By Donald Macintyre in Gaza City
Published: 07 February 2007It was mid-morning on easily the worst day of fighting, but Mahmoud al-Dadouh, 15, thought the battle he had been watching from the third floor roof of his family home was over. At about 10am, as his father, Maher, 39, explained yesterday, the Hamas paramilitary Executive Force had attacked and finally occupied a training camp used by a Fatah-dominated presidential security force about 150 metres from the house.
"My son heard the shooting and went upstairs. He wanted to see what was happening. He started to come down and then one bullet went into his temple and came out the back. We cannot really tell who fired the bullet..." As Mr Dadouh trailed off, pointing towards the now ruined training camp as the direction from which the fire came, his cousin Medhad, 37, explained: "It was random shooting everywhere."
Mahmoud's brother Hussam, 18, who was just in front of his brother on the stairs when he heard the shot, said they had been frightened by what they saw from the roof but said: "We didn't think we were in any danger to ourselves. And we thought it was all finished."
A red-eyed Mr Dadouh, who farms olives and vegetables in the Tel Al Hawa suburb on the southern fringes of Gaza city, was still too distraught yesterday to describe what sort of boy his third son, a ninth grader in the local preparatory school, had been. But his cousin said: "He was a good boy. He did what his parents told him. He was good in his class at school. He would help his father plant vegetables and work on the land when he was not in school."
The random shot which killed Mahmoud last Friday made him a statistic, one of three children among the 29 Palestinians whose lives were lost in the three days of ferocious fighting between Hamas and Fatah forces which started when Hamas attacked a presidential convoy and which has horrified and angered the large majority of Palestinian civilians here. As they have tentatively returned to a semi-normality which many fear could be short-lived, their hopes rest with a Saudi-brokered summit in Mecca at which the factions are making their heighest profile effort yet to agree a coalition government of "national unity" and pull Gaza back from the brink of a possible civil war.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2245123.ece
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
