Gaza: The death and life of my father

[Scurrilous]

For Fares Akram, The Independent's reporter in Gaza, the Israeli invasion became a personal tragedy when he discovered his father was one of the first casualties of the ground war

<snip>

"The phone call came at around 4.20pm on Saturday. A bomb had been dropped on the house at our small farm in northern Gaza. My father was walking from the gate to the farmhouse at the time. It was our beloved place, that farm and its two-storey white house with a red roof. Nestled in a flat fertile agricultural plain north-west of Beit Lahiya, it had lemon groves, orange and apricot trees and we had recently acquired 60 dairy cows.

It was the closest farm to the northern border with Israel. Ironically, we always thought the biggest danger there was not from Israeli troops, who usually went straight past if they were mounting an incursion, but from stray Hamas rockets aimed at the Israeli towns north of us.

But shortly before sunset on Saturday, as Israeli ground troops and tanks invaded Gaza in the name of shutting down Hamas rocket sites, the peace of that place was shattered and my father's life extinguished at the age of 48. Warplanes and helicopters had swept in, bombing and firing to open up the space for the tanks and ground forces that would follow in the darkness. It was one of those F16 airstrikes that killed my father.

The house was reduced to little more than powder, and of Dad there was nothing much left either. "Just a pile of flesh," my uncle, who found him in the rubble, said later with brutal honesty."

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[IndianaGreen]

1. K&R n/t

:cry:

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. Just Israel winning hearts and minds, right?

How does this sort of total destruction help matters? It seems to me to give strength to the argument that what Israel is really after is total annihilation of all Palestinians.

[Vegasaurus]

3. If that were the goal,

Israel could have flattened the Palestinians hundreds of times in the past 60 years.

You know that isn't the goal, and the Palestinian population has grown 30% in ten years, so the Israelis are doing a terrible job of annihilating the Palestinians.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

4. I used to think so,

but with the use of phosphorus bombs on children, I'm beginning to think that those in charge in Israel have decided to try and kill as many Palestinians as possible.

[azurnoir]

5. We are told so often this is a war on Hamas

this incident is quite revealing.