A Week Of Funerals In Gaza As Palestinians Feel Israel's Wrath

[Purveyor]

Mariam Rahal, a 53-year-old grandmother and her two sons, were in the wrong place at the wrong time as they drove their donkey cart of oranges home through a mainly residential district of Beit Lahiya. Mrs Rahal was buried yesterday with one of the sons, Mohammed, 23. The pair were innocent victims of a four-day conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants that last night seemed far from over. They were killed when their cart was destroyed by a missile which targeted the car of a rocket-launching crew on Thursday evening.

At the mourning tent for mother and son, as another son, Mansour, 16, lay critically ill in Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, a third brother, Amar, 33, explained: "They had gone to see another of my brothers who has just had a baby and on their way back they stopped to buy some oranges to sell."

Relatives and neighbours described how Mrs Rahal, the mother of eight children from the age of 12 up, and the second wife of a sick man, would rise before dawn to buy fruit and vegetables to sell door to door.

Mr Rahal, a farmer, said: "I have six dunums (1.5 acres) of strawberries and I lost the whole crop because of the ban on exports and the freezing weather. She did everything she could to help me, she looked after everybody."

The tent was decked with the flags not of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, responsible for the 118 Qassam rockets that have been launched into the southern Negev area of Israel this week, but the yellow ones of its forcibly displaced rivals Fatah and the red ones of the little People's Party, a small non-violent leftist organisation of which Mohammed Rahal was a supporter.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3350896.ece