Palestinian Drs despair at rising toll of kids shot dead by army snipers

[Tinoire]

((Had to slightly modify the title so it could fit))

Palestinian doctors despair at rising toll of children shot dead by army snipers

As the carnage in Rafah escalates, bullet wounds belie the official Israeli line on killings of young teenagers

Chris McGreal in Rafah
Thursday May 20, 2004
The Guardian

The tiny hole buried under Asma Mughayar's thick black hair, just above her right ear, is an illusion, according to the Israeli army. So is her family's insistance that Asma, 16, and her younger brother Ahmed, were both shot through the head by an Israeli soldier as they fed their pigeons and collected the laundry from the roof of their home in Rafah refugee camp.
But their corpses tell a different story, as do the bodies of other children brought to Rafah's hospital and makeshift mortuaries even before yesterday's carnage, in which Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on a peaceful protest by Palestinians in the camp, killing 10 demonstrators, according to Palestinian paramedics.

Israel disputes the Mughayar family's account: that soldiers shot the children on Tuesday. Hours after their death, Israeli officials blamed the Palestinians, telling reporters that Asma and Ahmed had been killed in a "work accident" - a euphemism for bomb-makers blowing themselves up - or by Palestinian fighters who had left a landmine in the street.

<snip>

"They are liars, liars, liars, because these children have bullet wounds to the head. There is no doubt about it," he says.

Dr Ahmed Abu Nkaria, who pronounced the Mughayar children dead, insists on proving the manner of their killing. He pulls Asma's body from the mortuary's refrigeration unit and fumbles through the teenager's hair to reveal the hole where the bullet entered above one ear and ripped a much larger wound as it emerged above the other.

"The Israeli propaganda is that they were killed in a work accident. These are the kinds of lies they tell all the time," he says. "They say all the dead are fighters. They say they do not deliberately kill children, but about a quarter of the dead from the first day of shooting are children. The evidence is here in the morgue. Does this girl look as if she was blown up by a bomb?"

<snip>
Much much more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1220635,00.html

[Scurrilous]

1. Lies about crimes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221511,00.html

<snip>

"Two acts of carnage, one in Iraq and one in Gaza, competed for the world's horrified attention yesterday: more than 40 people were killed by American fire in a village close to the Syrian border in western Iraq, and at least eight Palestinians had died as a result of Israeli gunfire during a peaceful demonstration at Rafah. There is no need here to be reminded that violent and indiscriminate death is not confined to one side.

When Iraqis are blown apart in Baghdad by a car bomb, or Israelis in Haifa by a suicide bomber, these are instantly and correctly labelled as terrorist attacks. However when American helicopters or Israeli tanks cause death to innocent civilians on a similar scale, there is always an alternative version on offer. The Pentagon's explanation of the attack on the village of Mukaradeeb is that the people killed were not taking part in a wedding party or firing their guns in the air in celebration, as the survivors have insisted. They were occupying a "foreign fighter safe house" and had fired on the coalition forces first. The Israeli army's explanation for the deaths in Gaza is that its fire had been directed against an "abandoned structure" as a warning, and that this may have led to casualties when a tank shell went through a hole in the wall created by a previous shell.

Of course, no one has the monopoly of truth, yet on the facts so far reported in these two cases, as on too many recent occasions, the "official" version is simply not credible. The US military admits that it probably killed 40 people at Mukaradeeb but says that none of them were civilians. So did the "foreign fighters" include the young girl, one of several children whose bodies were shown being buried on television? Or the Iraqi wedding singer and his musician brother, whose funeral in Baghdad was reported yesterday by Reuters? In Rafah, it is not believable that casualties on such a large scale - including some 50 injured as well as the dead - were caused by "warning shots" directed towards an unoccupied area (and since when are tanks used to fire such shots anyhow?). As it happens, we carried yesterday evidence of another earlier evasion - or lie - in Rafah: our correspondent was shown the bodies of four dead children, all with bullet wounds, whom the Israeli army claimed had been killed on Tuesday not by its snipers but by Palestinian bombs."