Ma'an
In one corner of Salah Samouni’s modest living room hangs a “martyr poster” – a customary honor printed for those killed in all Israeli attacks, in the West Bank and Gaza over the years.
On the Samouni poster, the 29 faces stare back from eternity, from Muhammad Helmi Samouni, age six months, to Rizqa Muhammad Samouni, age 55. It was this oversize poster that Salah Samouni brought with him to the public hearing held by the UN Fact Finding Mission led by Richard Goldstone in Gaza City in June.
Helmi and Salah Samouni spoke to Ma’an in September, nine months after the war, in one of the remaining houses of the Samouni family. The rest were destroyed during Israel’s war on Gaza in December and January...
On 4 January 2009, nearly 100 members of the extended Samouni family were rounded up by the Israeli army, searched, some handcuffed and corralled into one house. After an excruciating night crammed into Wael Samouni’s storeroom, the Israeli military shelled the building, killing 21. Eight others were killed by Israeli forces in the same vicinity in a span of two days.
The Samouni compound is in a farming area on the outskirts of Gaza. Many members of the extended family are still living in tents, tin shacks and in the wreckage of their homes...
Goldstone’s delegation and the Red Cross visited the Samouni neighborhood and saw the destruction. Salah Samouni told Ma’an he hadn’t seen the UN team’s report, but said they felt it was significant that international teams visited, and listened to their story.
...The story of the deaths in the Samouni compound has been recorded by the Goldstone commission, by various human rights groups and by a few journalists. Still, visiting the Samounis themselves, one gets a sense not only of the terror of the initial killing, but of how trauma persists, how it hangs and stays with the survivors.
“My father, mother, wife, and six-month old son were killed. I had been married for a year and a half. My entire life was destroyed,” Helmi Samouni said. “For months afterwards I would wake up in a nightmare that I was in a different reality, in which I too had died.”
...Salah Samouni echoed the notion that after the massacre, without justice, without accountability for what happened, he and his family are living “in another world. … But this is our world, this is reality.
“After everything that happened, we still want to know why. We are civilians. There was no resistance in this area. … Give us a reason,” he said...
...The story of the massacre begins early on the morning of 4 January, in the first hours of Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza..... At around 5am, Israeli soldiers entered several of the houses in the Samouni neighborhood.
The Goldstone report states: “The soldiers entered Ateya Al-Samouni’s house by force, throwing some explosive device, possibly a grenade.In the midst of the smoke, fire and loud noise, Ateya al-Samouni stepped forward, his arms raised, and declared that he was the owner of the house.
“The soldiers shot him while he was still holding his ID and an Israeli driving license in his hands.
“The soldiers then opened gunfire inside the room in which all the approximately 20 family members were gathered. Several were injured, Ahmad, a boy of four, particularly seriously.”
At around 6:30am, the soldiers ordered the family to leave, they had to leave Ateya’s body behind, but four-year-old Ahmad was still breathing, according to the Goldstone report.
However, “A few meters further a different group of soldiers stopped them and ordered the men to undress completely.”
The report goes on: “Faraj al-Samouni, who was carrying the severely injured Ahmad, pleaded with them to be allowed to take the injured to Gaza [City].”
The soldiers refused his pleas. “You are bad Arabs,” they told the family...
Faraj, his mother, and others then entered an uncle’s house in the neighborhood, where they called a Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulance, which was turned away by the soldiers in the area.
That night, Ahmad died, and about 45 people who had been sheltering in the house decided to walk to Gaza City, defying the orders of soldiers who ordered them to stop, and even shot at their feet, the witnesses told the Goldstone commission. After walking for two kilometers along Salah Ad-Din Street (a main north-south thoroughfare in Gaza), they found ambulances that took the injured to the Ash-Shifa Hospital in the city center.
In the pre-dawn invasion on 4 January, the soldiers also entered the other houses in the Samouni compound...
The soldiers separated the men from the women, and had Salah Samouni’s father identify each family member in Hebrew. The men were also searched and then handcuffed. Following this, the soldiers corralled around 100 members of the extended Samouni family into a storeroom ...
“For 24 hours we called ambulances, and doctors and radio stations, and friends and everyone was saying ‘we can’t get to you, we can’t get to you,’” Helmi Samouni said.
At around 5:30pm on 4 January, women in the house wanted to bake bread with a little flour they found in the house. Some men stepped from the building, collected wood and made a fire. Fourteen-year-old Rizqa Samouni baked bread, as soldiers in neighboring buildings looked on.
Day Two
At six the next morning the children awoke crying with hunger.
“We had no electricity, no gas, and we’d had nothing to eat. The children were starving,” Helmi Samouni said.
Five men, along with some women, went out from the house to collect firewood again, while a woman and child fetched water from a nearby well.
A shell was fired at the men, killing Muhammad Ibrahim Samouni and injuring Salah in the head. Wael and Iyad were also wounded.
...Then another Israeli projectile struck the house. Salah and Helmi Samouni both said it was a missile fired from an American-made Apache helicopter, although the Goldstone commission said it could not establish this definitively. The shell killed 19 people.
....In the dust and chaos of shrieking children after the shelling, the Samounis decided to flee. The able-bodied among them carried as many of the wounded as they could carry. The women waved their scarves.
Flight and aftermath
After proceeding less than 100 meters down the road Israeli soldiers in the same building Salah Samouni pointed out ordered them to stop, firing on them.
“Go back unto death,” the soldiers shouted from a building they were occupying, speaking in classical Arabic.
Salah said he refused the soldiers’ orders. “Fine,” he told them, “then we will die on the road.”
But, Helmi noted, “there were some we could not carry.” He said he was aware that there were some family members who were still alive but they had to leave behind.
For the next four days, PRCS and ICRC personnel and the Samounis themselves attempted to return to their compound to retrieve the dead and rescue the injured. Each time they were turned back by the Israeli military. Various members of the family also told Ma’an that after the initial shelling, Israeli forces knocked down what remained of the house, either with tanks or with bulldozers.
After four days, the Israeli military allowed the ambulances to pass through. Incredibly, rescue workers found two children alive in the rubble of Wael Samounis house, along with bodies. Ma’an met one of the surviving children, 13-year-old Amal (literally "hope"), when visiting the area in September.
...“If the ambulances had been able to get through on the second day or the third day, there would have been more survivors,” Helmi said. Full story
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