For Arab Clan, Days of Agony in a Cross-Fire

[groovedaddy]

GAZA — Israel’s attack has razed buildings and upended families in much of crowded Gaza. But few neighborhoods suffered more than Zeitoun, a district of eastern Gaza City. And few families felt the wrath of the Israeli military more than the Samounis.

Israeli troops swarmed Zeitoun shortly after the ground invasion of Gaza began a week ago, and members of the extended Samouni family said they were moved from house to house as soldiers took over the neighborhood. On Monday, with nearly 100 Samounis huddled together in one house, the shooting and the shelling began, according to accounts of family members and witnesses that were partly corroborated by the Red Cross and the United Nations.

Thirty Samounis died, not all of them quickly. Ahmed al-Samouni, 16, survived.

“I could feel the blood dripping inside my head,” Ahmed said, recalling the days he lay wounded in the bombed-out building. “My father was crawling — he couldn’t move his legs,” he said. His cousin Abdallah, 10, was trying to stand up but kept falling down; his brother Yaqoub, 12, kept removing large pieces of shrapnel from his own stomach; and his sister Amal, 9, was not moving at all. Another brother, Ishaq, 12, was wounded in the legs. He bled for two days before he died.

Ahmed, speaking from his hospital bed, said he wanted to call for help. But his mother, Laila, was among the dead, and her cellphone was nowhere to be found.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/world/middleeast/10gaza.html?_r=1&th&emc=th