In a follow-up to his “10 Days Inside Gaza” report for the 8 August issue of the NS, Donald Macintyre recounts the latest twist in the story of the Badrans, a Gazan family whose home in the Nuseirat refugee camp was targeted in an Israel air strike.
Ten-year-old Mohammed was blinded in the attack and doctors feared his entire family had been killed.
It transpired that other members of the family had in fact survived the attack – but then Mohammed’s father, Nidal, was killed in another air strike on a mosque in Nuseirat.
As Macintyre writes, “.
.
.
in Gaza, happy endings are always conditional”.
The unfurling fate of the Badran family goes to the heart of the debate around Israel’s actions in Gaza and the high number of children killed in air strikes there.
The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has identified 72 Gazan families of three or more people that have been killed in their own home in the course of Operation Protective Edge: 547 people in all, including 250 minors, 125 women under the age of 60 and 29 men and women aged 60 or above.
Many of these families no doubt included at least one militant from Hamas or another armed group.
In other cases, there is no evidence as yet that they did.
B’Tselem and other human rights groups, such as al-Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, argue strongly that there is no justification for the high number of casualties among civilian relatives.