Survivor discusses Gaza shooting deaths

By SARAH EL DEEB
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER


Six-year old Palestinian Lydia Abu Eitta, left, sits with her aunt Linda Abu Eitta, not seen, the mother of Osama,9, Ahmed, 6, and Salam, 3, the sons of senior intelligence officer Baha Balousheh who were killed in a drive-by shooting Monday, in the house of Balousheh in Gaza City Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2006. Lydia Abu Eitta was getting a ride to school Monday when masked gunmen stopped her car. She ducked and a split second later, militants riddled the car with gunfire, killing her three young cousins. (AP Photo/Diaa Hadid)

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Six-year-old Lydia Abu Eitta was getting a ride to school when masked gunmen stopped her car. She ducked and a split second later, militants riddled the car with gunfire, killing her three young cousins.

Osama, 9, Ahmed, 6, and Salam Balousheh, 3, died instantly along with the driver in the Monday morning assassination attempt apparently aimed at the boy's father. The little girl saw it all and even managed to draw a picture of the bloody scene on Tuesday.

"I asked Osama for a tissue" to wipe off the blood running down her face, but "he didn't answer," Lydia said, in the first eyewitness account of a shooting that has prompted rage, grief and soul-searching throughout the Palestinian areas.

Lydia, a first-grader, lived with her cousins in the family house and always rode with them to school.

Three small scratches ran along Lydia's forehead, her only apparent injuries. She recalled details of the bloody attack, imitating the shooting with gestures and drawing a picture to illustrate her painful memories.

She peppered her sketch with pen strokes, representing flying bullets, and drew about 10 simple stick men - the killers - some surrounding her car. In her drawing, she was under the seat.

"We were going to school and suddenly masked men came in three cars. They started to shoot, shoot from far. The glass broke and then suddenly Ahmed and Osama and Salam died, God have mercy on them," said Lydia, her hair pulled back in a braid down to her waist.

Lydia said three men drove up and fired into the air to stop her car before opening fire. When she next peeked through the window, she saw about a dozen gunmen with green uniforms and black masks.

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"When they left, a car with small kids came," she said. "They brought a cotton pad and water and wiped my face."

Ahmed, the 6-year-old, was her best friend. "They (relatives) told me they didn't die. They lied to me," she said.

The apparent target of the killing, her uncle Baha Balousheh, was not in the car. He escaped two previous assassination attempts by Hamas, which is now running the Palestinian government. An intelligence officer and Fatah loyalist, he helped lead a crackdown on Hamas a decade ago. The Islamic group denied involvement in the shooting and condemned the killing. No one has been arrested.

In a mourning tent set up at the family house in Gaza City, Lydia ran among the male visitors, a chocolate pudding in her hands. In constant motion, she climbed to the 12th floor, where the women were having a separate gathering.

Lydia's mother, Reem, 24, said the little girl had trouble sleeping, calling out her cousin's name in the middle of the night. She intends to take her daughter to a doctor for counseling, she said.

"When I first got the news, they told me she was dead," said her mother, puffing on a cigarette and smiling broadly. "As soon as I saw her, you can't believe how I felt."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/110...g_Survivor.html

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L12884896.htm

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA, Dec 12 (Reuters) - In a sign of just how far security has fallen in the Gaza Strip, a group of children took to the streets on Tuesday burning tyres and threatening stonings if the "adults" did not stop causing chaos.

Dressed in jeans and a blue shirt, 12-year-old Saeed Salem and his friends said they were enraged by the killing of three young brothers on Monday and fed up with the constant security nightmares that have ruined their short lives.

"We are angry," said Salem, as he and his young colleagues set about burning tyres in a central Gaza street. "We need those who killed the kids to be found and stoned to death."

His friend, Ahmed, his hands blackened from wheeling abandoned tyres on to the bonfire, said the adults were lost in rivalries and had abandoned the kids to their own business.

"We have no amusment parks to attend and no sport clubs to go to. At least let us live in peace," the boy said.

Gaza took another step towards chaos on Monday when gunmen shot dead three brothers, aged between 6 and 9, as they were being dropped off at school.

Their father was an intelligence officer considered close to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, giving the killings a political bent, although there is no clear indication yet of who was responsible.

Fatah, the party headed by Abbas, and its Islamist rival Hamas, which runs the Palestinian government, have blamed one another for the killings, deepening tensions between the movements, both of which are well armed.

Abbas sent forces on to the streets to try to restore order on Tuesday and called for a day of mourning for those killed. But despite the greater security presence, rival gunmen still clashed and at least two people were wounded.

As well as the children, mothers also expressed alarm at the killings and despair at Gaza's spiralling crisis. Radio stations have been jammed with callers denouncing the brothers' deaths.

"Life in Gaza has turned to hell," said Umm Mohammad, a veiled woman attending a mourning house to honour the boys.

"The government and the president are busy in their disputes, careless about the people's lives.

"Those who killed the kids had no mercy, had no religion," she said. "I thought of my kids, they could have been among the dead or the wounded."

Fears about Gaza's future have grown steadily darker in recent months, as tensions between Fatah and Hamas have soared and efforts to overcome international sanctions that have hamstrung the government have failed to achieve results.

Palestinian political analyst Muheeb al-Nawati predicted the worst in an article published this week

"What comes next?" Nawati asked, pointing out that children do not get shot dead by mistake. "The answer is we can expect car bombs, an era that moves us to the stage of blood and the scattered remains of unidentified victims on the streets."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6171713.stm
Press fury at Gaza killing
Arabic Press

The Palestinian press urges leaders to stop making excuses and end internecine bloodshed after the killing of three children in a drive-by shooting in Gaza.

Al-Jadidah worries the murders play into the hands of Israel as it will be able to point to the killings to deflect international criticism from itself. Al-Quds calls on the interior minister to resign.

UK-based Arabic paper Al-Quds Al-Arabi says Hamas must do more than just condemn the act.

EDITORIAL IN AL-QUDS

Fighters and contenders, enough is enough. All national and Islamic leaders have to put an end to the lawlessness and crime. Even if it is not possible for you to reach agreements with each other, you are still capable of stopping this chaos. We are fed up with statements and condemnations.

COMMENTATOR IN AL-HAYAT AL-JADIDAH

'The Palestinians are killing their own children, so why are you complaining about us?'. This is what the [Israeli] occupiers will say to themselves and to the world. This is what the world sees and hears, while our Interior Minister Said Siyam sees and hears nothing. The militants that fired at his motorcade were arrested in less than two hours.

COMMENTATOR IN AL-HAYAT AL-JADIDAH

We all want to know who gave the word to kill the children and who stands behind the crime and the terrorising of children and families. We do not want to hear excuses after every massacre that anonymous people or people suspected of collaboration [with Israel] committed them.

COMMENTATOR IN AL-AYYAM

Was there a need to shed the dear blood of the children to understand how deep the crisis we are going through is? Will this blood be enough for Palestinian political leaders to regain their sanity and cling a little less hysterically to power, or will the crisis need long months to hit new records before it is resolved?

COMMENTATOR IN AL-QUDS

Will the interior minister prove he has a sense of responsibility and resign so as to honour the souls of the innocent children of the resistance fighter Baha Balusheh?... Organised crime has flourished during his reign. We think it is time he told us who was responsible for the killing. Otherwise we will ask for an international investigation and court.

COMMENTATOR IN AL-QUDS

Dear leaders: What would you tell God tomorrow if he asked you about the blood of the children and hundreds who were killed before them... If you are unable to bear your responsibility then leave and allow others who are more capable to assume it. You should all resign and leave us because we no longer need you.

EDITORIAL IN UK-BASED AL-QUDS AL-ARABI

It is not enough for the Hamas government to simply condemn this act... Hamas has to do all it can to arrest all those involved in this monstrous act and take the necessary steps against them.

Violence stifles Gaza peace talks

Mark Lavie / Associated Press
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic.../612120361/1020
JERUSALEM -- By threatening to ignite a Palestinian civil war, the killing of three children in the Gaza Strip on Monday has jeopardized Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's efforts to restart long-stalled peace talks.

As violence between the two main Palestinian factions has intensified, hopes are fading for a Palestinian national unity government -- seen as a precondition for renewed negotiations with Israel. Olmert is offering the Palestinians far-reaching concessions and a state of their own if they choose the path of peace talks.

"It's one of those situations where all Israel can do is wait it out," said Shmuel Sandler, a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University outside Tel Aviv.

The apparent target of the drive-by shooting in Gaza City was Baha Balousheh, a top Palestinian security officer and Fatah loyalist. He blamed the rival Hamas, although the Islamic movement denied responsibility.

Since January elections in which the radical Hamas ousted Fatah, the traditional dominant force in Palestinian politics, there have been periodic flare-ups of violence between the two sides.

The West, labeling Hamas a terror group, cut off aid to the Palestinian government in March, insisting it must recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept previous peace pacts.

Hamas refuses to take any of those steps, so President Mahmoud Abbas has been trying to create a new government with his Fatah party and Hamas in joint control -- to no avail.

Another round of violence, triggered by the killing of the children, would contribute to the "chaos that dominates the Gaza scene," said Ron Pundak, director of the Peres Peace Center and one of the authors of the first Israel-Palestinian partial peace agreement in 1993.

'They were targeting the children': Gaza factions hit new level of horror

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1969880,00.html

· Gunmen kill Fatah official's three small sons
· Hamas denies any involvement in deaths

Rory McCarthy in Gaza City
Tuesday December 12, 2006
The Guardian

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Schoolgirls injured

The street around them was full of children walking to their classes. At least two were injured in the gunfire, including Huda Awadi, 12, who was hit in the lower left leg, and her sister Nasma, seven, who was hit in the hand and needed 18 stitches. The girls' grandfather, Ibrahim Abu Shaaban, 68, sat on a chair by Huda's bed in the Shifa hospital yesterday. "As long as there is no security and no unity between the Palestinian factions, then worse things will happen," he said.

Mr Balousha, a former fighter and now lieutenant colonel in the Palestinian intelligence service and a long-time Fatah activist, knew the importance of security precautions in Gaza's fragile climate. The children always travelled separately from their father, always with two armed guards and always in the same white Skoda with its tinted windows.

Twice in recent months he had escaped assassination attempts, the result of a worsening rivalry between his secular Fatah faction, led by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, which defeated Fatah in elections at the start of the year and now runs the government.

Mr Balousha had taken part in prison interrogations of Hamas fighters during a crackdown a decade ago. Several Fatah intelligence officers have been assassinated this year and only on Sunday gunmen fired shots at a convoy carrying the Hamas interior minister, Said Siyam.

The mother of the three dead boys, Linda Balousha, 33, an accountant, was in her bedroom when she heard the shooting. Bodyguards would not let her or her husband down on to the street. "I could smell the smoke and the bullets from the window," she said.

"Their father started to scream: 'the children, the children,' and I saw from the window the white car was stopped, its windows were broken."

There seemed little doubt among the family yesterday that the gunmen had purposely sought to kill the children, not the father. "It wasn't a mistake," said Mrs Balousha. "They were targeting the children. They tried before to kill my husband and they couldn't. The government has responsibility."

Many Fatah officials blamed Hamas, which denied any involvement. Fatah's faction in parliament called on Mr Abbas to dismiss the Hamas government which it said was "pushing us with its policies and programmes to civil war". Saeb Erekat, a Fatah official and the chief Palestinian negotiator, said: "If this continues, it will lead to our worst nightmare, internal fighting."

Fears of civil war

It is still not clear how determined the rival factions are to avoid all-out war. A gradual descent into factional violence has been obvious in Gaza and the West Bank for months, but senior Palestinian figures repeatedly insist no one wants a civil war and all acknowledge there would be huge casualties and no clear victor. Mr Abbas was due to make a speech later this week threatening early elections after talks to form a coalition government between Fatah and Hamas broke down completely.

But his Fatah party lacks a parliamentary majority and some say has failed to come to terms with its election defeat this year, which brought to an end more than a generation of leadership in Palestinian politics. Any attempt on Mr Abbas's part to dismiss the Hamas government might trigger a sharp and violent reaction.

Hundreds of men marched in a funeral procession through Gaza yesterday, carrying the bodies of the three small boys wrapped in white sheets. Mr Balousha greeted mourners under the green awnings of a tent set up in the street a short distance from the scene of the killings, but he stopped short of assigning blame.

"I have no words," he said. "I am a father who has lost his children."

By Atika Shubert
CNN


GAZA CITY (CNN) -- On Monday morning, Baha Balousheh kissed his three sons goodbye and sent them off to school. From his children's bedroom window, he watched them drive away in their chauffeured car.

Moments later, Balousheh says, gunmen opened fire on the vehicle, killing 9-year old Osama, 6-year old Ahmed and 3-year old Salam.

"I named the youngest one Salam, meaning peace. I hoped there would be peace. But now Salam has taken that peace to God," said Balousheh, who is a senior intelligence official from Fatah.

"I hope that this is the last killing."

Gaza is used to violence, but the murders of Balousheh's children marks a dangerous turning point in the Palestinian struggle for statehood: This time it's Palestinians killing Palestinians.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in August 2005, Palestinians envisioned a bright future: Gaza for Palestinians, run by Palestinians -- free of violence and Israeli occupation.

Instead, Gaza has become a battleground in a power struggle between the Islamic militants of Hamas, led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniya on one side and the armed gunmen of Fatah on the other, loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.

The two factions are locked in a power struggle for control of the Palestinian government and attempts to forge a coalition have failed.

Balousheh and his wife, Linda, stopped short of blaming Hamas for the deaths of their children, but did say the killings were likely to have been carried out by political rivals.

"Sometimes the very people who condemn the killings are the same people who order the killings. While the people who actually carried it out roam free," Linda said, struggling to be heard over the wailing cries of women attending the mourning service for her children.

"The prime minister, the president, the whole world must know: Enough is enough. Our children are not so cheap."

The escalating violence comes at a time when Gaza's economy has been hit hard. In the face of crippling international sanctions, the Hamas-led Palestinian government has collected millions of dollars to keep the government operating on fundraising trips to other countries in the region.

The United States and the European Union, which had provided millions each year to keep the Palestinian Authority afloat, cut off money after Hamas won elections in January and took over the government. Hamas has refused to recognize Israel's right to exist.

It has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

The killing of the Balousheh children triggered an escalation in political violence. Two days later a local Hamas militia leader was shot dead on his way to work.

Tensions grew on Thursday night when gunmen opened fire on the convoy of Prime Minister Haniya as he was returning from Egypt to Gaza. The prime minister's son was wounded in the attack, and one of his personal bodyguards was killed.

Hamas blamed Fatah for the attack, demanding that Abbas take immediate and harsh action against his own security forces.

Hamas on Friday staged a show of force calling tens of thousands of supporters onto the streets of Gaza City. Armed Hamas militants stood guard at street corners wearing black masks pulled down over their faces. (Full story)

A senior Hamas leader, Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar, told CNN that Hamas would continue to deploy its own forces to quell the violence and oppose anyone who challenged Hamas' authority.

"We have the popular power. Ask any one of the people on the street. We have the military power. We have the moral power." Zahar said.

Palestinians are now bracing themselves for the possibility of still more turbulence. Despite the rising tensions, government officials say Abbas will press ahead with a Saturday speech calling for early elections in an attempt to break the political impasse with Hamas.

Hamas has rejected the idea, saying Abbas does not have the legal authority.

"If he is tired, he should resign. And we will help to run an election for president," Zahar said. "But in speaking about elections for the legislative council, he has no role whatsoever."

Many Palestinians are shocked and dismayed at the internecine bloodshed that has stained the streets of Gaza, but few expect the killing to end. The brutal murder of the Balousheh children, in particular, has touched a nerve with the Palestinian public.

As hundreds gathered at the Balousheh home to mourn, one grieving woman said, "I am sure that whoever killed these children came to this house to offer condolences. We must find out who did this."

She cried, "Why are we Palestinians killing each other?"

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/15/shubert.gaza/