“Sharon, Why Did You Destroy My House?”: Operation Rainbow a Year Later
Mohammed Omer, Award Winner 2006: Youth Voice, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Washington, DC), Posted: Nov 02, 2006
THE ISRAELIS called it “Operation Rainbow”—and insisted the name was generated at random by a computer. To the men, women, and children of Rafah who endured the slaughter, however, it was a bitter footnote to a week of horror. In Greek mythology, the rainbow was a bridge between earth and Olympus, between men and gods. In the Old Testament, after sending a flood that destroyed the world, God set a rainbow in the sky as a sign of peace and renewal. But in May of 2004, the shells and bombs in the night sky over Rafah brought only death. “Operation Rainbow” is an appropriate name in only one way: a year later, the images are still vivid, their evidence of Israeli terrorism against a civilian population undimmed.
After nearly three years of intifada, the residents of Rafah were
familiar enough with Israeli incursions—the American-made Apaches overhead, the tanks and the shelling, followed by the bulldozers that would destroy homes, infrastructure, lives. Like Israel’s previous invasions, Operation Rainbow was undertaken “for security reasons,” ostensibly to find and destroy alleged smuggling tunnels running from Rafah under the border into Egypt. In May 2004, however, the Israeli army began its onslaught in the northern part of Rafah—far from the border in Tal Al Sultan and El Barazil—tearing up streets completely, destroying electric, water, and sewer lines, flattening whole blocks of houses, even bulldozing Rafah’s small zoo.
Israeli snipers commandeered taller houses and took up positions on rooftops, shooting anything and anyone who moved, even killing two teenagers whose “hostile activity” consisted of taking laundry off a clothesline and feeding pet doves. All the while, the shells from the Apache helicopters turned its victims into scattered body parts. As the week wore on, people ran out of food, water and medicine. Ambulances were pinned down by Israeli fire and could not reach the injured. The morgue in Al Najjar hospital was overflowing and, when no one could venture outdoors to bury their dead, a commercial refrigerator that usually stored vegetables was pressed into service to hold corpses.
The ceaseless din of explosions and gunfire couldn’t drown out the human chorus of despair—children crying for a piece of bread, for a cup of milk, for a drop of water, the laments of parents who had nothing to give them, the wails of the newly widowed and orphaned, the screams of the dying and dismembered. But sometimes there was only stunned, disbelieving silence, as friends and relatives tried to identify their loved ones from scattered body parts—a leg, an arm, a piece of a torso—that was all the ambulance drivers could gather.
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=d85cea2322312e2f1ec429d29a543f91
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