Gaza picnic ends in carnage

2006-06-09 21:06

Mehdi Lebouachera

Al-Sudania - Broken camping tables, childrens' sandals and lumps of flesh lay on the sands of Gaza's Sudania beach on Friday, after the Israeli shelling of a picnic party left seven people dead.

Stunned witnesses recounted how the calm of a day out at the seaside turned into a scene of carnage.

The Israeli military said it would investigate the circumstances behind the tragedy, but survivors insisted there was no reason why the army had chosen to target the area.

The shelling wiped out a family.

The five members of the Ghali family, who were enjoying a picnic on the beach, were killed when Israeli shells landed on the beach in the late afternoon.

Husband Ali, wife Raisa, and their three children - aged one, three and ten - died instantly.

Picnic hampers and red plastic sandals lay scattered on the beach, where crimson blood spattered the yellow sand.

Witnesses shocked

Fragments of chairs had been thrown dozens of metres from the scene.

A teenaged girl writhed and wailed in anguish next to the body of a man who had been killed in the strike.

"Father! Father!" she screamed.

Ahmed Abu Amrene, who had been at the beach at the time, was still in a state of shock several hours later.

"I was swimming in the sea when we heard the sound of a shell," said the 20-year-old.

"We rushed over and saw the five members of the family dead on the sand."

Pointing towards the debris, he said: "The family was sitting right here. They were just having a meal."

A fleet of ambulances was dispatched to the scene. In less than an hour, the seven dead and 35 injured had been transferred to hospitals in Gaza City and the nearby Jabaliya refugee camp.

'This is a long way from anywhere'

Ahmed el-Douch, 25, said he could not understand why the Israeli military had fired at people picnicking at the seaside.

"Why did they target a family on the beach? This is a long way from anywhere used by the resistance to fire rockets against Israel. They are not being launched from here," he said.

"The Israelis just fire indiscriminately."

His sense of fury and bewilderment was matched by another bather, Jaber Mughani, who said picnickers had "just come to have a drink and something to eat at the beach" on one of the hottest days of the year so far.

The Israeli military said it had launched an investigation into the incident.

The shellings cap an upsurge of bloodshed in Gaza, where seven other Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes in less than 24 hours.

- AFP