"Because of all the smoke and fire we started shouting again, and again said 'Ktanim, ktanim,’ and we prayed and read the Koran and coughed. I couldn’t see the children because of all the smoke. The soldiers put on gas masks and lit up the place with the lights on their rifles, and spoke Hebrew. We’re crying and the children are peeing their pants and the soldiers are laughing. In the end, they said, 'Come on, come on,’ and took us out. They spat on my husband again. I look at the pool of blood under his head and a soldier aims his rifle at me. Outside there were soldiers who fired. My children and I went out barefoot, our arms raised. Fahed, Zahwa’s son, carried Ahmed. I told a soldier I wanted to take my husband. He said no. Outside I saw many soldiers.
"Amal ran to the house of [Uncle] Talal, but the soldiers wouldn’t let us follow her. We walked on the paved road [eastward, toward Salah al-Din Street]. I didn’t notice anything, and suddenly everyone stopped. It turned out that there was a snipers’ post in Sawafiri’s house. They ordered my husband’s [older] sons to pull up their shirts and turn around, and then they ordered them to go to Rafah [south]. We continued and entered the home of Majed [Samouni, another relative]. I looked at Ahmed; his clothes were covered with blood and I saw the two big holes in his head. I gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, I screamed, I asked for an ambulance. His mouth was dry. I moistened his lips with saliva, and then with water that Majed brought me.
"We tore a sheet for white flags, so we could go out. Majed’s wife was pregnant and began going into labor. His mother and I helped her give birth. There were about 40 or 50 of us. The children were hungry. Majed brought pita and olives and tomatoes that were in the house. I asked Ahmed if he wanted to eat and he whispered, 'Yeah . . . Mommy,’ and I gave him a little bread in water. I fed him like a baby bird. All the time blood was running, everything was covered in it. In the evening he told me, 'I want to take you and Dad to Paradise.’ I kept bringing towels to absorb the blood and I thought about Amal and about my husband’s dead body.
"Ahmed died at about or 4:30 or 5 A.M. [on January 5]. I screamed and I closed his eyes. Salah’s girl came and said a shell landed on the home of Wa’el [a relative] and that the roof fell in and everyone was screaming and covered in blood. She said everyone had fled to the city. I said that in that case we’d all leave the neighborhood.
read more @ uruknet
excerpt:
What followed is one of the more macabre scenes of this or any war. The grief-stricken relatives began to argue and fight over the remains of the men and boys who a few hours earlier had greedily sought the tanker's fuel. Poor people in one of the world's poorest countries, they had been trying to hoard as much as they could for the coming winter.
"We didn't recognise any of the dead when we arrived," said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. "It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned. The bodies were like this," he brought his two hands together, his fingers curling like claws. "There were like burned tree logs, like charcoal.
"The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone."
So the elders stepped in. They collected all the bodies they could and asked the people to tell them how many relatives each family had lost.
A queue formed. One by one the bereaved gave the names of missing brothers, cousins, sons and nephews, and each in turn received their quota of corpses. It didn't matter who was who, everyone was mangled beyond recognition anyway. All that mattered was that they had a body to bury and perform prayers upon.
"A man comes and says, 'I lost my brother and cousin', so we gave him two bodies," said Omar Khan. "Another says I lost five relatives, so we gave him five bodies to take home and bury. When we had run out of bodies we started giving them limbs, legs, arms, torsos." In the end only five families went away without anything. "Their sons are still missing."
AND YOUR AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS PAY FOR ALL OF IT.
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