Teenagers shot by Israelis, then run over with a tank


After their mutilated bodies are returned, families of three teenagers 
struggle to understand why they attacked Jewish settlers

By Robert Fisk in Gaza City

Two of the schoolboys were 14, the other was 15; they were internet surfers 
in the local cyber cafe, one of them idling his hours away drawing children's 
cartoons; all three were football enthusiasts. Hours after they had been shot 
dead by the Israeli army near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim, their 
fathers received the three young bodies. They had been driven over by an armou
red vehicle which ­ in 14-year-old Ismail Abu-Nadi's case ­ cut his corpse in 
half.Knife-wielding suicide bombers approaching the Jewish settlement, 
according to the Israeli army and, of course, The New York Times. But even 
Hamas, creator of the vicious Palestinian campaign of suicide bombing, admits 
that the three schoolchildren ­ all ninth-graders in the Salahadin School in 
Gaza City ­ had naively planned to attack the settlement of their own accord 
and with, at most, knives. It urged preachers and schoolteachers to tell 
children that they should never embark on such wild schemes again. And when 
the three boys' fathers talked to The Independent yesterday, they told a 
story of waste and tragedy and childhood anger at Israel's bloody invasion of 
the Jenin refugee camp. "I spent all last night asking myself why my son did 
this,'' Mohamed Abu-Nadi told me as we sat among mourners outside his 
middle-class home. "Did Ismail need money? No. Did he fail at school? No. He 
was first in his class. Were there problems with his family or friends? No. I 
asked myself the same questions over and over. Why? Can you tell me?'' It's a 
painful question to be asked by a distraught father, a highly educated civil 
engineer. Did Ismail want to die? His father said this would have been 
impossible until "three or four months ago''. That was when the schoolboy, 
born in Abu Dhabi and a fluent English speaker, began to ask his father why 
the Palestinians were given no outside help in their struggle for a state. 
"He asked me: 'Why is it that only the Palestinians cannot have a state? Why 
doesn't America help? Why don't the other Arab states help?'." Bassem Zaqout, 
the father of 15-year-old Yussef ­ none of the fathers have met, though their 
sons all attended the same school ­ also thought the Jenin bloodbath 
influenced his son. "When I came back from evening prayers on Tuesday, he had 
left the house," he said. "I had no idea why. Now I think the boys were 
walking towards the Jewish settlement with some kind of idea of attacking the 
Israelis there, but he never touched a weapon. When we got his body back 
yesterday, it was in a terrible state. Dogs had been at it in the night and 
his face was unrecognisable because it had been crushed by a heavy vehicle 
driving over it." Adel Hamdona's 14-year-old son Anwar was returned to him in 
a similar condition. The father's description was cold, emotionless. "He 
didn't have a face. His legs had been severed. He had been driven over 
several times and had been pretty well disembowelled.'' Anwar's body, too, 
had been gnawed by dogs. Mr Hamdona said: "He was just a boy, a child. I am a 
teacher at his school. At five in the evening, he told his mother he was 
going to an internet cafe to surf the net. When he hadn't come home by nine, 
I felt something was wrong. Then we heard shooting from Netzarim." And 
there's a clue as to why Mr Hamdona felt that "something was wrong". For 
Anwar had begun talking to his family about "martyrdom". "The events here had 
an effect on the boy. He was always talking about the suicide operations, 
about martyrs and the concept of martyrdom. He used to want to become a 
martyr. I had a suspicion that a few years later, when he grew up, he might 
do this ­ but not now." Ismail left what appears to be a farewell note to his 
parents. "One of his friends brought me a paper he had written," his father 
acknowledged after talking of his son's education and his puzzlement at the 
world's abandonment of Palestinians. "On the paper, Ismail had written: 'My 
father, my mother, please try to pray to God and to ask for me to succeed to 
enter Netzarim and to kill the Israeli soldiers and to drive them from our 
land'. "I could not believe this. At his age, any other boy ­ and I've been 
to England, the United States, India, Pakistan ­ yes any other boy just wants 
to be educated, to be happy, to earn money, to be at peace. But our children 
here cannot find peace." As for the condition of the bodies, none of the 
fathers wished to speculate on the reasons. Would the Israelis deliberately 
mutilate the bodies? It seems unlikely. Or did they, after shooting the three 
schoolboys, avoid the risk that one may be still alive ­ and with a bomb 
still waiting to go off ­ by driving over their remains? And when their 
bodies were crushed, were they all dead? Also from the Middle East section

    
    

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