Mideast violence

By Laura King, Associated Press

Transcribed from the clipping

“…Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. At Netzarim Junction, a highway crossroad in the scrubby flatlands of the central Gaza Strip, a lone army outpost guards the access road to a Jewish settlement by the same name.

Like many other settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Netzarim is loathed by Palestinians living in nearby towns and refugee camps as a symbol of oppression and occupation. The Israeli soldiers at Netzarim Junction, many of them teenage conscripts, are far outnumbered by mobs of rioters who have besieged their isolated post each day.

Given their state of hair-trigger jumpiness, it sometimes is only a matter of moments before a lower-level confrontation — stone-throwing repelled by rubber bullets and tear gas — turns into a full-scale battle with live ammunition.

On Tuesday at the junction, a chaotic scene erupted when a rioter on a warehouse rooftop adjacent to the army outpost was struck by a missile. Onlookers said the man — identified as 28-year-old Fahmi Abu Amounah — was throwing stones. But the army said he was probably shooting toward the soldiers.

Friends who jumped to his aid saw that his brains had literally been blown out, sending them into a frenzy of shock, rage and grief. ‘Allahu Akhbar (God is great)!’ they screamed. Palestinian police tried to block the group from charging the Israeli outpost, but they snatched up rocks and furiously stoned the police, quickly breaking through their lines.

As firing broke out, some shots appeared to come from a building on the Palestinian side, pocked with bullet holes. Smoke billowed from piles of burning tires in the street. Israeli helicopters circled overhead, as dozens of youths ran through the street, one waving a Palestinian flag. A veiled Palestinian woman stumbled as she tried to get out of the line of fire.

Demonstrators rushed to carry wounded to arriving ambulances. One drove off so fast that a roll of surgical tape unwound out its open back doors. At least 41 people were hurt and two other men killed in the daylong battle, according to hospital officials. The army acknowledged the use of live fire and said helicopter gunships fired rockets.

Hospital emergency room director Moawia Hassan said a gaping wound like Abu Amounah’s, which blasted away a huge chunk of bone, would likely have come from a high-caliber weapon, but he could not say what type. More than 2,000 people packed the narrow concrete alleys of Nusseirat for Abu Amounah’s funeral, held only an hour after he was killed.

‘My brother, my only brother,’ wept his 20-year-old sister, Falestine. Netzarim Junction has been the scene of some of the most wrenching events in nearly a week of fighting. On Saturday, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead and his father seriously wounded as the two huddled, terrified, trying to find shelter from a hail of bullets.

The army acknowledged Tuesday its soldiers had apparently fired the fatal shots and expressed sorrow over the incident — but blamed Palestinians anew for ‘cynical use’ of children in the confrontation with Israeli troops.

Speaking specifically of that incident, but referring generally to problems faced by soldiers manning outposts under siege, a top Israeli commander said the troops’ field of vision was often limited. At the bunker-like outpost at Netzarim, for instance, soldiers are aiming through small slits, said Gen. Giora Eiland.

On Monday, nearly three dozen Palestinians were hurt by a single anti-tank missile, one of several fired at Netzarim. Word of Tuesday’s gruesome fatal shooting spread swiftly to the ranks of the young stone-throwers massing for a new wave of attacks against the Israeli outpost. ‘We’re a little terrified,’ said Yasser Abu Assi, 19.

He and his friends were regrouping, having scattered when a helicopter gunship flew overhead. ‘We have stones, and they have that,’ he said, gesturing toward it. ‘They are using much more force. But it’s our land, and if I die, my death is a good one.’”

Context added by this archive

The third printing of Laura King’s dispatch that Wednesday, and the only one of the three that keeps the sister. All three papers carry the death of Fahmi Abu Amounah. Lincoln stops there. Spokane adds the funeral, two thousand people in the alleys of Nusseirat an hour after he was killed.

This paper adds the next sentence, and it is the one that turns a casualty back into a family:

‘My brother, my only brother,’ wept his 20-year-old sister, Falestine. Her name is the name of the country. It survived in one American newspaper out of the three, on a jump page, at the end of a paragraph about a funeral.

Cite this item

"Mideast violence," St. Petersburg Times, 4 October 2000. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2000-017. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2000-017