GAZA CITY: Israel yesterday bombed the crammed Sheikh Radwan cemetery, sending body parts flying onto neighboring houses and blasting craters into the graveyard.
After the bombing, Palestinians were seen collecting charred body parts in plastic bags and placing them back into the crater that was all that remained of the graveyard. Scores of tombstones were smashed in the bombing on Day 19 of the war on Gaza.
The area smelled of rotting and charred flesh. Passersby covered their faces with cloths as they walked around.
“There was flesh on the roofs, there were small bits of intestines. My neighbor found a hand of a woman. We put it all into a plastic bag,” said resident Ahmad Abu Jarbou. “One man who buried his cousin yesterday couldn’t find the body at all.”
“The Israelis have struck even the dead. There is nothing they have not hit in the Gaza Strip,” lamented Abu Fayez Al-Shurafa, leaning on a cane. “I was shocked they would dare do this. The flesh of the dead flew in the streets and we are collecting them in bags.”
In a predictable response, Maj. Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said the fighter jets targeted a weapons cache next to the cemetery and a nearby rocket-launching site. She claimed the heavy damage was the result of secondary explosions.
Palestinians were unimpressed, complaining that the bombing offended religious sensibilities common to Muslims and Jews. Abdel Karim Al-Kahlout, the city’s grand mufti, said: “Jews would rise up if anyone so much as broke a tombstone in their cemeteries. Attacking the dead is forbidden in every religion and in every belief.”
Israel, meanwhile, tightened its hold around the city. And a top Israeli general said “there is still work” ahead against Hamas. Explosions and heavy machinegun fire echoed through the city yesterday after tanks drew close to Gaza’s densely populated center.
Talat Jad, a 30-year-old resident of the Gaza suburb of Tal Hawa where tanks thrust overnight, said he and 15 members of his family gathered in one room of their house, too frightened to look out of the window. “We even silenced our mobile phones because we were afraid the soldiers in the tanks would hear them,” Jad said. “Some of us recited verses from the Qur’an and others prayed the sounds of explosions would die down.”
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon began a visit to the region yesterday urging an immediate halt to the violence. “My call is for an immediate end to violence in Gaza,” he said in Cairo after meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
“It is intolerable that civilians bear the brunt of this conflict,” he said, adding that the “negotiations need to be intensified to provide arrangements and guarantees in order to sustain an endurable cease-fire and calm.”
Palestinian medical officials said more than 1,000 people have died and nearly 5,000 wounded since Israel began its offensive on Dec. 27. The health minister in Gaza’s Hamas-run government said close to 400 of those were women and children. Thirteen Israelis — 10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians hit by mortar bombs and rockets from the Gaza Strip — have been killed since Israel launched the war on unarmed civilians.
In northern Israel, three rockets launched from Lebanon hit fields outside the town of Kiryat Shmona, the second such attack in less than a week. There was no claim of responsibility and Israel, which responded with artillery, said it hoped to avoid the opening of a second front. No one was hurt in the exchange.
A senior Israeli Army official has said that the war could well continue until the Jan. 20 inauguration of US President-elect Barack Obama. “Israel is still waiting for guarantees on solving the issue of weapon smuggling and things are moving in Cairo,” the official said on condition of anonymity. “Nevertheless, Israel is not feeling any pressure at this point to end the operation,” he said. “The only real exit point we can see at this time would be when Obama enters the White House.”
The bloodshed has highlighted fault lines in the Middle East, with the Bush administration in its final week standing solidly behind Israel, Europe pressing Israel to call off its attacks and Arab leaders speaking out against the Zionist state.
