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Children in the crossfire

On both sides, children are being killed. But far more young Palestinians have been buried in the past year, and their peers bear many scars.

KHAN YUNIS, Gaza Strip - Prim and neat in their matching smocks, students were taking Arabic dictation Oct. 13 when the familiar sound of gunfire echoed through the Khan Yunis Elementary School.

Three dozen girls dove under their desks. All but one made it to cover.

Gadeer Mekhamer, 11, tried to stand, then collapsed. A spot of crimson was slowly seeping across the crisp black and white stripes of her uniform.

As classmates screamed, a teacher carried the unconscious child outside and flagged down a car. Gadeer was rushed to a hospital, where she died the next day - killed, her teachers and family claim, by an Israeli bullet.

"We are very afraid of the Israelis shooting," says Sabah Safi, an English-language instructor. "Last Tuesday, it continued an hour and all of us - students and teachers - were under our desks. It is very terrible."

The school, in the Khan Yunis refugee camp for Palestinians, is near the barbed wired boundary of the largest Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. Cursed by its location, the school and its 900-plus students are often caught in the cross-fire between Palestinian militants shooting at settlers and Israeli soldiers blazing back.

With Gadeer's death, the school also sits at the fore of a debate that has raged since Israel launched a major offensive in the Gaza Strip this fall.

Does the Jewish state use excessive force against Palestinians, especially children? Or are Palestinians asking for it, as some Israelis claim, by raising their sons and daughters in a "culture of death" that stokes one of the world's hottest conflicts?

Since fighting intensified in September 2000, each side has accused the other of murdering children.

Of the 933 Israelis killed in the past four years, 117 were under 18, many of them blown up by suicide bombers on buses or in cafes.

Of the 3,111 Palestinians who have died since 2000, 652 were under 18, many shot while throwing rocks at heavily armed Israeli soldiers.

But while the number of Israeli deaths has dropped in the last year, partly due to the new security fence in the West Bank, the toll among Palestinian youth remains high.

In October, no children died from terror attacks in Israel. But 13 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers, 11 of them in the Gaza Strip.

Among the victims: Imam al-Hams, a 13-year-old girl who wandered near an Israeli military outpost in southern Gaza on Oct. 5. Her family said she was going to school; soldiers said they thought she was planting a bomb.

The soldiers fired repeatedly even after one remarked that she was just "a little girl" who appeared "scared to death." Then, as seen on a tape obtained by an Israeli TV station, the company commander charged Imam as she lay still, pumped at least a dozen bullets into her body and announced he had "verified the kill."

The commander, who was suspended, is charged with obstruction of justice and illegally using a weapon. His action outraged not just Palestinians, but also many Israelis.

"The ease with which commanders accept the killing of children and innocent civilians demeans the character of Israeli society," editorialized the newspaper Haaretz.

And B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, said the only unusual aspect of Imam's death was that the Israel Defense Forces had started an investigation that led to an indictment.

"There is no such accountability for the vast majority of Palestinian civilian deaths," the organization said.

"The combination of rules of engagement that encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers, together with the climate of impunity, results in a clear and very troubling message about the value the IDF places on Palestinian life."

Growing up in Gaza can be a perilous path to adulthood.

Although only half as many Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip as in the West Bank, children are far likelier to be killed in Gaza.

One reason is that two crowded refugee camps (Rafah, with 91,000 people, and Khan Yunis, with 61,000) are close to Jewish settlements, while the Jabalya camp, home to 103,000, is just across the border from the Israeli city of Sderot.

"These are places of friction and confrontation," says Jabr Wishah of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. "By (Israel's) use of missiles or shelling or shooting into highly dense populations, large numbers of children are injured or killed."

That became evident in September when Israeli troops invaded the northern Gaza Strip, from which militants had fired Qassam rockets that killed two small boys in Sderot.

In retaliation for that and other attacks, Israeli bulldozers reduced part of the Jabalya refugee camp to rubble, leaving hundreds of people homeless. Soldiers also shot at and shelled civilian areas, Palestinians say.

Samah Owda, 11, was at home playing with her sister Oct. 7 when a bullet ripped into the left side of her skull and emerged from the right, an inch above the eye. She was in a coma for 20 days and was still hospitalized in late November.

"The Israelis accuse us of being terrorists, and they are the terrorists," said her mother, Nawal, keeping vigil at her bedside. "What mistake did she do - she was in the house. What am I supposed to think about Israel when I see my daughter like this?"

Another grieving mother says her 14-year-old son, Salmen Abu Faoel, had gone to check on his sister at school when an Israeli tank shell hit him.

"The doctor told me he was in pieces," Kalia Faoel says. "I can't go to the grave because I can't imagine my son in pieces."

In less than three weeks, Israel's Days of Repentance operation killed 116 Palestinians, including 50 civilians, according to B'Tselem. Of those, 26 were under 18.

"The deaths of a large number of civilians who did not take part in the fighting, as well as the enormous property damage, strongly suggest the IDF used disproportionate and illegal force," the organization said.

A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces says the army had no choice but to go into Jabalya, a stronghold of the radical group Hamas, after months of Palestinian attacks on an Israeli city.

"It wasn't one Qassam rocket, it was a daily barrage in which people were killed, people were wounded," says Capt. Jacob Dallal. "We did everything we could to try to stop it, but it came to a point where we said, "This now requires a large-scale operation,' and unfortunately in a large-scale operation, there were a minority of civilian deaths."

Since then, there have been no more rocket attacks on Sderot. Still, Dallal acknowledges, the incursion was "not a perfect solution - we have no interest in killing civilians because it only breeds further resentment among the Palestinians."

But one Palestinian psychologist thinks such actions are part of a long-running attempt by Israel to disrupt the Palestinian social order, starting with its most vulnerable members - children.

During the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers broke into homes at night and woke up young children, says Ahmed Tawahina of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program.

"Then they'd start beating the father or oldest son of the family in order to deliver a message to those kids - that the father who is supposed to protect you is unable to protect himself. I think the psychological aim behind this is to break down the social network among Palestinians, who consider the family structure very important."

Palestinian researchers found that 92 percent of children had experienced at least one traumatic event - a home invasion or arrest of a relative - while 75 percent had experienced multiple events.

But rather than crushing the resistance, Israel strengthened Palestinians' resolve to stop the occupation and get their own state, Tawahina says, "Those who were traumatized in the first intifada are the leaders of the current intifada."

Children growing up in Gaza are exposed to even more jarring sights: Israeli troops bulldozing their homes or the gruesome after-effects of missile strikes on Hamas leaders.

Yasser El Gaber, 11, was in his house last June when it was attacked by Israeli forces planning to assassinate his uncle, a wanted Hamas member. But the uncle wasn't home; instead, tank shelling killed Yasser's father and severely wounded the boy.

Five months later, raised scars cover his body and there is a gaping crater in his right foot. He can no longer play his favorite sport, soccer, because he has to use crutches.

Yasser is polite, but he seems distant, depressed. Asked what he wants to be when he grows up, he replies in a flat voice, "I don't know - maybe I die."

Tawahina says his clinic sees more and more children suffering from depression and other psychological problems. Also common are symptoms of stress, including insomnia, bed-wetting, pulling out hair and biting nails "until their fingers are bleeding most of the time."

Some children act more aggressively, becoming rebellious in school, playing "Arab vs. Jew," or, especially in the case of teenage boys, throwing rocks or other objects at Israeli soldiers.

"As part of their defense mechanism to overcome their weaknesses and problems," Tawahina says, "they try to show by their behavior they are still strong."

To cover this multitude of symptoms, he came up with a new diagnosis: Gaza Syndrome. "These are normal responses to an abnormal situation. If we fix the situation, people will automatically be normal again."

Tawahina knows Israeli children also have been killed, injured and traumatized in what he calls "this crazy cycle of violence." For that reason, Palestinian and Israeli mental health professionals hope to begin meeting next year to "acknowledge the suffering each side has caused the other" and try to bridge the gap between the two.

Meanwhile, the Gaza mental health center works with teachers and parents to spot worrisome behavior so it can be treated before it gets out of hand. Of the scores of schools in Gaza, 20 now have guidance counselors - not nearly enough, Tawahina says, "but it's a start."

Counseling is especially important, he says, when children witness a violent event, like the shooting of Gadeer Mekhamer as she sat at her desk. "Counselors should visit in order for students to say and show what they're feeling. If not, you might get symptoms years later."

As the intifada drags on, there is a growing sense in Gaza that Palestinians as well as Israelis must do more to change the violent environment in which children are raised.

"We demand that both sides keep civilians from being in the middle of any confrontation," says Wishah of the human rights center. He also thinks that "martyr posters," which memorialize slain children, play into Israeli claims that Palestinians have a warped "culture of death."

"This is a very painful issue - according to general opinion here, someone who was killed by Israelis is a martyr and a hero and the posters allow these mothers to live with this pain," Wishah says. "But from my point of view, such things hurt the image of the Palestinian people, and Palestinian mothers even more."

Gadeer Mekhamer's mother doesn't feel that way. Among the few decorations on the drab concrete walls of her apartment are three martyr posters.

One shows a young male friend of the family. Another is of Gadeer's 60-year-old grandmother, struck in the heart by an Israeli bullet in October as she picked mint for her tea.

And the third shows Gadeer herself, with a shy smile.

Of Gadeer's mortal wound, "it's not 100 percent certain" it was inflicted by an Israeli bullet, says Dallal, the army spokesman. However, he acknowledged soldiers were shooting in the vicinity that day in response to militants firing mortars at the nearby Jewish settlements of Gush Katif.

"This is a very problematic area," he says. "The gunmen know it's very difficult to return fire here because of the school, but we do return fire, occasionally, I'd say. Not to return fire would let the gunmen turn this into a full-time haven from which to kill and injure people in Gush Katif."

After Gadeer's death, the school, run by the United Nations, tried in vain to get money to erect higher walls. For now, the shooting goes on, as often as 10 times a day, teachers say, with bullet holes pockmarking almost every surface.

Contrary to Israeli claims, faculty members say the school doesn't advocate the destruction of Israel or teach children to hate Jews. Toy weapons are banned from the grounds; students aren't allowed to play "Arab vs. Jew."

But what Tawahina, the psychologist, calls "the reality of the situation" invariably intrudes. When Gadeer's 9-year-old sister, Abeer, returns home from the school where her sister was shot, it is to a neighborhood where soldiers have bulldozed homes and her grandmother was killed.

"The Israelis," she says in a tiny voice, "are dogs."

Susan Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com