Kim Bullimore, West Bank
Thirteen-year-old Iman Alhamas was shot dead on October 6 as she walked to school in the Rafah refugee camp. One of 30 children killed during the 18-day Israeli offensive into Gaza, Iman's body was riddled with 20 bullets.
Eyewitnesses who saw the incident reported that she was shot at by Israeli soldiers from several military posts and that one soldier had emptied his entire magazine into her body.
On October 10, the mass Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported that soldiers in the unit had told it their commanding officer had approached the wounded Palestinian school girl, shot her in the head, walked away, then turned back and emptied the rest of his magazine into her body. Three days later, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) was forced to take the unusual step of suspending the officer.
Prior to the newspaper's revelations, the IDF had said that Iman had been killed because the soldiers had believed that she was a terrorist and had suspected she was carrying explosives in her school bag. The bag, however, contained no explosives, only school books.
At least 20,000 Palestinian children have been wounded and at least 650 have been killed by the IDF since the beginning of the Al Asqa intifada in September 2000, many on their way to school, in their classrooms and in their homes.
On October 13, another Palestinian child, 11-year-old Ghadeer Mkheimar, was shot in the chest as she sat in her classroom at the UN school in Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza. Later that day she died from her wounds. She was the second child at the school in less than a month to be killed by IDF fire.
According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, prior to the latest IDF Gaza offensive, 136 children have been killed in Rafah and Khan Younis over the past four years because of the IDF's "indiscriminate shooting, excessive force, a shoot-to-kill policy and the deliberate targeting of children". A study by Physicians for Human Rights concluded that "the pattern of injuries seen in many [civilian] victims did not reflect IDF use of firearms in life-threatening situations but rather indicated targeting solely for the purpose of wounding or killing".
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004.
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