A family in Gaza City. There are 16 people in the house. The children hide in the bathtub to take cover from the heavy Israeli fire. One son has down syndrome. They’ve already been displaced five times. The boy has difficulty walking, is pure innocence and has zero idea what is going on. Back home they let him be in a corner of the living room, so everyone can keep an eye on him and help him.
Israeli soldiers come. They send in attack dogs. They start mauling Muhammed. They bite him in the chest and the arm. His mother, in her seventies, Nabila Ahmed Bhar says:
“Muhammed could not speak or say any word, but out of horror, he was screaming at the dogs, sometimes saying ‘wala, wala’ [hey you], and sometimes ‘Khalas ya habibi’ [enough, my dear].
“I don’t know how he uttered these words; we had never heard him speak before.”
The soldiers put him in someone else’s bedroom. They don’t let the family see him. He starts begging for water. He doesn’t get any. She’s told there is ‘special water’ for him. The soldiers tell him to be quiet. A doctor or a medic arrives and gives him a sedative.
The family is kicked out of their home, once again. This time without Muhammed. It takes them seven days to get back to their home. The boy is found on his stomach. His body decomposing. Worms crawling out of his face. A tourniquet on his left arm. Bizarre, the soldiers apparently made some effort to stop his bleeding, but then let him die anyway.
During the ordeal the mother asked to be with her son, but this was refused. She could either hear him scream or hum in pain. She says the screams will haunt her forever. She will never know what exactly they did to him as he lay there dying, not allowed to see his family anymore. They were in the same house from the moment the dog attacked him, but the soldiers made sure the mother could neither touch nor see her suffering son. Cruelty on the most perverse level.
After he gets administered a sedative, his mum recounts:
“I asked the soldier, ‘Where is Muhammed?’ He told me, ‘Muhammed is gone.’ I asked again, ‘Gone where?’ He answered, ‘He’s gone. There is no Muhammed,” she told Middle East Eye.
People as sick, maybe sicker than those soldiers, will shrug this off as all the fault of Hamas or as the non-existent, disgusting smear of Pallywood.
All to distract you from the truth. The Israeli army kills innocent people, causes immense suffering, has no respect whatsoever for the lives of unarmed Palestinians and makes the suffering of their victims infinitely worse than needs to be. There was absolutely no need to separate this injured boy from his family or to deny him water. There was no need for him to die and his agony and that of his family were of no military value to Israel in the slightest.
They are telling people to go and be safe in a kill zone where there is no safety to be had and think that makes them moral.
Israel has created a factory of pain in Gaza and has not accomplished anything to ensure its safe from retaliations for its many acts of cruel violence.
More details:
The Confessor 