Israel Bombs UN School, Three Killed; Death Toll 100 on Monday Alone

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted January 6, 2009.

It just has to stop, because scores of innocent people are now being caught up in this. Humanitarian supplies are not getting to the places where they're needed. Ambulances aren't getting access to the sick, the dying, the injured, and they're not getting access to hospitals. We're not able to get medical supplies to the hospitals because of this offensive. We have had to cancel today--I hope that might change, but so far we've had to cancel the delivery of our trucks, because of the security situation is just too bad.

AG: We've reported over 500 Palestinians have been killed. And we're talking with Fares Akram, who is the Gazan reporter for The Independent of London. And my question to you is -- we're talking about his father, who was killed on his farm in the first day of the attack. The UN says the number of Palestinians who have been killed, something like 20 percent of them, at least, are civilians. But is it true that that is only counting women and children?

CG: Well, it's extremely confused, and we're being very careful in UNRWA about this figure. What John Holmes, the head of OCHA, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in New York, said last night was that at least 25 percent of all these -- the fatalities are civilians. And I'm afraid that's about as accurate as we can be, given the sheer confusion on the ground.

AG: Well, I want to thank you, Christopher Gunness, for joining us, spokesperson for the UN Relief and Works Agency, speaking to us from Gaza, as we return now to Fares Akram.

Fares, you were describing what happened to your father, who was a judge, who returned to his farm. This is on the first day of the Israeli attack on Gaza.

FA: Mm-hmm. After that, we kept in contact with my father, who was saying that it's very safe there and it has been very quiet and no fighting at all there. But suddenly, on Saturday, three days ago, as Israel was about to start the ground invasion into Gaza Strip, an F-16 warplane suddenly dropped a bomb at our two-story house there, turning it to little more than boulders, destroying it completely.

We got the news after one hour, because the mobile networks were down in Gaza due the overload and because the Israelis hit some of the signal transmission antennas.

We tried to go there, but, of course, the road was cut. But my brother and my uncle took the risk, and they drove there, drove a jeep, sped by a jeep there. And they said the Israeli gunboats were firing at the jeep all of the way, but because the jeep was driving very speedy on a dodgy road, the missiles did not hit the jeep.

When they arrived there, they found the dead body of my father as a pile of flesh, in addition to another teenager from our extended family. Though he was walking with my father into the villa, we found the second teenager thrown 300 meters away from my father's body. At that time, when some other people from my family arrived to help evacuate the facility, another Israeli air strike took place, but this time by Apache helicopters targeting one of our cottages there, and a cousin of me was seriously injured when they were there. And the Israeli gunboats also kept firing on them on their way back to Gaza.

AG: When did you hold the funeral?

FA: We held a very quick funeral next day, on Sunday morning. The convoys of the cars in the funeral were very small and short, because the shelling was ongoing and the Israeli airplanes were flying overhead and were striking everywhere.

I would like to mention that thousands of air strikes have took place in Gaza, and they are still ongoing. But here, we have to mention that Gaza is only 360 square kilometers. When you drop this amount of bombs into this small area, it means there is no safe place in Gaza at all, and it means everything is targeted, as you may be hearing that families there were killed. Complete families made up of the parents and their kids were completely eliminated.

AG: I thought it was very interesting in reading your piece about your dad, reporter's father first casualty of Israel's ground offensive, that you said he was born in Gaza, educated in Egypt, a lawyer and judge who worked for the Palestinian Authority. "After Hamas took over, he quit and turned to agriculture. Dad's father, Fares" -- who you're named for, I suppose -- "who had been driven out of his home in what is now Israeli Ashkelon in 1948, had bought the land in the 1960s"?

FA: Yeah, that's right.

AG: And Jewish settlers had taken it over during the Second Intifada?

See more stories tagged with: israel, palestine, gaza, helen thomas, dana perino, fares akram, unrwa, christopher gunness

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

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