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"The Children were Shouting. I Still
Can't Sleep Remembering Their Screams"
A
Prayer in Paradise
By GIDEON LEVY
The kindergarten teacher is lying on
a stretcher, covered with blood. The minibus is parked alongside.
From somewhere to the left, the army cannon is firing shells.
The children are lying on the ground next to one another. That
is how one of the children described the morning when they were
driving to their kindergarten in Beit Lahia and an Israel Defense
Forces shell or missile--the army spokesman refuses to say--exploded
several meters away and mortally wounded the teacher before their
eyes.
Two high school-students on
their way to school, Ramzi al-Sharafi, 15 and Mohammad Ashour,
16, were killed in the bombing. And this week the children of
the Indira Gandhi kindergarten buried their teacher, Najwa--which
means "prayer" in Arabic--the mother of two toddlers,
who lay in a coma for about two weeks in Gaza's Shifa Hospital.
Almost nothing was written
in Israel about the shelling of the minibus carrying 20 y! oungsters.
It happened two days before the shelling that killed 22 residents
of neighboring Beit Hanun, at the height of Operation Autumn
Clouds. By a miracle the missile/shell did not hit the minibus
directly, but landed at a distance of 15 meters from it.
The traumatized children from the kindergarten have not recovered.
This week they marched, bearing wreaths and signs they had drawn
in memory of their beloved teacher, in the mourning procession
to Najwa Khalif's home; the adults interred her in the Beit Lahia
cemetery.
Indira Gandhi Hamuda, the owner
of the new kindergarten, an impressive 35-year-old woman, says
that during the past months she used to tell the children that
the Israelis don't kill children, only those who fire Qassams,
and that they had nothing to fear as long as they didn't go up
to the rooftops. Last week one of the children asked: "You
told us that the Israelis don't kill children, but only the Qassam
launchers, so why did they shoot at our minibus?"
What can you say to a four-year-old
who saw his kindergarten teacher lying covered with blood alongside
their minibus? That the firing on the minibus was meant to prevent
Qassams, which! have only intensified since then?
The reply of the IDF spokesman:
"On November 6, the IDF attacked a cell of Qassam-launchers
in the Beit Lahia neighborhood of Sheikh Zayed, whose members
had come to pick up the launchers from which rockets had been
fired the previous night in the direction of the western Negev.
At the time of the attack, no uninvolved persons were identified
in the vicinity of the terror cell. The IDF regrets all injury
of uninvolved persons. Very unfortunately, the terror organizations
habitually launch rockets at Israel from within residential areas,
and thus sometimes unintended injury to civilians caught in the
cross-fire is unpreventable."
In the wretched Kamal Adwan
Hospital in Beit Lahia the latest casualties are lying. You see
them groaning in their unmade beds, surrounded by relatives.
This one was working in the field, this one was innocently walking
when the fire caught them. These are the lucky ones. The seriously
wounded have ! already been transferred elsewhere.
Meanwhile a wounded man is
being rushed to a local clinic--an elderly farmer, who was brought
in on a donkey cart, an improvised ambulance, straight from the
field after an army tank fired at him. His daughter runs after
the cart, screaming. The explosion was heard all over. Passersby
carry the old man into the clinic.
The IDF tanks and bulldozers
are a few hundred meters from us; the road is already torn up
and it is no longer passable. "The IDF at work" as
the media phrase it.
A child arrives at the clinic,
holding two casings from ammunition fired from an Apache helicopter.
Not far away is a mourners' tent for Taher al-Masri, a 16-year-old
boy who was killed the day before.
For a moment, Beit Lahia looks like a pastoral village, and then
suddenly it becomes a focus of fear and loss. Who knows that
as well as the children of the Indira Gandhi kindergarten, with
its colorful Mickey Mouse signs? Mickey also appears on the slide
in the pleasant yard with its decorative plants. The! re are
not many kindergartens in Gaza as well kept as this one.
Indira Gandhi? The father of
the owner of the kindergarten fell in love with the admired Indian
leader and decided to name his daughter after her. (He also named
one of his sons Hassan, after the king of Morocco, and another
son Hussein, after the king of Jordan.) Some people call the
woman Indira, some call her Gandhi, and some call her Indira
Gandhi. A yellow garbage can, a gift from Germany, stands at
the entrance, adjacent to the town's strawberry fields.
There are 260 children enrolled
in this kindergarten, from Beit Lahia, Beit Hanun, the Jabalya
camp and the surrounding area. They are divided into groups in
colorful rooms decorated with murals--children aged four and
five, learning reading, writing, arithmetic and English, between
7:30 A.M. and noon. Only about one-tenth of the parents were
able to pay the tuition: NIS 300 a year. Children of the fallen
and of prisoners attend free of ch! arge. The entrances to several
of the classrooms are covered with grat ing and sheets of plastic,
and have no windows. Indira does not have the money to complete
construction of the new facility, and most of the parents have
no money to pay.
For eight years the kindergarten
wandered among various premises, until this year it moved to
this spacious and attractive structure. Every morning the children
who live far away are transported in two Volkswagen Transporters,
one blue and one yellow; the blue one was the one involved in
the incident. Now the two minibuses bear signs in memory of the
teacher who was buried Sunday, when we arrived.
There is firing in the background.
The kindergarten is almost empty; most of the children joined
the mourning procession for their teacher. Indira's daughter,
Hadil Hamuda, 14, is watching over the handful of children who
have stayed. This morning she went to school, but after half
an hour, when the tanks came loudly rolling in, the teachers
decided to send the students home.
A bird is hopp! ing on the
sand in the kindergarten. Naim al-Rahal, a smiling young man
of 23, the driver of the blue minibus, made his usual rounds
on that Monday two weeks ago. At 6:50 A.M. he arrived at the
Sheikh Zaid neighborhood and waited for one of the children who
came downstairs late. The minibus was already full, 20 children
and three teachers. They didn't go to Beit Hanun that morning
because it was dangerous. Teacher Najwa Khalif was sitting in
the middle seat with her young son Wasim, 3, on her knees and
her daughter Manar, 5, beside her.
While he was still waiting
for the child who was late, the driver suddenly heard a deafening
boom. He says that the shock waves sent the minibus flying. He
started the engine and tried to escape. The child who was delayed
did not manage to board and Al-Rahal saw him running after the
bus shouting, unable to catch up. After the driver drove away,
he noticed that Najwa was bleeding from her neck and head, and
that her head was leaning ! sideways. It turned out that two
shells had penetrated the window and hit her. She was already
unconscious and the blood was dripping onto Wasim who was sitting
on her knees. "The blood spilled onto the little children,
onto their briefcases and onto the books," he recalls.
Al-Rahal quickly drove toward
the nearest hospital, Al-Ouda, while the children's screams filled
the vehicle. "The children were shouting. I still can't
sleep remembering the screams," he says.
The children haven't been sleeping
since then, either. Immediately after the incident, dozens of
frightened parents came to the kindergarten to see what had happened
to their children. The place was filled with little cries of
grief--not only from the children who had been witnesses. They
were all sure that the teacher was dead, but Indira tried to
lift their spirits and told them she would recover from her wounds.
Then she was forced to close the kindergarten for five days.
Some of the children have not returned since then, others still
refuse to travel in the minib! us; one child asked his parents
to move next to the kindergarten so he won't have to travel in
the bus.
It's been two weeks since the
incident and Indira tells of children who still don't utter a
word all day long, and of kindergarten teachers who still burst
out crying.
The sound of a passing helicopter
or tank makes everyone in the kindergarten nervous now. The driver,
Al-Rahal, says that today he saw the boy who came downstairs
late and ran after the minibus, after the shelling, hiding behind
the kindergarten building. It turned out that he had wet himself
and was embarrassed to board the minibus en route home.
"Before this they would
see an Apache and say, 'Here's an Apache,'" says Indira.
Since the incident the children have been using dough only for
making weapons. Beforehand there were some who made dough rifles,
but now they're all doing it," she says. Even the girls.
Najwa Khalif worked in the
kindergarten for three years. Here is a ! picture of her surrounded
by children, and there is her classroom with miniature plastic
chairs in a variety of colors, arranged carefully around the
little tables, with drawings on the wall: a mother duck and her
ducklings, 2 apples + 1 = 3. In the first days after her death
they divided the children in her class among the other classes,
but now they already have a new teacher, a substitute. During
the two weeks when Najwa was fighting for her life they held
daily prayers for her welfare in the kindergarten.
On Sunday morning, when they
learned that she had died, Indira gathered all the kindergarten
children and told them not to be angry, because she had gone
to paradise.
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