GAZA, 17 August — Five-year-old Ayman Fares could hardly wait for his first day of school but Israeli gunfire cut short the Palestinian boy’s dreams, his mother said yesterday as his flag-wrapped body headed for an early grave.
“They stole his happiness and ours,” said Sumaya Fares, weeping as she held up a pair of Ayman’s jeans and a blue shirt while receiving mourners at her house at the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, shortly before the burial. Sumaya said she had already bought Ayman his school uniform and he was keen to begin a major new stage of his life, when shots fired by the Israeli Army into his refugee camp district cut him down on Thursday.
“Ayman asked me to buy him a pencil, school bag and copy books. He was happy to be joining the school.” The school year starts in early September in Palestinian territories.
Hundreds of Palestinians marched for the child’s funeral yesterday, including several armed men firing automatic rifles into the air. “Revenge is coming soon!” they cried. Hospital officials said Ayman died from a bullet in the back of the head. Palestinian security sources said an Israeli tank approached a residential area on the edge of the camp and opened fire “without reason”.
The camp, flanked on two sides by a compound of Jewish settlements, has been a flashpoint for Palestinian-Israeli violence during the 22-month-old Palestinian uprising for independence in Gaza and the West Bank.
The child’s grandfather, Nadid Fares, said he suffered a light bullet wound in the hand as he and a neighbor tried to get the boy’s body out of the area to the hospital. “There was no mistake. Soldiers knew where they directed their weapons,” he said. “People here live in terror. Israel tanks open fire daily against our houses and fields,” added the old man, who has land close to the army-protected Jewish settlement of Gani Tal.
At least one-third of the 1,503 Palestinian deaths in the intifada have been people under the age of 18.
