Gunfire leaves veiled woman dead on a Gaza street
Source: Reuters
by Shams Odeh BEIT HANOUN, Gaza, Nov 3 (Reuters) - Slowly at first, then with growing confidence, the crowd of Palestinian women, all wearing traditional hijab gowns and coloured veils, approached the outer wall of the Gaza mosque. Inside, 60 Palestinian gunmen were hiding out, pinned down by Israeli tanks and troops positioned just a few hundred yards away, on the other side of an earth barricade. The women, around four dozen of them, some elderly and some teenagers, were hoping to help the gunmen flee, or at least act as "human shields" and press for their release unharmed. As they walked together down a deserted road towards the mosque, pressing themselves up against a high sandstone wall on their right, with Israeli troops off to their left, gunfire rang out from the Israeli positions. The women pushed on, walking faster and pressing closer together, chattering encouragement to one another as they went. More shots cracked overhead as the Israeli troops tried to force the women to turn back. Some did turn around, but others, the majority, pushed on. Then, up ahead, where the front of the procession was advancing, several gunshots rang out from Israeli troops and one woman, dressed in a tan-brown hijab, fell to the ground. The Israeli army said the women were being used as human shields and while it had identified shooting at armed men, it was looking into whether it had shot at the women. Screaming and panicked, several of the woman's colleagues rushed to her side. As she lay motionless on the pavement, the cream veil covering her head fell away. A trickle and then a stream of blood emerged from under her body and ran into the drain at the side of the road. "Bring an ambulance! Bring an ambulance!" screamed the women, throwing their arms up in the air and wailing. Others grabbed one another and began to flee, then thought twice and turned back, determined to push on with their protest. Within seconds two ambulances were on the scene, and the woman, her limbs hanging lifeless, was bundled onto a stretcher. Another woman lay critically wounded nearby, one of seven wounded in all. "World, where are you?" screamed a woman towards a television camera. "People are being killed. There are martyrs." Moments later, several women ran back down the road from the direction of the mosque, struggling to carry among them one of the wounded, a young woman in a black hijab, the bottom of her jeans showing beneath her garment. On the street, another woman held between her hands a patterned black headdress coated in blood. "Look! The brains of a woman of the resistance, splattered on her scarf. Look at it," she said, staring into a camera. At a nearby hospital, men who had heard of the protest waited to find out what had happened to their wives. "I urged my wife to join the other brave women who went to help end the siege of the hero fighters," said Khaled Faleh, a 34-year-old husband. He didn't know if she was still alive.
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