Jabaliya buries its dead

[subsuelo]

East Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip bore the brunt of Israel's latest military incursion into Gaza. The incursion, which was launched in the early hours of Thursday 28 February and lasted four days and nights. In that time Israeli troops killed 108 Palestinians, including 54 unarmed civilians, 26 of whom were children. The Palestinians who live in and around Abed Rabbo Street in east Jabaliya suffered intense air strikes by F-16 planes and helicopters, tank shelling, snipers, and having their houses invaded and vandalized by Israeli soldiers, who tied adults up with ropes, or else locked whole families into single rooms in order to use their homes as sniper towers to target local Palestinian fighters. Sixteen-year-old Jacqueline Abu Shbak and her fourteen year old brother, Iyad, both lived on Abed Rabbo Street with their mother and three other young brothers and sisters. The children's uncle, Hatem Hosni Abu Shbak, who lives next door, found the bodies of Jacqueline and Iyad in the early hours of Saturday 1 March, when he rushed upstairs after hearing intense shooting and then screaming.

"I heard shooting and Iyad was screaming. As I ran upstairs the shooting continued, and both children were on the living room floor" he says, sitting in the blood-stained living room where Jacqueline died and Iyad was critically injured. "I tried to revive them, but Jacqueline was dead, and even though Iyad was alive and making sounds we could not save him. We had to wait for an ambulance because my car had been shelled by an Israeli tank." Hatem Abu Shbak shows us the mirrors and windows shattered by bullets, the bullet holes in the walls, and the children's blood on the furniture.

The Israeli soldiers who killed Jacqueline and Iyad had occupied the opposite house, and were holding Ramez Etbail and his family hostage so they could use the house to shoot at local Hamas fighters. The Israelis fired straight through the kitchen window of the Abu Shbak house, striking Jacqueline and Iyad who were both cowering in the corner. Their mother was in her own bedroom trying protecting her youngest child from the onslaught of bullets.

The children's father, Mohammed Hosni Abu Shbak, works as a security guard in Ramallah, in the West Bank. He has been in Ramallah since Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

As soon as the Israeli military withdrew from northern Gaza, at around 6:00am on Monday 3 March, people came out onto the streets of Jabaliya in order to start to bury their dead. Driving through Jabaliya just hours later, funerals were being held in street after street.

Report, PCHR, 5 March 2008

[ProgressiveMuslim]

1. I missed all those funerals when they were broadcast all over the world...

Oh that's right.

They weren't.

[ohio2007]

2. Hams attack on Israel targetted CHILDREN ? ( 7 of 8 were children )

They were identified as:
Yohai Lifshitz, 18, from Jerusalem;
Yonatan Yitzhak Eldar, 16, from Shilo;
Yonadav Haim Hirschfeld, 19, from Kohav Hashahar,
Neria Cohen, 15, also from the capital,
Segev Peniel Avihail, 15, from Neve Daniel,
Avraham David Moses, 16, from Efrat, Roee Roth, 18, from Elkana and Doron Meherete, 26, from Ashdod.


http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2008/03/victims-names.html

One of them was an immigrant from Sudan but I don't know which one

[Violet_Crumble]

3. Hams? WTF is a hams?

And since when has a 19 year old been a child?

And in yr haste to divert attention away from the killing of Palestinians, you fail to miss the point. Seeing as how the international media has been flooded with it, everybody knows about the Yeshiva killings, knows how many died, and knows it in detail. Some like yrself can recite lists of names and ages. Can you do the same for the Palestinian children killed? I doubt it very much...

[subsuelo]

4. Palestinians have names?

[Violet_Crumble]

5. Of course. Doesn't the US media tend to report their names as Terrorist and Militant? n/t