New York Times Article Demonstrates Beyond Any Doubt
that Israeli Snipers Deliberately Targeted Palestinian Medics
This
is a quite amazing investigative article from the New York Times. The NYT is a byword in pro-Zionist journalism.
Their reporters have gone out of their way to portray Israel’s murder of over
200 Palestinians in Gaza this year as a self-inflicted piece of theatre
designed to show up Israel as the cartoon below shows.
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| This is the normal nonsense that NYT commentators dish out |
It
is therefore even more amazing that NYT reporters have conducted, much to the
fury of many of their commentators, a forensic analysis of what happened which
demonstrates beyond any doubt that an Israeli sniper deliberately shot into a
crowd of medics and civilians, none of whom posed any threat whatsoever to Israel.
Of course the article suffers from many political mistakes, not least in its tentative heading suggesting Razan's death could have been an accident. It's like saying that if you put a rattlesnake in a baby's cot and he dies that that too is an accident. When you shoot into a crowd of people then you do it with the knowledge you may kill one or more of them.
Likewise there is the acceptance that Israel had a right to prevent the demonstrators accessing the fence that divides Gaza from Israel. The march was entitled the Great Return because all of those involved had the right to enter Israel. The same Israel that prevents anyone accessing Gaza. The article operates within the racist paradigm that Israel can keep out the refugees who came from surrounding areas, on the basis that they are not Jewish. But with all those caveats the article is still breaking new ground.
This suggests that the debate over Israel and Palestine in the USA is slowly changing and that things are not what they used to be. People in America are no longer willing to be spoonfed Zionist propaganda any longer.
The
whole debate over Israel’s wanton murder of unarmed demonstrators is suffused
with racism. The standard Zionist narrative is that ‘Hamas organised it’ – those killed are Hamas, as if that makes it
ok. There is a racist denial of any
agency to Palestinians. Let us be
clear. The Great Return march was
organised by ordinary Palestinians, not Hamas, as a protest against the
intolerable conditions that they live under – from only 4 hours if that of
electricity each day, a perpetual shortage of food, polluted drinking water,
lack of medical facilities, unemployment etc. Gaza is an open air prison with Israel
controlling all exits. Anyone with the
slightest understanding of what is happening in the Gaza pressure cooker
understands this.
Hamas,
which was all but a creation of Israel, is a conservative and yes repressive
Islamic organisation which operates much like any sectarian group on the left
in Britain. It immediately sought to
take credit for the March, no doubt to impress its funders and sponsors in
Qatar and elsewhere.
Israeli
and Zionist propagandists leapt on Dr.
Salah Albardawi’s claim
that the first 50 out of 60 murdered were Hamas activists. Of course even if this had been true it would
have been irrelevant. But it was not true.
Most of the activists were just ordinary Palestinians. Salah Albardawi acted as the idiot he was, seeking to build the
reputation of his organisation at the expense of the Palestinians as a whole.
It fed into Israel’s racist narrative that Palestinians have no minds of their
own and would happily accept Israel’s siege and theft of land but for ‘agitators’
and others. This is a conspiracy theory
no different from all the other anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that Jews have
suffered from throughout the ages.
Razan gives the lie to this Zionist narrative. She was a plucky young woman who was eager to
support those who were taking part in the protests. She was a medic and saw her role as providing
support and comfort to those who had been injured. She was clearly in a white coat which seems
to have acted as a target for Israeli snipers.
Ashraf al-Najjar mourns the death of his daughter.
Her interview by the NYT is very interesting
for 2 reasons. Firstly it isn’t often that
a face and a voice is given to Palestinian victims of Israeli terror. When a Jewish settler is killed we soon learn
that they had a family, how many children, what pursuits they enjoyed
(attacking Palestinians isn’t usually listed) etc. They are portrayed as fully rounded human
beings. Dead Palestinians are just a number. In Israel they even have different coloured
body bags for Jews and non-Jews.
In her interview it was clear that Razan is
what we would call a feminist. She was
determined to do the work she was doing despite no doubt pressure from the
conservative Islamists that Hamas represents that it’s not ‘womens work’. These, of course are the feminists that
western feminists dismiss with their racist and imperialist discourse.
The interview with her grief stricken father is
equally interesting. We are not used to
seeing or witnessing Palestinian grief.
After all they are the other.
Wailing Israeli women, screaming revenge and retribution are usually
what is on offer. Palestinians don’t
have any feeling. It used to be thought
that Black people had a greater tolerance of pain than White people and
therefore it was quite understandable to whip and beat them.
Israel’s supporters and the Zionist movement
embody these racist colonial concepts.
 |
| Why is this racist supporter of war crimes still a member of the Labour Party? |
A word should be said about one particularly
disgusting racist, namely Luke Akehurst of We
Believe in Israel. This apology for a human being has spent his time in the
Labour Party trying to
justify Israel’s war crimes by repeating the canard that the only people
killed were Hamas as if that makes it alright.
A
Day, a Life: When a Medic Was Killed in Gaza, Was It an Accident?
On June 1, an Israeli soldier
shot into a crowd, killing a volunteer medic named Rouzan al-Najjar. Israeli
officials say soldiers only use live fire as a last resort. Our investigation
shows otherwise. We analyzed over 1,000 photos and videos, froze the fatal
moment in a 3-D model of the protest, and interviewed more than 30 witnesses
and I.D.F. commanders to reveal how Rouzan was killed.Published OnDec. 30, 2018CreditAdel Hana/Associated Press
KHUZAA, Gaza Strip — A young medic in a head scarf runs into
danger, her only protection a white lab coat. Through a haze of tear gas and
black smoke, she tries to reach a man sprawled on the ground along the Gaza
border. Israeli soldiers, their weapons leveled, watch warily from the other
side.
Minutes later, a rifle shot
rips through the din, and the Israeli-Palestinian drama has its newest tragic
figure.
For a few days in June, the
world took notice of the death of 20-year-old Rouzan
al-Najjar, killed while treating the wounded at protests against
Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. Even as she was buried, she became a
symbol of the conflict, with both sides staking out competing and mutually
exclusive narratives.
To the Palestinians, she was an
innocent martyr killed in cold blood, an example of Israel’s disregard for
Palestinian life. To the Israelis, she was part of a violent protest aimed at
destroying their country, to which lethal force is a legitimate response as a
last resort.
Palestinian witnesses
embellished their initial accounts, saying she was shot while raising her hands
in the air. The Israeli military tweeted a tendentiously edited video that
made it sound like she was offering herself as a human shield for terrorists.
In each version, Ms. Najjar was
little more than a cardboard cutout.
An investigation by The New
York Times found that Ms. Najjar, and what happened on the evening of June 1,
were far more complicated than either narrative allowed. Charismatic and
committed, she defied the expectations of both sides. Her death was a poignant
illustration of the cost of Israel’s use of battlefield weapons to control the
protests, a policy that has taken the lives of nearly 200 Palestinians.
It also shows how each side is
locked into a seemingly unending and insolvable cycle of violence. The
Palestinians trying to tear down the fence are risking their lives to make a
point, knowing that the protests amount to little more than a public relations
stunt for Hamas, the militant movement that rules Gaza. And Israel, the far
stronger party, continues to focus on containment rather than finding a
solution.
In life, Ms. Najjar was a
natural leader whose uncommon bravery struck some peers as foolhardy. She was a
capable young medic, but one who was largely self-taught and lied about her
lack of education. She was a feminist, by Gaza standards, shattering
traditional gender rules, but also a daughter who doted on her father, was
particular about her appearance and was slowly assembling a trousseau. She
inspired others with her outward jauntiness, while privately she was consumed
with dread in her final days.
The bullet that killed her, The Times found, was fired by an
Israeli sniper into a crowd that included white-coated medics in plain view. A
detailed reconstruction, stitched together from hundreds of crowd-sourced
videos and photographs, shows that neither the medics nor anyone around them
posed any apparent threat of violence to Israeli personnel. Though Israel later
admitted her killing was unintentional,
the shooting appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime,
for which no one has yet been punished.
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Rouzan al-Najjar, 20, was killed by an Israeli sniper on June 1 while she was treating the wounded at protests at the Gaza border.
|
3:45 a.m., Friday, June 1
The last day of her life begins
well before sunrise. Ms. Najjar fries sambousek, small meat pies, to share with
her father for the predawn meal before the Ramadan fast. She shows him a new
suit she bought for her 5-year-old brother, Amir. They pray together before
going back to sleep.
When he awakens that afternoon,
she is gone.
Just around the corner from the
Najjar home in Khuzaa, visible from their rooftop, is a barren field that has
been turned into the stage for one of five
protests along the Gaza-Israel border fence. Nearly every day for the
past nine weeks, hundreds of Palestinians have
flocked here for demonstrations. On Fridays, there can be thousands. The protests often culminate in rocks or firebombs thrown
at the Israeli side, and Israeli tear gas and gunfire in response. The
protesters’ stated goal is to break through the fence and return to their ancestral homes
in what is now Israel. But the immediate focus is the 11-year-old Israeli blockade of Gaza. The blockade,
which is also enforced by Egypt along Gaza’s southern border, has choked Gaza’s
economy and left its 2 million residents feeling imprisoned.
Today, the medics are hoping
for a low-key Friday. But around 5 p.m., the protest gains energy. A crowd
surges toward the fence and the Israelis unleash a suffocating barrage of tear
gas.
There has been no gunfire yet.
It is still possible to kid around. “Let’s go get martyred together,” Ms.
Najjar teases Mahmoud Abdelaty, a fellow medic. “Go on and get hit so I can
take care of you.”
“Are you scared of death?” she
asks Mahmoud Qedayeh, another member of their team of volunteers. “You only die
once.”
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A mural in Bethlehem depicting Ms. Najjar. In death, she became a martyr, famous throughout the Palestinian territories.
|
‘Everybody Knew Her’
For the Israel Defense Forces, she was a nightmare of a
victim: a photogenic symbol of nationhood, youth and compassion.
On March 30, the protests’ first day, Ms. Najjar became the
youngest of three volunteers tending to the wounded, and the only woman.
To the young men in skinny jeans and T-shirts hurling rocks
at Israeli soldiers, she seemed to appear beside them almost as fast as they
fell, bandaging burns, splinting fractures, stanching gunshot wounds, offering
encouragement, sometimes hearing last words.
Journalists noticed. Practically overnight, she became a
fixture of news reports, with a growing social-media following. “Everybody knew
her,” said another medic, Lamiaa Abu Moustafa.
Over the next nine weeks, shrapnel pelted Ms. Najjar’s legs,
a flaming tire burned her, a tear-gas grenade fractured her arm. She cut off
her cast the same day and went back to the protest.
Others cowered when Israeli soldiers fired at them. Not Ms.
Najjar. “The gunshots we hear will not harm us,” she told a colleague. The implication:
You won’t hear the one that kills you.
She inspired other women to become medics, despite social
conventions in this deeply conservative Muslim territory that reserve dangerous
work for men. “I wanted to become like Rouzan, brave and strong and helping
everybody,” said Najwa Abu Abdo, a 17-year-old neighbor, explaining her
decision to volunteer.
Unmarried and uninterested in marriage for the time being,
Ms. Najjar remained very much the star of her own drama. She sent affectionate
texts to peers who each believed they were her closest friend. She lied about
her credentials, pretending to be a college student. She obsessed over
backbiting and jealousy within her social circle.
Yet she had more on her mind.
For Ms. Najjar, the protests were not just an opportunity to
vent at the barbed wire that made Gaza feel like an open-air cage. They were an
opportunity to gain medical experience, to make a name for herself and perhaps,
by making an impression, to further her goal of making nursing school
affordable.
By late
May, she seemed well on her way.
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Around 5 p.m., the protest gains energy. A crowd surges toward the fence and the Israelis unleash a suffocating barrage of tear gas.
|
Tear gas is everywhere. The
Israelis have not yet fired live ammunition, but the acrid fumes are
overwhelming. “Like a dense fog,” says Fares al-Qedra, another medic.
It’s a giant dance: Protesters
run toward the fence, soldiers launch gas grenades, the protesters back off.
Repeat.
Ms. Najjar, noticeable in her
white coat and red lipstick, scurries around spraying saline solution in
people’s eyes to wash away the gas. So many need her help that she cannot keep
up.
A 54-year-old man is hit in the
forehead by a gas grenade. Ms. Najjar rushes to him, bandages the gash, then
runs alongside as he is carried to an ambulance.
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Long coils of barbed wire stretch across the Gaza side of the security fence with Israel. Behind them, the fence and sand berms used by Israeli snipers.
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A Flimsy Fence
Gaza had not always been locked up behind barbed wire,
sensors and bunkers.
Before 2005, Gaza residents could work in Israel. But rocket
attacks and bombings after the Second Intifada erupted in 2000 prompted Israel
to cordon off the strip and eventually abandon its settlements there. When
Hamas seized power from the Palestinian Authority after a weeklong civil war in
2007, Israel imposed a punishing blockade, severely restricting travel and
trade.
By 2017, after three wars with Israel, Gaza’s economy was a
shambles and the authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, was determined to finish
off Hamas. He laid off thousands of Gaza workers and cut electricity to a few
hours at a time.
Just as support for Hamas was cratering, young Gazans called for a mass
protest against the blockade. Hamas jumped at the chance to redirect
popular anger against Israel. Officials promised nonviolence but
nonetheless encouraged protesters to try to break through the fence.
With imams urging people to attend and Hamas chartering
buses, crowds grew quickly. The protests became a kind of nationalist circus.
Mothers brought children, vendors hawked falafel and families slept in tents.
Nearer the fence, young men burned tires, crept up with wire cutters or
improvised firebombs — and presented Israeli snipers with easy targets.
Bloodshed served Hamas’s public-relations purposes, winning
international attention and sympathy. The Israelis obliged.
For Israel, the protests touched a nerve: The border was
demarcated by a fence, not a wall — a
relatively flimsy contraption designed to detect intrusion, not
prevent it. Technically, it was not even a recognized border, only the
armistice line drawn in 1949, after the Israeli-Arab war.
Fearing an onrush of thousands, the army warned Gaza residents that anyone coming
close to the fence would be shot.
Later, Israeli officials explained that military policy
permitted deadly force only as a last resort, against an imminent threat of
violence, and after exhausting lesser options like verbal warnings, tear gas
and warning shots. Spokesmen insisted that commanders had to approve each shot
and, in one subsequently deleted Twitter post, that “We know where every bullet
landed.”
But the first day of protests alone left more than 20 dead
and hundreds wounded. Since then, one Israeli soldier has been killed by sniper
fire. The Palestinian death toll has reached 185.
The victims include two women and 32 children. Journalists. A
double-amputee in a wheelchair. A young man who had a tire in his arms and was running
away from the fence when he was shot in the back.
And medics.
6:13
p.m.
A new friction point has opened
up: A few dozen protesters have drifted about 200 yards north along the fence,
past the point where a bunker on the Israeli side had loosely marked the
protest’s northern boundary.
Some of the protesters begin
tearing at the barbed-wire coils about 40 yards in front of the fence.
Israeli soldiers quickly drive
up and take defensive positions on the other side. They’ve shot people for
less. For now, they fire only a warning shot and more tear gas.
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Photos from Ms. Najjar’s childhood, and her passport.
|
Like a Prisoner
Except for a visit to Egypt in 1997, at three days old, Ms.
Najjar spent her life confined to the cramped Gaza Strip, mainly in Khuzaa, a
tiny border village where nearly everyone is a Najjar — descended from refugees
who fled in 1948 from Salamah, near Jaffa.
Rouzan was precocious, entering kindergarten at 2, picking up
English words and reciting poetry. And happy: Her mother, Sabreen, given to
melancholy, recorded her laughing. “She would move worlds when she saw me sad,”
she said.
But Rouzan was a daddy’s girl. Her father, a lanky
entrepreneur named Ashraf al-Najjar, spoiled her, when that was still possible.
He worked in Israel for months at a stretch, buying appliances or furniture to
sell in Gaza at four times what he paid. There was meat for dinner.
“To be honest, I long for those days,” he said.
As a little girl, Rouzan reached for toy stethoscopes. Her
father expected to send her overseas to study medicine someday.
But then came the rockets, the blockade, the wars. No longer
able to work in Israel, Mr. Najjar opened a motorcycle-repair shop. It was
bulldozed by the Israeli army during the 2014 invasion. He went bankrupt and
took handouts from siblings. Rouzan skipped school field trips to scrimp.
Khuzaa was largely reduced to rubble in the war. Two of
Rouzan’s best friends were killed, one of them along with more than 20 of her
relatives. She saw a cousin’s body torn apart. The Najjars’ home was damaged,
the recordings of her laughter lost. When they returned from shelter, the dead
and dying lay in the streets.
Rouzan said she wanted to learn how to help.
6:17
p.m.
Opposite the Israeli bunker,
Ms. Najjar rushes toward the fence to help a teenager, as Israeli soldiers look
on. Someone behind her throws a rock at them, using her as cover.
Two protesters are trapped near
the barbed wire, lying on the ground.
She and several other medics —
among them her friends Rasha Qudeih and Rami Abo Jazar — make their way forward
again to try to help. They raise their hands to show the Israelis they mean no
harm.
Two shots ring out overhead.
Ms. Najjar waves at the soldiers, who are only about 50 yards away, not to
shoot. But as she edges closer, another shot, much closer, kicks up the sand.
A soldier emerges from behind a
jeep, leveling his rifle. “The sniper is aiming at us!” Ms. Qudeih yells.
The medics turn and run, as a
fresh barrage of tear gas descends on them. Ms. Najjar is the slowest to
retreat.
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| A portrait of Ms. Najjar in her family’s home. |
Fearless at 15
Nearly everyone who saw Ms. Najjar at the protests was struck
by her readiness to place herself in harm’s way. Again and again, there she was
in video clips: the first to those in trouble, the last to safety.
“She was reckless,” said Eslam Okal, a trauma nurse from
Rafah who volunteered at the Khuzaa protests after hearing about Ms. Najjar. “I
told her, ‘Your first priority is safety.’ We had many arguments over this. But
her bravery won out.”
In high school, she was the alpha of a clique of mildly
rebellious teenagers who bridled at the dress code of their all-girls school:
white scarf and hijab, dark trousers. Ms. Najjar wore bright colors and
accepted the scoldings that followed.
Other girls were quiet in class. But Ms. Najjar interrupted
the teachers with questions, stood her ground when chastised and talked back
constantly, though usually through a smile.
How she became so fearless and outspoken is impossible to pin
down, but several people who were close to her cited a traumatic experience
when she was 15.
During 10th-grade finals, Rouzan returned home to a tense
situation in her family’s four-story building. Her aunt, Nawal Qedayeh, whom
Rouzan adored and who was seven months pregnant, was being treated like a
pariah by Rouzan’s paternal aunts and grandmother, who refused to let her use
the communal kitchen. When Ms. Qedayeh was caught scrubbing pots there, a fight
broke out, and Rouzan watched as her grandmother pushed Ms. Qedayeh down the
stairs. Both she and the fetus she was carrying were killed.
Rouzan, the only eyewitness, had a choice: She could stay
silent, forgoing justice for her aunt’s killing and following the social
expectation for a young woman to leave weighty legal matters to the men. Or she
could tell the truth and potentially send her grandmother to prison.
Rouzan testified. Her grandmother was convicted of accidental
manslaughter and spent more than a year in prison.
Nisreen Abu
Ishaq, Rouzan’s high school religion teacher, said the ordeal made her
“stronger and more daring.” After that, said Suzan Mahdi al-Reqeb, a school
administrator, “nothing stood in her way.”
Money did.
Knowing she couldn’t afford college dejected her. She had also failed part of
the entrance exams. Yet she scarcely gave up.
“On the contrary,” her mother said. “She stomped her feet and
said, ‘I’m not going to waste years waiting for things to get better — I’ll
find another way.’”
She began
taking basic first aid courses and discovered that she could simply “forget” to
pay the fees: “Don’t be an idiot,” she told a friend who almost paid $5 in
tuition.
She hung
around emergency rooms, running errands, observing surgery, pretending to
belong until the staff realized she didn’t. When Seif Abdel Ghafour rushed his
dying uncle to Nasser Hospital, he was bewildered by the place until Ms. Najjar
led them where they needed to go. “She didn’t know us,” he said. “But she
treated us like we were her brothers.”
The
protests would let her test her skills. When the Health Ministry made about 200
volunteer medics take a written exam, Ms. Najjar scored 91, the highest in her
group. She was given an identification card, lab coat and white-and-pink
paramedic’s vest.
She wore them like armor.
6:20 p.m.
To the north, past the bunker,
at least two protesters throw homemade firebombs at the Israelis. No damage is
done, but it’s a significant escalation from slinging rocks.
Ms. Najjar is recovering from
the tear gas she inhaled. Nearby, protesters start cutting away a new section
of barbed wire.
Suddenly, there’s a rifle shot.
A young man in the group to the north is hit in the leg.
That is where Israeli forces
are instructed to aim, a tactic, Israeli officials say, intended to minimize
fatalities. But they fire a heavy battlefield round, one meant for targets
hundreds of yards away. At 100 yards, ballistics experts say, a missed shot
could bounce like a skimming stone.
“If I missed, and it will hit a
rock, I don’t know where the bullet will go,” a senior Israeli commander says.
 |
Mohammad Abu Mustafa, who was hit by a canister of tear gas and aided by Ms. Najjar on the day she was killed.
|
‘A Daughter of Men’
Nearly every protester in Khuzaa has at least one story of
Ms. Najjar coming to his rescue. Some have many.
When Mahmoud Abu Shab, 26, a kafiyeh-wearing rock thrower,
was shot through the hand in March, she stanched the bleeding. One day in
April, when he failed to get out of the way of a stretch of barbed wire being
dragged from the fence, she bandaged his wounds.
He didn’t know that she had bought the medical supplies
herself. She was collecting a shekel a day from a group of supportive young
women. She even sold off a gold ring to buy supplies.
“She wanted to always be at the fence, to be a daughter of
men,” said Nada al-Laham, another volunteer, using an expression for a woman
driven by a strong sense of national identity.
Her father said he urged her to take a day off: “She’d say,
‘No, Baba, there are people who need me.’”
Her mother visited the protests, but said their chats ended
abruptly: “Suddenly there would be a wounded protester, and she’d just stop
talking and say, ‘I have to go, there’s someone I need to save.’”
Ms. Najjar
saw her role as part of the Palestinian struggle as much as those burning tires
or wielding wire cutters. She became a practiced spokeswoman, never refusing an
interview request, not always waiting to be asked.
 |
| Published OnDec. 29, 2018 |
“We want to send our message to the world:
I’m an army to myself, and the sword to my army,” she told The Times on May 7. “We
have one goal, and that’s to rescue and evacuate, and to send a message to the
world, that we — without weapons — we can do anything.”
Her Facebook posts could be florid. She once wrote that her
bloodstained uniform carried the “sweetest perfume.”
The protests became Gaza’s biggest social event. Matches were
made, engagements announced almost every day. Young men and their parents
paraded through the Najjars’ home seeking betrothal to the now-famous Rouzan.
“Ten or 12 just during Ramadan,” her father said.
She turned them all down, he said: “She had her own goals in
mind.”
After the
protests ended, she planned to retake and ace the college-admission tests.
Somehow, she would find her way to nursing school.
 |
| Lamiaa Abu Moustafa was Ms. Najjar’s closest friend among the medics. |
6:29 p.m.
Ms. Najjar is back on her feet
beside her colleague, Ms. Abu Moustafa, her closest friend among the medics. Protesters tugging at the barbed wire scramble by them
toward the south, hoisting their long rope over the women’s heads.
Ms. Abu Moustafa is concerned.
The Israelis often shoot at the rope pullers, she says. She urges Ms. Najjar to
leave.
The rope pullers finally make
off with a small coil of barbed wire. Much of the crowd follows. The clamor
around the two women subsides.
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| Ms. Najjar, center, at the protest on the day she was shot. |
Air of Mortality
As the
protests took on a sense of permanence, Ms. Najjar’s bravado became alloyed
with increasingly frequent allusions to her possible demise.
“When my life
finishes, make me a sweet memory for those who know me,” she wrote on Facebook
on May 5.
“They said to
me, ‘Bend a little, as the bullet is on its way to you,’” she wrote later. “I
said to them, ‘The bullet chose me because I do not know how to bend, so why should
I change my way?’”
She texted one
friend an apology in case one of them was martyred.
“Say a nice
prayer for my memory,” she told another on May 24.
Her parents
said such morbid talk was uncharacteristic. While many in Gaza speak of death
as preferable to the here-and-now, Ms. Najjar “clung to life,” her mother said.
“She never wanted to be a martyr. She loved life.”
One of her
happiest days ever, friends said, was Tuesday, May 29. She cashed a $100 check
— a one-time gift to each member of her team of medics, the Palestine Medical
Rescue Service, from its overseers in the West Bank — and joined colleagues on
a small boat that left the Gaza City marina, hoping to catch up to a flotilla
that was challenging the blockade.
They were on
the water nearly three hours under the brilliant Mediterranean sun before being
turned back by an Israeli gunboat.
“I said I hoped we wouldn’t get hit,”
said Mr. Abdel Ghafour, the man she had helped at the hospital and who had
since befriended her. “She said, ‘So be it! We die as friends.’”
 |
| Mohammed Shafee, a medic, was sprayed in the chest and pelvic area by fragments of the bullet that killed Ms. Najjar. |
6:31 p.m.
Sunset is coming and with it,
the end of the fast. Things seem to be quieting down at the fence.
An Israeli soldier looking
across at where Ms. Najjar stands now might see a man waving a Palestinian flag
aloft, a few straggling protesters ambling around, and a cluster of medics
helping a protester on the ground recover from tear gas. No one in the area is
doing anything menacing. The tear gas is doing what it is meant to: making the
use of lethal force unnecessary.
Suddenly, there is another
gunshot.
Mohammed Shafee, a medic, sees
things “fly into my body.” He’s sprayed in the chest by small bullet fragments.
Mr. Abo Jazar perceives an
explosion on the ground, then screams in pain. He’s grazed in the thigh.
Behind them, Ms. Najjar reaches
for her back, then crumples.
As Ms. Abu Moustafa looks on in
shock, Ms. Najjar is picked up by protesters she had treated just a few minutes
ago. As they carry her off, blood pours from her chest.
To Shoot or Not to Shoot
Three medics down, all from one bullet. It seemed improbable.
But The Times’s reconstruction confirmed it: The bullet hit
the ground in front of the medics, then fragmented, part of it ricocheting
upward and piercing Ms. Najjar’s chest.
It was fired from a sand berm used by Israeli snipers at
least 120 yards from where the medics fell.
The Israeli military’s rules of engagement are classified.
But a spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, said that snipers may shoot only
at people posing a violent threat, like “cutting the fence, throwing grenades.”
To deliberately shoot a medic, or any civilian, is a war
crime. Israel quickly conceded that Ms. Najjar’s killing was unintended.
“She was not the target,” Colonel Conricus said. “None of the
medical personnel are ever a target.”
But no Israeli soldiers reported accidental shootings.
After-action reports said snipers aimed at four men that day and hit them all,
the army said.
The Times found the first, third and fourth of those
protesters, each shot in the leg exactly when and how the army said they were.
But The Times could not corroborate the army’s description of the second person
it said was shot, which matched the time Ms. Najjar was killed.
The army said it was a man in a yellow shirt who was throwing
stones and pulling at the fence. But the only man in a yellow shirt anywhere
near the line of fire was not doing that or much of anything else, The Times
found. He stood about 120 yards from the fence and posed no threat.
Even if the man was a legitimate target, there remains the question
of the medics standing behind him.
Former Israeli and American snipers said it would be reckless
to shoot if anyone who was not a legitimate target could be put at risk. Reckless killing can also be a
war crime.
Prof. Ryan Goodman, a New York University expert on the laws
of war, who was a special counsel to the Pentagon on war crimes and targeting
rules, said the key to whether a war crime was committed was whether the sniper
was aware of a high risk that civilians would be harmed.
“The laws
of war would not want any military personnel to deliberately fire in the
direction of the medics,” Mr. Goodman said. “I’m not saying it’s close to the
line. I’m saying it crosses the line.”
 |
| Ms. Najjar’s funeral in Gaza. |
Mistakes Add Up
A senior Israeli commander told The Times in August that 60
to 70 other Gaza protesters had been killed unintentionally, around half the
total killed at that point.
Yet the Israeli army’s rules of engagement remain unchanged,
the military says.
That alone may constitute a separate violation of
international humanitarian law, experts say: After enough civilians have died,
commanders have a duty to make changes to ensure that they aren’t needlessly
targeted.
“You lose the right to say, ‘Oops,’” said Noam Lubell, a
professor of the law of armed conflict at the University of Essex.
The large number of accidental killings, and Israel’s failure
to adjust the rules of engagement in response, raise the question of whether
they were a bug or a feature of its policy.
Colonel Conricus said that not all those killed
unintentionally had been shot unintentionally. Sometimes soldiers had aimed at
the legs of people they considered to be legitimate targets, he said, but
killed them instead of wounding them.
Israel considers members of Hamas fair game whether they are
armed or not, an interpretation of international law that is not universally
accepted.
Colonel Conricus also said the rules of engagement were
merely an upper limit on the use of force, and that the army was doing other
things, such as training troops when they are first assigned to the fence, to
curb civilian casualties.
Israeli military lawyers conceded there had been some
misconduct but said that no soldiers were suspected of intentionally killing
anyone they knew they shouldn’t have.
On Oct. 29, nearly five months after she was killed, Israel’s
military advocate general began a criminal investigation of Ms. Najjar’s death.
But the senior commander told The Times in August that no
recordings of the shooting from the Israeli side existed. He had no idea
exactly when Ms. Najjar had been shot. He learned that from The Times.
Israel seems content to say that protecting its border is a
messy business. “Unfortunately, yes,” said Colonel Conricus, “in a situation
like that, accidents happen, and unintended results happen.”
6:37
p.m.
An ambulance races Ms. Najjar
to a triage tent, where she is deposited in the “red zone” for trauma cases.
She had wanted so badly to
belong here that she used to visit the tent often, even when she was not
escorting patients. Now, the professionals crowd around frantically trying to
save her. The doctor who intubates her is the same one who administered the
Health Ministry exam she aced back in April.
Three people record the scene
on smartphones, a reminder of her
celebrity.
Ms. Najjar takes her last breath
even before she is rushed to a nearby hospital, where she is pronounced dead at
7:10 p.m.
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