SALAH AL-GHOUL had a dream of dwelling peacefully on a farm on the Gaza Strip’s northern border with Israel. He began building his handsome duplex mansion in September 2005, the day after the Israelis had pulled out of the local settlements of Dugit and Eli Sinai. He invested his life savings of $770,000 in the house and adjacent farm buildings in a neighbourhood of clansmen. When the Israeli onslaught began on December 27th, 120 members of his extended family were confined to their homes.
While al-Ghoul’s wife, two sons and five daughters had gone to Gaza city, her son Mahmoud (17) and cousin Akram remained in the Sayafa house to care for the cattle, camels and poultry. At 4.15pm on January 3rd, Salah al-Ghoul and a labourer were in a shed feeding the calves when the house disappeared in a cloud of smoke. The two men covered their faces with their hands and hurried to the house to seek shelter but found a pile of rubble. Mahmoud and Akram were dead and dismembered.
As we drove in al-Ghoul’s elderly Land Rover to the bomb site, he repeated testimony he had sworn in an affidavit before a lawyer at the Palestinian Human Rights Centre which is closely linked to Irish NGOs Trócaire and Front Line. “They are our most reliable partners in Europe,” Jaber Wishah, the centre’s deputy director says of his Irish links. “They provide funds, send interns, organise events, and represent us when we cannot show.” Which is often, due to Israel’s siege of the Strip.Wishah probed al-Ghoul for details. “We had co-ordination with the Israeli military. My cousin was in constant contact with the local commander. The Israelis watch everything that goes on in this area. They even know which birds are nesting in which trees. They also know us and are aware that there were no fighters here.”
En route to his farm, we passed through a torn and tortured landscape. Roads had been erased, wide swathes had been ploughed by tanks through fields, and houses facing the sea had been blasted to clear the route taken by Israeli armour and troops moving north.
The American International School, hardly a Hamas facility, was totally destroyed, as were million-dollar villas belonging to officials of Fatah, the party which administers the West Bank and is engaged in a power struggle with Hamas, which rules Gaza.
As we alighted from his vehicle, al-Ghoul pointed out an Israeli watchtower not 500 metres from his front gate. In the middle distance stood the smoking chimney of the power plant at the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
We climbed over the gate which lay askew across the entrance to his garden, scrambled across chunks of concrete and broken tiles, and peered into the shallow crater next to the blue tiled ornamental pool.
Al-Ghoul smoked a cigarette to collect himself before searching the ruins for metal scraps to identify the type of munitions used. He and the lawyer found a shard bearing the numbers SWC 11. Not Israeli-made. Al-Ghoul’s workmen filled a sack with twisted metal.
The heavy, sweet smell of death hung in the air. In the shed lay six bloated corpses of cows and the ragged form of a baby camel, its front legs exposed to the bone. Feathers from two dead ducks were scattered over the ground.
When Salah’s cousin, Moussa Mahmoud al-Ghoul, who lives nearby, heard the explosion and saw the smoke rising from the house, he called his Israel contact, a Druze officer, and told him that he wanted to send his son in a jeep to rescue the wounded.
“I did not let Tamir put his key in the ignition until we received co-ordination,” Moussa stated.
The jeep was struck by two shells (the casings of which were added to the collection) and Tamir was wounded; his left leg is broken, his body is punctured with shrapnel, and there are fine metal bits in his eyes. A Red Cross ambulance was fired on when it tried to rescue him.
A few hours later, Israeli television showed photographs of this very F-16 strike taken by cameras mounted either on the nose of the bombs unleashed upon the house, or on the war plane that carried out the mission. Salah al-Ghoul plans to launch a legal case against Israel. Wishah is not certain whether this incident constitutes a war crime or a violation of the rules of war.