The Experiment

"All day there was shooting and bombing. We didn't have anything to eat, we didn't have water to drink. We couldn't sleep. We were sitting and suddenly there was bombing on our house and everyone started to run. I looked to my side, took hold of my boy Mohammad and I started to run. As I ran I looked back and saw on the floor my mother, two cousins and three of my children. All dead."
--Wael Samouni, after Israelis bombed his home in Gaza City, killing his wife, three of his children, his brothers wife and their daughter, January 5, 2009.

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"We started searching but it was hard with the dust, the darkness and the smoke. We went back home and searched everywhere. We found arms, legs, half a head. We didn't find a complete body. They are targeting civilians, children, old women. They want to crack down on Hamas, but Hamas is not in the houses. It's on the front line. Go there and kill them. Not us."
--Samer Abu Asha, after the Israeli rocket attacks incinerated his brother, Amer Abu Asha, along with his two wives, three sons and one daughter, January 5, 2009.

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"I saw women and men parents slapping their faces in grief, screaming, some of them collapsed to the floor. They knew their children were dead. In the morgue, most of the killed appeared to be children. In the hospital, there wasn't enough space for the wounded."
--AP photographer Matt Hamdan writing about the victims of today's Israeli bombing of a UN school in which more than 350 Palestinians civilians - mostly women and children - had taken refuge, January 5, 2009.

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"I saw a lot of women and children wheeled in. A lot of the wounded were missing limbs and a lot of the dead were in pieces."
--Shifa Hospital official Fares Ghanem, speaking about today's Israeli bombing of a UN school

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"Hermetically under siege, after decades of occupation and years of Intifada in which Israel destroyed the little infrastructure that the Strip ever had, following many months of total embargo on everything except basic food products, which brought the economy to a halt, with daily invasions of Israeli tanks and extra-judicial killings by Israeli airplanes, and now with gasoline supplies cut and electricity supply to be reduced soon, the Gaza Strip (1.5 million people, 80 percent refugees) is no longer the world's biggest open-air prison. It's a huge laboratory for human experimentation, run by the Israeli army."
--Ran HaCohen, Beware of Barak, Dec. 27, 2007