MID: Gaza family returns home after phosphorus blast
By Alfred de Montesquiou20 Jan 2009 9:05 PM
ATATRA, Gaza Strip, Jan 20 AP - The Abu Halima siblings returned to their home as an edgy ceasefire settled on Gaza, hoping to salvage what belongings weren't burnt and to gather their father's body parts for burial.
Of the 14 family members who huddled in their house on January 3 when Israeli forces entered this farming area in northern Gaza, five have died, two were in a coma and three were seriously wounded.
All were victims of a single white phosphorus shell dropped on their home, survivors and doctors said.
"It's been two weeks and it's still burning," said Mahmoud Abu Halima, 20, picking up a bit of phosphorus shrapnel in the hallway. He rubbed the brownish fragment against the floor and it gave off an eery green glow followed by acrid smoke that sent everyone coughing.
White phosphorus is an incendiary agent which is used to illuminate targets at night or create a smoke screen for day attacks. When a person comes into contact with it, it can cause horrific injuries. It ignites when it strikes the skin and burns straight through or until it is cut off from oxygen.
It's not clear how many people have been injured by the chemical in the 22-day offensive launched by Israel to end Hamas' rocket fire on southern Israeli towns. A Gaza Health Ministry statement on Monday said the latest toll showed that about 1,300 people had died and 5,300 been injured in the offensive, nearly half of them women or children.
On Monday, a day after both sides implemented the ceasefire, traces of phosphorus were seen by Associated Press reporters and photographers throughout Gaza City. In the Jebaliya refugee camp, a shell created a still-smoking small crater in the street. Children, covering their face to breathe without choking, brought some garbage to burn over it.
In the town of Beit Lahiya, boys exposed a lump of white phosphorus previously covered by sand. It burst into flames as they kicked it playfully down the road.
The United Nations says white phosphorus was fired at two UN schools packed with refugees during the fighting.
Israel says it only used the explosive as flares or smoke screens to protect tanks during heavy combat, and does its best to avoid civilian injuries. The international Red Cross said last week that it had no evidence to suggest the incendiary agent was being used improperly or illegally.
But a human rights group condemned its use in places filled with civilians such as Gaza.
"Its repeated use in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime," the London-based human Amnesty International said on Monday.
Mahmoud and his siblings have already buried brothers Abdel Karim, 14, Zeid, 12, Hamza, 9, and their 1-year-old sister, Shehad. But their father, a farmer who managed the family's strawberry fields, had been crouching next to the wall where the bomb hit and was blown to pieces. Mahmoud picked up from the rubble a lock of greying hair attached to a piece of bone.
His mother, Salima, 44, lay badly wounded in a ward of Shifa Hospital in central Gaza City. "I was burned by the smoke, it came like a fountain," she said, describing how the chemical burst in all directions after hitting her living room.
Doctors at Shifa Hospital said Salima's wounds at first appeared superficial when she was brought in.
"But it eats at the flesh, it digs deeper and gets to the bone," said doctor Nafiz Abu Shahbah. "The whole body becomes toxic," said the doctor, who heads the hospital's burn unit.
Abu Shahbah, a doctor trained in Egypt, Scotland and Virginia who's headed the Shifa ward for the past 15 years, said he believes the wounds of the Abu Halimas and hundreds of similar cases treated here were inflicted by white phosphorus shells.
Cpt Ishai David, an Israeli military spokesman, declined to comment on the specific use of white phosphorus, stating it was not army policy to discuss the type of ammunition it uses. But Maj Gen Amir Eshel, the army's head of strategic planning, said Sunday that firing shells to provide a smoke screen is allowed by international law.
"It is the most non-lethal kind of weapon we used. I don't see any issue with that," he said.
In Atatra, the surviving members of the Abu Halima family took stock. "For now, we're cleaning," said Omar, 18, still cringing from his own burns to the right arm.
An Israeli army unit occupied the gutted house for two weeks after the family evacuated, leaving behind piles of empty Israeli food rations and hundreds of bullet casings amid the rubble, molten acrylic bed covers, burned children's clothes and walls blackened by smoke.
On a wall, the troops had left a graffiti written in Arabic.
"On behalf of Israel's Defence Forces: we're sorry," it read, with a spelling mistake.
