Fury at death of innocents in the Middle East

By JUSTIN HUGGLER

GAZA CITY - We found them in the mortuary, the victims of Israel's air strike on Gaza, tiny bodies lying on slabs that were too big for them. In refrigerator after refrigerator, there were the bodies of children.

They pulled back the covers over one to show the tiny head of a baby, eyes screwed up as if in sleep. Part of the back of its head was missing.

In the next refrigerator lay Mohammed al-Hwiti. They said he was 4 1/2 years old. He too could have been asleep. He was still dressed in a bright-blue top. In the refrigerator below they showed us his brother, Subhi. He was 3 1/2.

Nine of the 15 who died when an Israeli missile ploughed into the residential district at about midnight local time were children.

On the floor of the morgue, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, lay the target of the missile, Sheikh Salah Shehada. The morgue staff pulled back the flag. In a second flag beside him lay a bundle of the body parts of his wife, Leileh, and their 14-year-old daughter.

Shehada was a man with the blood of children as young as these on his hands. He was the head of the military wing of Hamas, the militant group that has been behind more suicide attacks than any other.

The White House, using what was for it unusually blunt language, said: "This heavy-handed action does not contribute to peace.

"This was a deliberate attack on this site, knowing that innocents would be lost as a consequence of this attack."

Yesterday Israel braced for revenge attacks, its security forces on full alert.

Hamas and all the other hardline Palestinian factions swore they would make Israel pay in kind for the ruin caused by a guided bomb reportedly weighing a tonne.

Israel tried to play down the political fallout from the raid. Finance Minister Silvan Shalom said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were not informed of the risk to civilians.

Sharon said it was "one of the most successful operations" to have been carried out by Israel's military. He and his Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben Eliezer, personally approved the attack.

President Moshe Katsav said the political leadership must take responsibility for the raid, which he described as a "mishap". He said there was "no reason to hang anybody for what happened".

Pushing our way out of the morgue to get back to clean air, we had to struggle through an angry crowd. Thousands were congregating outside the morgue. Hundreds of young men, their faces hidden under black hoods, fired guns in the air. "Are you prepared for revenge?" someone screamed through a loudspeaker. They roared back in answer, and the air was thick with the sound of gunfire.

They formed a funeral procession. Thousands kept coming in a great sea of people. They brought the bodies out, and a young man held the body of a baby aloft, swaddled in a Palestinian flag and keffiyeh head-dress.

We found the father of the two dead brothers in the refrigerators, Mahmoud al-Hwiti, in the hospital. His face was badly injured, he found it difficult to speak. His brother, Mohammed, told his story. Not only two of Mahmoud's sons were killed, but his wife as well.

Mohammed and Mahmoud lived with their families in houses next door to each other. When we went there it was just a pile of rubble.

Across the walls of the half-ruined buildings next to those that were destroyed, someone had written: "This is the American weapon. This is the Israeli peace."

"We had no idea we lived next to a guy from Hamas," Mohammed told us. It seems Shehada, who knew he was at the top of the Israelis' hit list, was living here in secret. None of his neighbours knew that in the house next door lived a man whose presence would bring death to them out of the sky.

The deaths of civilians, so many of them children, has unleashed a terrible wave of anger. Tens of thousands joined the funeral march through the streets, many of them firing guns.

All talk of moves towards peace was over. The talk was only of blood.

- INDEPENDENT

Feature: Middle East

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