The horror of young Huda Ghalia
A family picnic on a Gaza Strip beach turned to chaos when a shell blast killed a Palestinian girl’s parents and five siblings
MARK MACKINNON
It was a simple affair: the family shared a lunch of hummus, cold meats and juice on the white sands of Gaza’s Mediterranean Sea coast.
“We were sitting together,” she started to recall, before lapsing into silence and trying again. “I was playing with my brothers and sisters.” Then, still expressionless, she stopped talking altogether.
Her 18-year-old brother, Ayham, said his sister is suffering mentally from what she had seen. He, too, saw his parents killed in front of him, but while his sister’s eyes were blank, his glowed with unconcealed rage as he finished the story Huda could not.
His father, he said, took the family to the beach to escape the constant noise of the shelling in and around their home in the battered north Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. But the terrifying din followed them. As the explosions got closer to where they were sitting, Ayham said, the family started to pack up to get off the beach. They called for taxis to take them back to town.
Then, what Ayham believes was a round fired from an Israeli gunboat that was visible just off the Gaza coast crashed into the beach 200 metres from where the family was packing up, causing panic. A second shell sent the family running away from the road, and back toward where they had been picnicking. The third shell was the fatal one.
Gritting his teeth under a wispy beard, Ayham said he supported Hamas’s decision to break the ceasefire after what had happened to his family. “Israel is a powerful country. Usually, when it fires, it knows exactly where its missiles will land. How could this have been a mistake? If they did not intend to kill us, why did they shell us again and again?”