Family wiped out in beach shelling

by Mehdi Lebouachera in Al-Sudania

June 10, 2006

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

Stunned witnesses who witnessed the bloodshed first-hand recounted how the calm of a day out at the seaside turned into a scene of carnage.

While the Israeli military pledged to investigate the circumstances behind the tragedy, survivors insisted that there was no reason why the army had chosen to target the area, causing the complete wipe-out of one family.

The five members of the Ghali family, who were enjoying a picnic on the beach, were all killed instantly when Israeli shells landed on the beach in the late afternoon: husband and wife Ali and Raisa and their three children aged one, three and ten.

Picnic hampers and red plastic sandals lay scattered on the beach where crimson blood spattered the yellow sand. Fragments of chairs had been thrown dozens of metres from the scene of the shelling.

A teenaged woman 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, one of those 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," he recounted in a trembling voice.

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

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

Ahmed el-Douch, 25, said he could not understand why the Israeli military had fired at people taking a picnic on 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," he added, struggling to contain his anger.

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

The Israeli military said that it had launched an investigation into the incident which capped an upsurge of bloodshed in Gaza where seven other Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes in less than 24 hours.

The Australian