sofas and cat and donkey impressions.
A lot more is required from us in Western countries to help alleviate some of the pain caused by our government’s policies, and most importantly to ensure that Palestinian families like the Samounis never have to go through this again. Doctor Mona El Farra’s message to the world is an important reminder that what is happening to Palestinians is not a humanitarian issue, but a continuing wrong that can only be addressed when people on the outside begin to understand it:
“I want people to try to learn about us and try to learn that there is an injustice that has been imposed on the Palestinian people. Not just because of the siege, but for what has been going on for more than 60 years since Israel was founded on the ruins of Palestinian refugees. We are looking and working for peace despite the difficult circumstances – but peace without justice is not peace.”
Donations for Zeinat Samouni
We are raising money to help rebuild and improve the house of Zeinat Samouni, 11 year old Amal’s widowed mother. Since her husband and son were killed in the bombing she continues to live in a single room alone with her 8 children crammed into it. Cracked asbestos tiling covers the roof, which leaks when it rains in winter. In this the hottest summer on record, the sweat from the children forms condensation that drops down at night. She can’t afford cooking gas, and cooks over a fire. The material to improve the house of Zeinat and her children would not cost a lot and would substantially improve their living conditions. We are also trying to support Amal to find a neurosurgeon in Europe who would give further analysis for the shrapnel still lodged in her brain. She continues to suffer from headaches, inflammation, nosebleeds and tiredness and there are concerns about the effect of the shrapnel as she grows.
Richard Goldstone visited the Gaza City neighborhood of Zaytoun in late June to tour the compound of the extended Samouni family, the subject of coverage here in recent weeks (“‘I fed him like a baby bird,'” September 17; “Death in the Samouni compound,” September 25). Twenty-nine members of the family, all of them civilians, were killed in the Israel Defense Force’s winter assault – 21 during the shelling of a house where IDF soldiers had gathered some 100 members of the family a day earlier.
Salah Samouni and the owner of the house that was shelled – Wael Samouni – took Goldstone around the farming neighborhood, showing him its devastated homes and uprooted orchards. In a telephone conversation this week, Salah described how he had shown Goldstone a picture of his father, Talal, among the 21 killed in the house. He told the Jewish South African judge and head of the United Nations inquiry team into Operation Cast Lead, that his father “had been employed by Jews” for nearly 40 years and that whenever he was sick, “the employer would call, ask after his health, and forbid him to come to work before he had recovered.”
The Samounis were always confident that, in the event of any military invasions into Gaza, they could always manage to get along with the Israeli army. Until 2005, before Israel’s disengagement from the Strip, the Jewish settlement of Netzarim was located right next door, and several family members worked there from time to time. When the joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols were active, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security officials sometimes asked the Samounis to “lend” them a tractor to flatten a patch of land or repair the Salah al-Din Road (for example, when a diplomatic convoy needed to pass through). While Samouni family members worked on their tractors, gathering sand, the soldiers would watch them.
“When the soldiers wanted us to leave, they would fire above our heads. That’s what experience taught me,” recalls Salah Samouni, who lost a 2-year-old daughter in the IDF attack, along with uncles and both of his parents. The older men of the family, among them his father and two uncles who were killed by IDF soldiers on January 4 and 5, worked in Israel until the 1990s in different localities, including Bat Yam, Moshav Asseret (near Gedera) and the “Glicksman Plant.” They all believed that the Hebrew they had learned would assist and if necessary save them during encounters with soldiers.
As was reported here last month – on January 4, under orders from the army, Salah Samouni and the rest of the family left their home, which had been turned into a military position, and moved to the other, the home of Wael, located on the southern side of the street. The fact that it was the soldiers who had relocated them, had seen the faces of the children and the older women, and the fact that the soldiers were positioned in locations surrounding the house just tens of meters away, instilled in the family a certain amount of confidence – despite the IDF fire from the air, from the sea and from the land, despite the hunger and the thirst.
On the morning of Monday, January 5, Salah Samouni walked out of the house and shouted in the direction of another house in the compound that he thought other family members were still in. He wanted them to join him, to be in a safer place, closer to the soldiers. Nothing prepared him for the three shells and the rockets the IDF fired a short time later.
“My daughter Azza, my only daughter, two and a half years old, was injured in the first hit on the house,” Salah told Haaretz. “She managed to say, ‘Daddy, it hurts.’ And then, in the second hit, she died. And I’m praying. Everything is dust and I can’t see anything. I thought I was dead. I found myself getting up, all bloody, and I found my mother sitting by the hall with her head tilted downward. I moved her face a little, and I found that the right half of her face was gone. I looked at my father, whose eye was gone. He was still breathing a little, and then he stopped.”
When they exited the house – injured, confused, dazed, fearing the fourth shell or rocket would soon land – determined to get themselves to Gaza despite the soldiers’ shouts from nearby positions to go back, they believed only corpses remained in the house. They did not know that under the dust and rubble in one large room, nine family members remained alive: the elderly matriarch and five of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren – the youngest of whom was three years old, the eldest 16 – along with another kinsman and his son. They had passed out, some of them beneath corpses.
When they regained consciousness, 16-year-old Ahmad Ibrahim and his 10-year-old brother Yakub saw the corpses of their mother, four of their brothers and their nephew. Mahmoud Tallal, 16, had lost his toes; bleeding, he saw that his parents – Tallal and Rahma – had been killed. Three-year-old Omar, Salah’s son, was buried unconscious under 24-year-old Saffa’s dead body, explaining why they hadn’t found him during the terrible moment of panic as they left the house. Ahmad Nafez, 15, recalled how when little Omar woke up and pulled himself out from under the corpse, he spotted his grandfather Tallal and started shaking him, crying: “Grandpa, Grandpa, wake up.”
The previous day Amal, a nine-year-old girl, had witnessed soldiers bursting into her home and killing her father, Atiyeh. She had taken shelter in her Uncle Tallal’s home and together with other family members was moved to Wael’s house. She did not know that her brother Ahmad was bleeding to death in his mother’s arms, in another house in the neighborhood.
The children found some scraps of food in the kitchen and ate. Later, Ahmad Nafez told his relatives how Ahmad Ibrahim had gone from corpse to corpse – his mother, his four brothers and his nephew among them – shaking them, hitting them, telling them to get up. Perhaps from the blows, Amal regained consciousness, her head bloody and her eyes rolling in their sockets. She kept crying out “water, water,” said she wanted her mother and father, and beat her head on the floor, her eyes rolling the whole time.
It is too dangerous to remove the shrapnel embedded in her head – that is even what the doctors at a Tel Aviv hospital say. Now everything hurts her and will continue to hurt her: when it’s cold, when it’s hot, when she’s in the sun. She will not be able to concentrate on her studies.
No one can reconstruct how the hours passed for them in Wael’s bombarded house; some remained in a state of exhaustion and apathy. The first to recover was actually Shiffa, the 71-year-old grandmother. On the morning of Tuesday, January 6, she realized that no one was coming to rescue them anytime soon. Not the soldiers positioned just meters away, not the Red Cross nor the Red Crescent nor other relatives. Perhaps they didn’t even know they were alive, she concluded. Her walker had been bent and buried in the house, but she managed to leave with two of her grandchildren – Mahmoud (his legs bleeding) and little Omar.
They hobbled out and started walking – along the silent street, among the vacated houses, realizing some were occupied by soldiers. “The Jews saw us from above and shouted to us to go into the house,” related Shiffa. That was when they were walking down the street and passed by her sister’s home. They went inside, but didn’t find a living soul. The soldiers – firing into the air – came in after them. “We begged them to let us go home. ‘Where is your home?'” they asked. She told them “over there” and pointed east, toward the home of one of her sons, Arafat, located closer to Salah al-Din Road. The soldiers let them continue on. “We saw people coming out of Arafat’s house and Hijjeh’s house. Everyone was a bit injured and the soldiers were shooting overhead.”
At Hijjeh’s house she found everyone crying, each with his own story of those dead or wounded. “I told them what had happened to us, how everyone had fallen on everyone else, in heaps, the dead and the wounded.” She remained there with the rest of the injured for another night. Omar remembers this house fondly: He was given chocolate there.
Only on Wednesday, January 7, did the IDF allow Red Cross and Red Crescent crews to enter the neighborhood. They attest that they’d been asking to enter since January 4, but the IDF would not let them – whether by shooting in the direction of the ambulances that tried to get closer or by refusing to approve coordination. The medical teams, which were allowed to go in on foot and had to leave the ambulances a kilometer or a kilometer and a half away, thought they were going to rescue the injured from Hijjeh’s house. But then the grandmother told them about the wounded children who remained behind, among the dead, in Wael’s house. The medical team set out to rescue them, totally unprepared for the sight they found.
On January 18, after the IDF left the Gaza Strip, the rescue teams returned to the neighborhood. Wael’s house was found in ruins: IDF bulldozers had demolished it entirely – with the corpses inside.
In a general reply to questions from Haaretz regarding the behavior of the military forces in the Samouni family’s neighborhood, the IDF Spokesman said that all of the claims have been examined. “Upon completion of the examination, the findings will be taken to the military advocate general, who will decide about the need to take additional steps,” the spokesman said.
Salah Samouni, during the telephone conversation, said: “I asked [Richard] Goldstone to find out just one thing: Why did the army do this to us? Why did they take us out of the house one at a time, and the officer who spoke Hebrew with my father verified that we were all civilians – [so] why did they then shell us, kill us? This is what we want to know.”
He feels that Goldstone, in his report, lent the victims a voice. He did not expound on his frustration upon learning that the debate on the report had been postponed, but sought a way to describe how he feels nine months after the fact. “We feel [we are] in an exile, even though we are in our homeland, on our land. We sit and envy the dead. They are the ones who are at rest.”
