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This afternoon (Wednesday) Vik and I went to Beit Hanoun to see the destruction which 2 Israeli F16s caused at 1 o’clock this morning in the centre of the town which is about 10 kilometers north of Gaza City and close to the border with Israel.Palestinian news agency Maan reported that the training centre of the Hamas’s military wing Al Qassam brigades was hit by 2 missiles and that 4 missiles were fired at already demolished Yasser Arafat Airport in Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
Maan quoted the Israeli Army (IA) spokesperson who talked about the need to destroy ‘terror tunnels’ and the attack being in response to the two rockets fired form Gaza into the border town of Askhelon.
The IA spokesperson did not mention that one of the bombed area was in a densely populated part of Beit Hanoun next to the kindergarten and summer play scheme for schoolchildren, which are both seriously damaged.
Across the Al A’alam Street where the training compound is located, there was hardly any building intact. The nearest ones had windows blown out, and we saw a curtain hanging on the street light electrical wire 10 metres form the mangled metal window frame where it ones lived.
The shops and the flats on the ground floors were all heavily damaged. The young owner of a trendy looking hairdressers’ invited us to his saloon which was covered with glass, with a large metal chunk of the F16 rocket resting on the coffee table.
Nobody so far came to visits or write a report on the damage and the hair dresser said that he did not expect any help with fixing the damage.
We spoke with a group of people who were standing in front of the damaged houses and they told us that in each of the 15 houses facing the area directly hit, 2 or 3 people have sustained injuries, mainly from the falling debris or the broken glass and that 6 of them were children.
We went to a house of a family who had a large whole in their front wall, where their living room was. Diagonally there was a broken door though which a meter long white tube traveled landing 15 meters away in a cot of a 5 day old boy Riyad, in the room across the courtyard. When we came his mum was holding him, still in shock and distraught at what might have happened. The family said that the powerful blast smashed roofs of the rooms in the back of the house and showed the beds with large chunks of corrugated roof covers and other debris. ‘There was somebody in every bed’, said the mother of the house, ‘we are grateful to Allah that nobody was killed’.
Couple of doors down there was a small supermarket which was badly damaged, and so was the furniture shop next to it , with its long metal doors laying bent on the pavement.
Vik who was here during the bombing raids over a year ago said that this attack was worrying because there were hardly any similar attacks on the heavily populated areas since January ’09.
A local resident told us that the noise and the air pressure form the blast were horrendous. Windows on the second floor of his house were broken even though his house was 500 meters away.
‘I think that Israelis used missiles they use to destroy tunnels’, he said. ‘They create pressure which causes tunnels to collapse’.
‘Children were woken up by the noise’, said the grandmother of the 5 day old baby who had a lucky escape. ‘I don’t think that there ill be many children who will have a good night sleep in a long time to come’.
Tags: civilian ijuries, destruction of property, Gaza, injury, Israel, live ammunition, Palestine, shooting at civilians, shooting civilians, siege, war crimesw
