A family’s story speaks for the terror of war in Gaza

ZEITOUN, Gaza: Helmi Samouni knelt on the floor of the bedroom he once shared with his wife and their five-month old son, scraping his fingers through a thick layer of ash and broken glass looking for mementoes of their life together. “I found a ring. I might find more,” he said.
His wife Maha and their child Mohamed were killed in the second week of Israel’s 22-day war in Gaza when they were shelled by Israeli forces as they took shelter nearby along with dozens of relatives. In total, 48 people from one family are now known to have died that Monday morning (January 5), in Zeitoun, on the southern outskirts of Gaza City.
Of all the horrors visited on the civilians of Gaza in this war, the fate of the Samounis, a family of farmers who lived close together in simple breeze-block homes, was perhaps the gravest.
Around a dozen homes in this small area were destroyed, no more than piles of rubble in the sand yesterday. Helmi Samouni’s two-storey house was one of the few left standing, despite the gaping hole from a large tank shell that pierced his blackened bedroom wall. During the invasion it had been taken over by Israeli soldiers, who wrecked the furniture and set up sand-bagged shooting positions throughout.
They left behind their own unique detritus: bullet casings, roasted peanuts in tins with Hebrew script, a plastic bag containing a ‘High Quality Body Warmer’, dozens of olive-green waste disposal bags, some empty, some stinking full — the troops’ portable toilets.

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No huge lots of rolling acreage of farmland perhaps, but they eek a living out of what patch of land they did have.

And I do not agree that what Israel has done is right. I know that most Palistinians are just trying to live a peacefull existance just as most Israelis are. Both sides have terrible stories to tell. However if over the years the PLO and now Hamas(hardliners) would stop with the suicide bombers(they seem to have now) and with the lobbing of rockets and morters at civilians. I think this would ratchet down. Israel should open the borders but Hamas must not use that to import weapons. I fear that would happen but hope it would not. The best solution would be for open borders both ways for goods and people with some sort of internaional monitors.