Nine-year-old Salama died instantly, his head blown off and his body torn to shreds when a massive explosion ripped through a Hamas military parade, killing at least 15 people. The Islamist faction blamed Israel and fired off dozens of rockets, unleashing a catalogue of Israeli air strikes and three sleepless, frightening nights for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Relatives of the victims, like Salama’s father Yossef al-Fayaida, are furious at what they call an outrageous lie and say the explosion has exacerbated tensions between Hamas and the rival Fatah movement of Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas.
”If Israel was behind the killing of my son, I would feel hatred and violence towards them, so of course I feel hatred and violence towards Hamas,” he says.
Most Palestinians believe Hamas lied merely to duck responsibility and have little appetite for the latest cycle of violence.
Fayaida carries around the shrapnel that killed Salama in a plastic bag, shards he is certain come from Hamas’s trademark 60cm Qassam rockets, which have killed five Israelis since 2004.
”They lied to cover their crime,” he says, sitting in the filthy entrance to his apartment block home in the Jabaliya refugee camp.
A member of the rival al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical Fatah off-shoot, Fayaida says he is depressed about deteriorating relations between Hamas and the governing party.
”There is no reason to fire any rockets, because Gaza has already been liberated. Relations between Fatah and Hamas have only got worse since,” he says.
After a weekend of attacks and counter-attacks, Hamas announced on Sunday that its fighters would hold their fire.
But militias such as Hamas’s Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades and al-Aqsa refuse calls from Abbas to disarm, laying bare his weakness in a radicalised territory awash with weapons.
”Abu Mazen [Abbas] can’t do anything. He hasn’t the power to control the Gaza Strip. Everyone is worried things are only going to get worse,” says the father of another victim who refused to give his name.
His 26-year-old son, who recently returned to Gaza from university abroad, groans in agony from his hospital bed, blood seeping from his heavily-bandaged and clamped legs, smashed to pulp.
”Nobody believes what Hamas says, but even if they did stand up and confess what difference would it make?” says his father.
The family’s only concern is to get surgery for the young man. In Egypt or Israel, no one cares. At the moment, Israel’s total lockdown on Gaza makes both impossible.
But for many it is inconceivable that a benevolent Hamas, which looks after families of ”martyrs” and cares for orphans, could have massacred its own people.
Jabaliya, which runs seamlessly into the northern outskirts of Gaza City still bares the scars of a deadly Israeli incursion last year, with homes demolished and walls covered in bullet marks and shell holes.
One registered nurse embarks on lengthy forensic explanations as to why the blast could only have been Israel.
”If the blast had been caused by a Qassam rocket, most of the injuries would have been in the chest and head. But they were in the legs, which comes from an explosion from the sky,” maintains Abu Hamza (26).
But the story quickly unravels. Some claim to have seen a drone, others a helicopter. Hamas has been divided itself on whether it was four missiles or one.
Others point to Friday’s killing of three wanted Palestinians in the West Bank as proof of Israeli aggression.
”So what if Hamas fired Qassam rockets. Nobody slept a wink last night, with F-16s and helicopters flying over all the time. Israel is the reason behind everything,” says Jomaa Abu Dayra, a 55-year-old primary school teacher. – AFP
