Ali al-Shaer was delivered in separate ambulances to the mob awaiting his arrival with a mixture of fury and obscene fascination at the Nasser hospital. First came what remained of his charred torso after an Israeli rocket slammed into his car as it worked its way through the cluttered streets of Gaza’s Khan Yunis refugee camp on Monday.
Minutes later, the Palestinian insurgent’s head was delivered in the back of an ambulance followed by a cortege of young gunmen packed into a string of battered old Mercedes, apparently learning nothing about what had fallen from the sky minutes before.
Their Kalashnikov’s clattered against the doors as they got out of their car. One man collapsed in tears, then rediscovered his anger and let off a burst of gunfire as the doctors shook their heads in despair. The uproar at the hospital was a far cry from the resignation with which most Palestinians greet news of the all-too-routine ”targeted assassinations”.
Monday’s attack only wounded its intended target, Mohammed Abu Nseara, who his colleagues at the hospital said was involved in an assault that killed three Israeli soldiers guarding a neighbouring Jewish settlement last week.
Abu Nseara was hauled out of the ambulance charred and appearing to all who scrutinised his bloodied and immobile face as if the Israelis might indeed have brought him to the brink of death. His family certainly thought so. One woman arrived at the hospital hitting anyone in her way as she demanded to see him.
More gunfire, more threats to wipe out Israelis. The police decided that was the moment to retreat and leave the militiamen to their own devices. Minutes later, the crowd calmed as the doctors announced that Abu Nseara was pulling through.
Lingering in a corner, away from the pressing crowd, was a man in a black T-shirt who gives his name to the outside world as Abu Haroun. Periodically he lifted a mobile phone to his lips for a burst of commentary on the unfolding scene. Abu Haroun is a member of the Abu Rish brigades, responsible for some of the recent attacks on Israeli soldiers.
”The Israelis got the wrong man,” he said indifferently of the dead man. ”He was just the bodyguard.”
No sooner had Shaer’s head been delivered than the crowd was briefly stunned into silence by an Israeli tank shell landing nearby. Regaining its collective outrage, much of the mob headed out of the hospital gates and charged down the road in search of the expected victims. But the explosive had landed on a patch of open ground for reasons known only to the soldiers in the tank.
The teenage boys who always crowd into the hospitals for a glimpse of the corpse threatened dire retribution.
They were going to kill all the settlers, they said. They were going to kill a soldier that very day. It was highly likely that their fury would propel a few into the arms of the militias, just as every killing seems to fuel a desire to kill or an indifference to living.
But the killing in southern Gaza is mostly one way with hundreds of Palestinians dead to less than a score of Israelis.
A few hours earlier, the Israeli army shot dead a man in the grounds of a United Nations boys’ primary school adjacent to Nasser hospital.
The victim had come to visit a friend, the caretaker. The boys’ school is opposite the United Nations’ girls’ primary school where 10-year-old Raghda Alassar was shot by a soldier at her desk three weeks ago. She died on Friday. Neither killing was deliberate, but stray bullets from indiscriminate gunfire by the army posts which caught innocent victims. Two weeks ago, an Israeli shell hit Nasser hospital, wounding a doctor and a nurse.
As dusk fell on the refugee camp yesterday, its residents tended to be concerned less with the demise of Shaer than news that their husbands and wives, mothers and fathers who work in Gaza City might not be home for the night.
The army closed the only road from the north after Jewish settlers lined a bridge and pelted Palestinian cars below in protest at Ariel Sharon’s plan to erase the settlements from the Gaza Strip.
When a Palestinian throws a stone at an Israeli, the army defines it as an act of terrorism. It is one reason the Israeli government claims Palestinians are responsible for 23 000 acts of terrorism over the past four years of intifada.
But the handling of the settlers is altogether a different matter. The army left them where they were. It was the Palestinian commuters — who had committed no crime — whom they told to go away.
Riad Ali, an Israeli Arab producer for CNN, was kidnapped at gunpoint on a busy street in Gaza City on Monday. His abductors have yet to issue any demand. Foreigners seized in Gaza have usually been released after a few hours. – Guardian Unlimited Â