[You'll find it buried in the last three paragraphs. Funny. Deaths of US citizens are normally news.]
[The headline is kind of interesting too. It implies one innocent victim. I count 9. And that's just the dead, not even counting the wounded & homeless.]
[Meanwhile, by current mainstream US standards, this has to be ranked as a very critical article.]
The New York Times March 18, 2003
An Israeli Raid Yields Dead Militant and Innocent Victim
By GREG MYRE
N USEIRAT REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip, March 17 Nisreen al-Assar was
enduring a sleepless night at the hospital, tending to her 4-month-old
son, who had a high fever, when ambulances began delivering
Palestinian casualties at dawn today, after an Israeli Army raid in
the central Gaza Strip.
Looking out the window, Mrs. Assar saw her brother-in-law at the
hospital entrance, and feared a family member had been harmed. Racing
to the emergency room, her eyes immediately locked on a little girl
with wavy brown hair and a pink blouse smeared with blood her
3-year-old daughter, Elham on a stretcher.
"She kissed me and my son when we left for the hospital last night,
and now she's dead," said a sobbing Mrs. Assar, 24, surrounded by
mourners this afternoon at a neighbor's house in this refugee camp.
A pair of early morning Israeli Army raids in Gaza killed 10
Palestinians today, including a leading militant in the Islamic Jihad
movement, and netted seven arrests.
It was the latest blow in Israel's month-old Gaza offensive that has
seen the killings and arrests of several senior Palestinian militants.
But the tanks and other armored vehicles, which operate mostly at
night in densely packed cities, towns and refugee camps, have also
inflicted many civilian casualties.
Palestinian security officials and hospital spokesmen said those
killed today included a militant, two Palestinian security force
members, and four civilians aged 19 or younger. The affiliations of
three of the dead were not clear.
Israel says it has been forced to act because the Palestinian security
forces failed to stop attacks, and that militants hide in congested
civilian areas, hoping to protect themselves from the Israeli forces.
As an example, the Israeli Army pointed to its raid on the home of
Muhammad Saafin, an Islamic Jihad leader accused of orchestrating
shooting, bombing and mortar attacks against Israeli targets in Gaza.
"In recent days, Saafin and his group were planning serious attacks,"
the army said.
Soldiers spent much of the night waiting for Mr. Saafin to return to
his apartment in a three-story building in the refugee camp. An
unmanned army drone filmed his car arriving before dawn, and that was
the signal for a special forces unit to strike.
The ensuing events were described by a pool reporter who was allowed
to accompany the special forces.
The troops sped down Gaza's coastal highway, with night-vision goggles
on and headlights off. As army engineers rigged a small explosive to
blow open the front door, Palestinian gunfire began raining down from
the roof of the building. Sleeping residents awoke, and a soldier then
called through a loudspeaker for Mr. Saafin to give himself up.
"Do you want the building to come down on top of you?" the soldier
said in Arabic. "Think of your children."
The response was gunshots, and both sides unleashed repeated bursts of
automatic fire. Amid the chaos, men, women and children streamed out
of the house in their pajamas, and troops pulled them aside.
Mr. Saafin refused to surrender, firing an AK-47 rifle and tossing
pipe bombs from his rooftop perch.
The confrontation ended when a bullet struck him in the face and he
fell to the ground. Mr. Saafin's brother Sami, who was also wanted by
the Israelis, identified the body, and was then placed in a military
jeep, bound and blindfolded.
Army engineers used dynamite to bring down the house, home to five
families, Palestinians said. Last year, Israel revived an old practice
of destroying the homes of militants in a bid to discourage future
attacks. Palestinians and human rights groups have denounced the
measure, saying it punishes innocents as well.
Elsewhere in the camp, soldiers in tanks and armored personnel
carriers exchanged fire with Palestinian gunmen in street-to-street
fighting.
"Our roof was shaking from the tanks in the street," said Eatemad
al-Assar, the sister-in-law of Mrs. Assar who lives in the same house.
"The bullets sounded like a heavy rain."
Eatemad al-Assar, who has five children, was looking after three of
Mrs. Assar's children when she went to the hospital on Sunday night.
The children were scared by the shooting, but also wanted to see, and
gathered in the front room of the house. As the shooting roared, and
ambulances wailed, someone opened the door to look, Eatemad al-Assar
said.
Palestinian gunmen were crawling on their bellies in the street, just
outside. Two Israeli tanks were down the road.
A moment later, 3-year-old Elham was flat on the floor, looking as if
she had fainted; there was no sign of blood, said her aunt. Her
husband splashed water on the girl's face, but got no response. Blood
began dripping from her back, and the family scrambled to hail an
ambulance. She never regained consciousness.
In a separate Israeli action in northern Gaza, troops clashed with
Palestinian security force members and gunmen near Beit Lahia. Two
members of the Palestinian security forces and a civilian were killed,
the Palestinians said.
The Israelis have been patroling the area trying to halt Palestinian
rocket fire on the Israeli town of Sederot. Palestinians fired five
rockets at the town today.
The Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, today praised Rachel Corrie, a
23-year-old American woman who was crushed and killed Sunday as she
knelt in front of an Israeli Army bulldozer preparing to tear down a
Palestinian home in Rafah, in southern Gaza. Mr. Arafat, in Ramallah
in the West Bank, called her "our sister, the martyr Rachel Corrie."
Ms. Corrie's colleagues said that she was in full view of the
bulldozer driver, and that he ran her over intentionally. The Israeli
military said the driver did not see her, and called it a "very
regrettable accident."
Ms. Corrie, from Olympia, Wash., belonged to the International
Solidarity Movement, a group of mostly American and European
activists. The group sympathizes with the Palestinians, and its
members have acted as human shields, repeatedly placing themselves in
front of Israeli troops operating in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
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