Gaza survivor: 'We envy the dead'

Israeli journalist Amira Hass just published the second in a series of articles on how 29 members of the same family were killed by IDF forces during the Israeli assault on Gaza last year.

One of the survivors of the Gaza invasion, recalls the events of the day in the video following the report, "We feel [we are] in an exile, even though we are in our homeland, on our land. We sit and envy the dead. They are the ones who are at rest."

Haaretz reports:

"The Samounis were always confident that, in the event of any military invasions into Gaza, they could always manage to get along with the Israeli army. Until 2005, before Israel's disengagement from the Strip, the Jewish settlement of Netzarim was located right next door, and several family members worked there from time to time. When the joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols were active, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security officials sometimes asked the Samounis to "lend" them a tractor to flatten a patch of land or repair the Salah al-Din Road (for example, when a diplomatic convoy needed to pass through). While Samouni family members worked on their tractors, gathering sand, the soldiers would watch them.

"When the soldiers wanted us to leave, they would fire above our heads. That's what experience taught me," recalls Salah Samouni, who lost a 2-year-old daughter in the IDF attack, along with uncles and both of his parents. The older men of the family, among them his father and two uncles who were killed by IDF soldiers on January 4 and 5, worked in Israel until the 1990s in different localities, including Bat Yam, Moshav Asseret (near Gedera) and the "Glicksman Plant." They all believed that the Hebrew they had learned would assist and if necessary save them during encounters with soldiers."

...

"On the morning of Monday, January 5, Salah Samouni walked out of the house and shouted in the direction of another house in the compound that he thought other family members were still in. He wanted them to join him, to be in a safer place, closer to the soldiers. Nothing prepared him for the three shells and the rockets the IDF fired a short time later.

"My daughter Azza, my only daughter, two and a half years old, was injured in the first hit on the house," Salah told Haaretz. "She managed to say, 'Daddy, it hurts.' And then, in the second hit, she died. And I'm praying. Everything is dust and I can't see anything. I thought I was dead. I found myself getting up, all bloody, and I found my mother sitting by the hall with her head tilted downward. I moved her face a little, and I found that the right half of her face was gone. I looked at my father, whose eye was gone. He was still breathing a little, and then he stopped."'


Believing everyone else to be dead as they left fearing more shelling, nine family members were still, in fact, alive. They had passed out during the attack, some of them buried beneath corpses. The youngest was only 3-years old.

Richard Goldstone toured the ruins of the Samouni family compound during the U.N. investigation into the Israeli assault on Gaza. It was included in his report to the U.N. The U.N. Human Rights Council voted to endorse the Goldstone report. The report calls on Israel and Hamas to conduct investigations into war crimes by their forces, or be subject to further international investigations and possibly prosecution.


In the following video, Wael Samouni recounts the events that claimed the lives of so many of his family members:






-Diane