Wounded Gaza teenager mourns 13 family members
Source: Reuters
(Adds Israeli military statement, details of funerals) By Nidal al-Mughrabi JABALYA, Gaza, Nov 8 (Reuters) - Palestinian teenager Asma al-Athamna lies in a hospital bed, her body lacerated by shrapnel wounds, her eyes red from weeping. A few hours earlier, Israeli artillery shells crashed around Athamna's house, dismembering her mother and sister, and also killing uncles and cousins. In all, 13 members of Athamna's extended family were killed in the shelling of the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun, Palestinian officials said. "We were asleep and we were awakened by shells hitting the house of my uncle next door. Then the windows to our house were blasted away," said Athamna, 14, her voice shaking. "We fled the house only to be hunted outside. The shells killed my mother and sister and wounded all my siblings." As she spoke, doctors and nurses at the hospital in nearby Jabalya town tended to the wounded, many of them from the Athamna family. Downstairs, dozens of frantic Palestinians sought news of loved ones wounded in the shelling. Medics threw buckets of water into ambulances, trying to wash the blood away. Doctors' gloves, covered in blood, lay on the ground. An Israeli military statement said the army "fired preventative artillery at launch sites from which Qassam rockets were launched (on Monday) into Ashkelon", in southern Israel. Israeli media said an artillery battery had missed its target, about a kilometre (half a mile) from Beit Hanoun. An army spokeswoman could not confirm this. Residents said the Athamna family owned four of the seven houses that were hit. WOUNDED COUSIN Athamna, her mother and her sister managed to get out of their house when the shelling started. "People outside the house called on us to flee. We ran from the house into a narrow corridor. At least eight shells landed in the street," Athamna said. "We were afraid of death inside the house. But death took my mother and sister outside." Lying next to Athamna was her 2-year-old cousin, Mallak al-Athamna. She had shrapnel wounds to the face. The teenager's injured father was also in the hospital. Across Gaza, shops closed in protest at the attacks and to mourn the dead. Activists from the governing Hamas Islamist movement burned tyres and vowed revenge. Families who lived near the shelled homes in Beit Hanoun fled, fearing more Israeli attacks, residents said. Palestinian officials said the Rafah crossing in southern Gaza, which has often been closed since militants abducted an Israeli soldier in June, was reopened to allow passage of some of the wounded to hospitals in neighbouring Egypt. Funerals expected to draw thousands of mourners will be held on Thursday in Beit Hanoun, the focus in the past week of Israel's biggest offensive in Gaza in a year. Israeli forces had withdrawn from the town on Tuesday after a week-long assault designed to stop militants firing rockets. That operation killed 52 people, more than half of them gunmen, hospital officials and residents said.
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