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Palestinians Vent Anger at Funeral of
13 Killed in Gaza Onslaught

Palestine Media Center
04 May, 2003

After Friday prayers in Gaza City, some 50,000 angry Palestinians joined the funeral procession for the thirteen victims of Thursday’s deadly Israeli military onslaught on the densely-populated al-Shujaiya neighborhood.

Among the twelve Palestinians killed were a two-year-old child, two teenagers and a handicapped man, medical sources said.

Many demonstrators shouted “Revenge, Revenge!!” while others carried Hamas and Palestinian flags and chanted anti-Israeli slogans.

On Thursday, IOF accompanied by tanks, armored vehicles and helicopters stormed the al-Shujaiya neighborhood and commenced intensive firing at passersby and residents’ homes.

Al-Shifa hospital identified the Palestinian victims as Ameir Ayad, 2, Mohammed Dahdouh, 13, Ahmad Ramadan Al-Tetir, 13, Mohammad Naim, 25, Abdullah Al-O’mrani, 21, Mohammed Abu Zareina, 30, Nasser O’mer Helis, 36, Baker Husein Muhaisin, 40, handicapped, Rami khadir saeid, 27, Mohammed Al-Gharably, 67, Yousif Khalid Abu Hein, 30, Mahmoud Khalid Abu Hein, 38, and Ayman Khalid Abu Hein.

More than sixty were wounded; of them three were admitted to the intensive care unit and four undergone major operations, hospital sources said.

Local residents said that Israeli tanks backed by helicopters raided the area after midnight and besieged the house of Fadel Abu Hain.

Fadel Abu Hein, a prominent child psychologist, said his four-story apartment building came under intense fire.

“We are sitting in full darkness. Children are screaming. We are trying to calm them down, but bullets are coming from all directions,” he said.

Director of emergency services at Shifa hospital confirmed that most of the killed were shot in the head.

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) took up positions on top of some houses, firing at residents’ homes, and sounds of explosions and tanks’ shelling could be heard from distance, witnesses said.

Seven IOF soldiers sustained moderate wounds, Israeli sources said.

The Israeli onslaught was seen as blow to peace hopes spawned the day before international diplomats unveiled a long-awaited “roadmap” to ending the 31-month conflict.

The Gaza raid was launched hours after US, UN, EU and Russian diplomats handed copies of the “roadmap” to new Palestinian premier Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The plan aims to achieve peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians and a separate Palestinian state by 2005, through an end to violence, an Israeli pullback from the occupied Palestinian territory and a freeze on illegal Israeli settlement activities.

Palestinian cabinet member Sa’eb Erakat accused the Israeli government of trying to derail the peace plan at its inception.

“Israel has launched its tanks into the Gaza Strip as a response to the roadmap,” Erakat told AFP.

An Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity admitted that the raid’s timing did not help create a climate conducive to the implementation of the plan.

“That’s true, but one could say the same about the terror attack in Tel Aviv. To tell you that it's the best timing and so on, probably not. But it's not related” to the roadmap, he told AFP.

On Wednesday, US President George W. Bush called on both parties to work with the United States, other powers, and “above all, directly with each other to immediately end the violence and return to a path of peace.”

Elderly Dies of Wounds, British Cameraman Killed by IOF

Meanwhile, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed a freelance British journalist Friday night in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah.

Witnesses said that journalist James Miller was filming a documentary on the Israeli occupation army’s house demolitions in Rafah when the Israeli tank opened fire at him wounding him in the neck.

The Israeli occupation army denied troops targeted Miller, saying their “operation” was to uncover tunnels used by to smuggle in weapons from nearby Egypt.

Miller was the third foreigner injured or killed in Rafah in recent weeks.

Earlier, US peace activist Rachel Corrie, 23, died March 16 in Rafah when an Israeli bulldozer she was trying to block from demolishing a Palestinian house ran her over.

On April 11, British peace activist Tom Hurndall, 21, was shot in the head at the Rafah refugee camp. He is in a coma.

Witnesses said an Israeli soldier shot Hurndall in a military watchtower as he stooped to pick up a Palestinian girl and carry her to safety.

Corrie and Hurndall were members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which a group of international peace activist protesting against Israeli illegal acts of aggression in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Also in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical sources said that a Palestinian elderly died in hospital in the Gaza city where he was being treated for severe wounds, which he sustained during the IOF invasion of the Jabalya refugee camp on 11 April.

Medical sources identified the victim as ‘Awad al-Saifi, 52.