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This desperate scene, captured moments after an Israeli
attack last week, moved Tim Butcher to investigate the fate of the young
casualties
It was a stunning picture. Friction
between Israelis and Palestinians generates countless images, but the
photograph of a prostrate teenager in agony next to an inert, almost
restful figure on a road by an abandoned bicycle somehow stood out.
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Gaza destruction: Mahmoud abu Khobayze screams as Khalil Dogmoush lies dead after the shell attack
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So vivid was the light and so dramatic the shell-damaged
Jeep backdrop that you could almost hear the boy's scream.
Look closely at the second figure's white shirt and its bloom of crimson
red might even be growing in front of your eyes.
But while pictures might be worth a thousand words, this
one - taken by an agency photographer who arrived at the scene minutes
after the blast - told you nothing of who the boys were, how they came to
be there and what subsequently happened to them.
To piece that together took days trawling ill-equipped
hospital wards, false leads, interviews with traumatised
mortuary assistants, and luck.
The incident took place in Gaza last Wednesday as the sun sank in
the spring sky. The clearing of winter clouds is normally a harbinger of
good, but not in Gaza,
where clear skies mean one thing - an increase in Israeli military
activity. Bombers, attack helicopters and surveillance drones all perform
better without cloud.
The issue of "who shot first" has long become
academic in this troubled corner of the Holy Land.
Around 1.5 million Palestinians, about a third of whom
were driven from their homes in what is now Israel, when the Jewish state
was founded 60 years ago, are crammed into a scruffy sliver of
Mediterranean littoral known as the Gaza Strip.
Without a meaningful economy, meekly dependent on aid and
with a creaking infrastructure providing piecemeal power, sewage and water,
it is a festering Petri dish for Palestinian resentment. And it is no
surprise where that resentment is aimed. The strip has a short land border
with Egypt,
but the rest of its frontier, airspace and marine approaches are under
Israeli control.
Violence between the two sides has been going on for
decades. Put crudely, Palestinian militants launch attacks against targets
inside Israel - often using primitive rockets aimed at civilians - and
Israel responds hard and heavy.
The Jewish state insists it fires only at confirmed
military targets, but the death toll among Gazan
civilians dwarfs the number of civilian Israelis killed.
Mahmoud abu
Khobayze, 16, heard the sounds of pre-dawn
clashes when he woke up in the tatty breezeblock home he shares with his navvy father, Ibrahim, 40,
mother, five brothers and two sisters in the village of Mughraqe.
The village is home to some of Gaza's oldest population, the once
nomadic desert Bedouin. It is dirt poor, with domestic animals fenced in
not by wire but by hurdles of desert scrub.
Mahmoud had to get up early as he
faced a long walk to the Ain el Hilwa secondary school on the outskirts of Gaza City. Days of border skirmishes had
led Israel
to shut off fuel supplies and there was no school bus.
"It was just a routine day. I could hear some firing,
but it was a long, long way off, so I just went to school," he said.
"I cannot even remember what we studied - English and Arabic, I
think."
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Survivor: Mahmoud abu Khobayze recovering in hospital
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In a much smarter part of Gaza City,
the Sabra suburb near the centre, 19-year-old Khalil Dogmoush was preparing
for work.
The oldest of eight children, he had followed his father, Ismail, into the stonemasonry trade and ran a
granite-cutting workshop to the south of the city. "He was a clever boy
and could have done anything," said Ismail.
"But he showed great skill as a businessman.
No one could believe he was only 19,
he was so like a more experienced man. And he employed seven people at his
own factory, at a time when work is very rare here in Gaza."
The Dogmoush family is one of Gaza's largest. Some
of its more extreme elements were responsible for last year's kidnapping of
Alan Johnston, the BBC journalist, but Khalil
clearly belonged to the mainstream part of the family.
He was so successful that not only did he own a small car
pimped out with tinted windows and go-faster stripes, he also had enough
money to afford fuel (cooking gas for an engine that had converted because
of petrol shortages) at inflated prices. Listening to music as he tooled
down Salahadin
Street, Gaza's
main north-south axis, he might not even have heard the sound of fighting.
Mahmoud and Khalil
came from starkly different backgrounds, but the Israeli war machine is no
respecter of class. It was the sight of a press Jeep near Mughraqe that first caught Mahmoud's
attention.
He had walked home from school and eaten a late salad lunch
before strolling over to the eastern edge of the village where it is
bordered by Salahadin Street. He was
with a friend, Mohammed abu Shalouf,
18, who had an old mountain bike that he used to ride to school. Mohammed
was hanging back a bit, perhaps sensing something was wrong, happy for Mahmoud to wheel the bike.
The Jeep, owned by Reuters, had two of the news agency's
award-winning Gaza
team inside. Clearly marked as a press car, they were seeking a vantage
point from which to film Israeli forces.
"I saw the Jeep stop where there is a view over the
fields and the guys got out and set up their tripod and their camera,"
said Mahmoud. "A couple of boys from the
village walked right up to the cameraman, but I was still about 50 metres away."
Parents across Gaza
tire of telling their children not to go outside during fighting, but they
also tire of their children ignoring them. What else could be as
interesting as watching fighting from a safe distance, say the kids. The problem is that with the tactics used by Israel in the cramped conditions of Gaza, there is rarely
a truly safe distance.
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Frames from Fadel Shana's film show the
muzzle flash from the tank that killed him
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The Reuters cameraman, Fadel Shana, 24, filmed the tank that killed him.
On his film you can clearly see the muzzle flash from the
tank about 1,500 yards away. And two seconds later, just before the film
dies, you can see something dark exploding above Fadel.
He died instantly, almost decapitated by shrapnel. The two boys who Mahmoud saw next to the tripod were also killed in the
blast.
"I heard the first explosion, dropped the bicycle and
fell to the ground," said Mahmoud. "I
had cuts on my neck and chest, but I could move, so I started crawling
away."
The detonation of the first tank round was heard by Khalil as he drove home from a day's work. It was so
close he heard it above the stereo. He had two friends in the car, but
pulled over on Salahadin and ran up the spur road
towards the damaged Jeep, to see if he could do anything to help.
It was just as he passed Mahmoud
crawling back along the asphalt that the second tank shell exploded. This
one contained hundreds of inch-long steel darts, known as flechettes (French for little arrows). They make
disarmingly small entry wounds but do terrible damage once inside the human
body. Khalil was hit by several, but the one that
killed him punctured his heart.
Blood can be seen on the front of his white shirt in the
photograph that was taken in the seconds after the second tank shell
detonated. Mahmoud was also hit by a flechette, puncturing the top of his left thigh. It
meant he could no longer crawl and by the time the photograph was taken it
was all he could do to drag himself up on his arms and scream.
Doctors managed to remove two pieces of shrapnel from Mahmoud's neck and chest that night before he was moved
to Shifa
Hospital, the biggest in Gaza, while experts
work out what to do with the flechette then
lodged deep within his pelvis. An orthopaedic
specialist, Dr Ahmed Akram, said the flechette had already caused extensive nerve damage and
if Mahmoud walks again he would do so with a
limp.
They buried Khalil on Thursday
after midday prayers. Hundreds of Dogmoush family
members gathered outside the five-storey apartment building where his family have lived for decades.
His 90-year-old grandfather, for whom the boy was named,
has lived through three foreign occupations of Gaza, two wars and decades of violent
insurgency and he used to boast that he had never cried in public. At the
sight of his grandson's corpse, he fell to the ground and wailed.
Last Wednesday's incident might just be a footnote in the
bloody history of Gaza,
but for those affected it was the day their lives changed for ever.
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