GAZA CITY: A UN human rights mission yesterday listened as witnesses described in gruesome detail the Israeli shelling of the Gaza Strip during a three-week offensive at the turn of the year.
The delegation planned to hold two days of public hearings as part of its investigation into alleged war crimes committed during the 22-day offensive launched in late December, which killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
The group is headed by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, who previously served as chief prosecutor for international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
One of the first people to testify was Musa Silawi, a 91-year-old man who recounted an airstrike on a mosque in the town of Jabaliya that killed 17 people, including his son and four other members of his extended family.
“After the evening prayers we heard the shell hit the mosque and we had no idea what happened. We all started screaming, ‘God help us!’” he said.
“I am 91 years old and I have never seen anything like this catastrophe.” A young wheelchair-bound man named Ziad Al-Deeb described how he had been sitting at home with his family, savoring a brief pause in the fighting, when Israeli forces began shelling his neighborhood.
“We were shocked when we heard the loud noise coming from the Israeli shelling, then one of the missiles landed on top of us. There were 11 people killed,” he said.
“My legs were cut off, and then I looked and saw my father and my family. Most of them had been killed. The children were screaming.” One of the investigators asked if there had been any warning before the strike.
“There was no warning,” Deeb said. “If there had been we would have left.”
Later, they heard from the Samuni family, who draped a banner over a table bearing the pictures of 29 relatives killed in the Israeli blitz. Rescue services were unable to reach the area for three days.
“All I want to know is why,” Salah Al-Samuni said as he choked back tears and held up pictures of some of the children, posing and smiling before the war and then as maimed corpses laid out on stretchers.
“Were they wanted by Israel, were they in the resistance? I really want to know,” he said.
The UN mission was expected to look into several allegations of human rights violations that emerged in the aftermath of the assault, which Israel said was aimed at stemming Palestinian rocket fire from the Hamas-ruled enclave.
“The purpose of the public hearings in Gaza and Geneva is to show the faces and broadcast the voices of victims — all of the victims,” Goldstone said last week.
Israeli authorities have so far refused to allow the investigators into the country and have accused the mission of being pro-Palestinian.
The group plans to hold similar hearings in Geneva in which they will interview witnesses and experts on alleged violations in Israel and the occupied West Bank, it said in a statement.
The UN refugee agency said Israeli fire struck several of its facilities during the war, including schools where civilians were sheltering and a large warehouse filled with humanitarian aid that was set on fire.
