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Palestinians Return to Flattened Khan Yunis
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A Palestinian woman carrying her child as she looks at the mound of her home
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By
Yasser Al-Banna, Mohammad Al-Astal, IOL Correspondents
KHAN
YUNIS, West Bank, December 20 (IslamOnline.net) – Palestinians
returned to the southern Gaza Strip city of Kkhan Yunis to find their
homes reduced to rubble and vegetation uprooted in a deadly two-day
Israeli onslaught.
Israel
launched “Orange Metal” offensive
at dawn Friday, December 17, killing 11 Palestinians, injuring some 50
others, inlcuding three journalists and five children under the age of
16.
The
Israeli army flattened 40 homes and displaced some 400 people during
the operation, according to UN estimates.
“I
no longer can recognize my home as it had been flattened by Israeli
bulldozers,” Fatma Abu Shahma, 52, told IslamOnlin.net as she was
looking desperately at mounds.
“My
family and I are left homeless and have lost our properties to the
Israeli raid. Now I don’t know what to do and where to go.”
With
trees uprooted, many displaced Palestinians families cannot find
shelter from the adverse weather conditions and torrential rains at
this time of year.
Abdel
Rahim Sahlol, 40, said the Israeli occupations troops are mistaken to
think that such bloody raids would put an end to mortar attacks on
nearby Jewish settlements.
“What
did they gain from the destruction of hour homes? Will these crimes
protect their settlements?” He asked angrily.
“It
is far better to call this operation as the ‘rust metal’ instead
of the ‘Orange Metal’,” added Sahlol.
Mustafa
Barghouti, a Palestinian presidential candidate, visited the battered
city Sunday, December 19.
“What
happened is a crime that harms Palestinian lives,” he was quoted as
saying by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
“Farewell”
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A Palestinian woman sits on the rubble of demolished houses in Khan Yunis (AFP) |
Palestinian
experts said the Khan Yunis offensive came as a “last farewell”
bid by Israeli occupation troops ahead of the planned pullout of the
Gaza Strip according to the disengagement plan of Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon.
Kamal
Al-Astal, professor of political sciences in Al-Azhar University in
Gaza City, said Israel wanted to preoccupy the Palestinians with their
daily sufferings and social woes and distract them from pursuing their
legitimate struggle for liberation.
Salah
Al-Bardawil, a writer and a political analyst, said the Israelis
“want to appear as victorious when pulling out of the Gaza Strip and
not as defeatist.”
In
October, at least 14 Palestinians were
killed and 70 others injured in a similar Israeli
incursion into Khan Yunis.
The
northern Gaza Strip was plunged in scenes
of anguish in October following a sweeping Israeli incursion
that killed at least 137 Palestinians, including many children, in the
deadliest onslaught on the Strip since the outbreak of the second
Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000.
At
least 62 Palestinians were killed in Rafah in May as Israel launched a
massive incursion into Rafah, the bloodies of its kind in
decades.
UNRWA
estimated that from 18 May through 24 "a total of 167
buildings in the Tel Sultan, Brazil and Salam quarters
of Rafah were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. These buildings
housed 379 families or 2,066 individuals.
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