No matter how much the Israelis threw at Khalil Bashir, he stuck with the message that has drawn admiration and scorn in Gaza: there is no time for anger, no time for revenge, there should only be tolerance for the Jews.
It has been a hard view for the Palestinian school headteacher to sustain as the Israeli army has tried to prise him from his home, isolated next to the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom.
Three years ago soldiers requisitioned the top floors of the house, covered the roof in camouflage and barbed wire and installed a machine gun post.
Bashir, his wife, five children and his elderly mother were confined to a single room on the bottom floor during the nightly gun battles between Palestinian fighters and Israeli troops.
Bullets shattered the windows. The Bashirs keep a bucket holding the remnants of an Israeli shell that hit the house.
As the months passed the army added a gunpost outside the kitchen window and expanded Kfar Darom’s security fence until the barbed wire coils ran along the wall of the Bashir home. The army set about trying to force the family out.
The Bashirs’ greenhouses were demolished and their date palms uprooted. Troops threw stun grenades into the house. A soldier shot one of Bashir’s sons, Yasan, in the neck, causing a light flesh wound.
The family was forbidden to move around outside the house except to go into the yard, and visitors had to be screened by the army. Even close relatives were turned away.
But Bashir was as firm in his refusal to move as he was in his message of universal forgiveness.
Then a fortnight ago an Israeli soldier shot Yusuf, his 15-year-old son, in the back at close range. Bashir says it was a cold-blooded attempt to murder his child, who is paralysed from the waist down after the bullet lodged in his spine.
The shooting was all the more brazen because the soldier opened fire in front of two British aid workers visiting the besieged home.
”The soldier aimed to kill Yusuf. There is a bullet in his spine. What else could he have been trying to do? It was most shameless in front of the United Nations delegation and their flag,” said Bashir.
”I think they wanted to send a new message because they sent me several messages before to leave the house.
”Why else did they shoot my son in spite of the fact that they had given permission clearly for the UN delegation to visit my house and they know well I am a civilian and peace loving? I have never been any danger to them. On the contrary, I always call for tolerance.”
The army has described the shooting as a ”tragedy” but Palestinian human rights lawyers say it is further evidence that some Israeli soldiers target innocent people, including children, and that those who do are only held to account when foreigners bring pressure to bear.
Two Britons — a UN worker and a member of a British aid group, International Service — witnessed the shooting. They agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.
Gunposts
They had gone to the Bashir home to check on the family’s welfare. The army agreed that the pair could meet Bashir for 30 minutes but must remain in the yard in sight of one of the gunposts.
”After about 25 minutes, there was a shout from a soldier who told us it was time to leave,” said one of the Britons.
”We walked to the car about 10 metres away. Yusuf was standing with his father just in front of the vehicle, waving to us. We had just begun to reverse when there was a shot.
”Yusuf’s hand was in the air because he was waving. He was hit in the back and his other hand went up and then he crumpled to the ground. He couldn’t walk from the moment he was hit. His legs went to jelly.”
The aid workers hauled Yusuf into the bullet-proof UN vehicle and took him to hospital. They said the soldier opened fire from no more than 20 metres from the boy and that there was no other shooting in the area at the time.
”This comes in the context of what has been done to this family. It has been intimidated, abused, threatened in an attempt to force them to leave the area. None of these things have worked,” said one of the Britons.
Bashir says the shooting of Yusuf tested his faith in his message of tolerance but ultimately reinforced it.
”I have experienced suffering at their hands. Every night they imprison me in my house in one room. In April 2001 they threw a grenade into my house and I had to be taken to hospital.
”Now they have shot two of my children. In spite of all this I believe it is time for tolerance, there is no time for anger, there is no time for revenge,” he said.
”I am still asking the Israelis to shake hands with me. I challenge them to invite me to visit their houses, and I will invite them to visit mine. But up to this moment the only answer they gave me was to shoot Yusuf.”
After the UN protested to the army the Israelis admitted a soldier shot Yusuf.
”This is a tragic event. One of our soldiers shot the boy and right now he is being suspended while we investigate,” said a military spokesperson in Gaza.
The army said the soldier claimed to have shot ”in the direction of the wheel of a vehicle that looked suspicious to him”. The only vehicle in the direction the soldier fired was the clearly marked UN car.
Military investigators have yet to contact Bashir or the British witnesses for their accounts.
The Israeli army vigorously denies that its soldiers target innocent civilians or children.
But during the past 18 months it has been forced to admit that troops shot at least two Britons, and possibly a third, in cold blood.
The Israelis have paid compensation to the family of Iain Hook, a UN worker from Felixstowe shot in the back in Jenin, and have charged a soldier with manslaughter for the killing of Tom Hurndall, a British peace activist targeted by an army sniper in southern Gaza while trying to protect children from Israeli gunfire.
A third investigation, into the killing of a television cameraman, James Miller, in Gaza is under way.
Foreign pressure
In all three cases the army presented as fact the accounts of the soldiers who pulled the trigger that it later admitted were false under pressure from the victims’ families and the Foreign Office. The military says these are exceptional cases.
Palestinian human rights lawyers say they are only exceptional in that foreign political pressure forced the Israelis to confront the truth.
Yusuf is now being treated in a Tel Aviv hospital. The doctors are uncertain if he will regain use of his legs.
”The bullet is stopped in his spine and I’m afraid he will be crippled,” said Bashir.
”Every day I ask if he will walk again. The doctors don’t know but they say there are encouraging signals because he moves his toes. I hope so because Yusuf said to me: ‘I was a sportsman but now I am a cripple, father’.” – Guardian Unlimited Â