Days after the slapping video made by Israeli soldiers revealed how deeply-dehumanized Palestinians are in the Israeli mind, here is a horrifying story from the Gaza Strip, from the International Solidarity Movement. Two months ago, Ahmed Abu Hashish, an 18-year-old son of a farmer, disappeared in the northern Gaza Strip. His family guessed that he had been killed in the Israeli "buffer zone" carved out of Palestinian land. But it was dangerous to search for him.
The presence of a "murder of crows" in the brush (the tender spirits of ISM are also literary) gave the family a focus, and on June 14, a group of international volunteers went out with the family to search for the body, with Israeli soldiers harassing them the entire time with gunfire. Writes "Orange Jenny" of ISM:
As we rushed to take Ahmed’s body away, the shooting only intensified. We were all heading away from the fence. We’d told the soldiers over the megaphone, that we’d found the body and that we were going. Ahmed’s father hurriedly and in anguish attempted to catch up with the bearers of his son’s corpse, wailing and lamenting his loss as he did so. Still the bullets whistled past our heads, or into the ground behind us.
It struck me, when we finally got out of range of the soldiers’ guns, that our presence in that area that day must not have come as any surprise to them. It was most likely them who had shot Ahmed in cold blood some 54 days previously. They would have known where his body lay. The Israeli military never informed anyone of this. They did not pass on news of Ahmed’s murder to his family. Instead, they waited for almost two months, knowing that at some point and despite the danger, a search party might come looking for the corpse.
Was it necessary to shoot at a group of civilians on a humanitarian mission? Was it necessary to continue shooting at us as they left? Was it necessary for their bullets to force a grieving father to face his own mortality at the very moment he was compelled to recognise that of his son?
