These targets had names

As Israel continues its bombardment of Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) public relations office is providing what for the last decade has become standard war pornography: video feeds from precision guided rockets destroying their targets. The IDF has its own YouTube channel where you can watch these explosive snuff videos at your leisure. Wow -- there goes a mosque! Yikes -- that was the Hamas Government compound! Wonder how many people were inside?

I poked around in this channel the other day, mostly just appalled. All that destruction can't possibly lead to anything but further hatred.

But one video was actually interesting. It was called "Israeli Air Force Strikes Rockets in Transit" and seemed to show what appeared to half a dozen human figures on the ground moving cylindrical objects into an open pickup truck. The black and white film is jerky -- the indistinct men seem to swarm rather than walk, slightly insect-like. On the other hand, their movements don't seem furtive, as if they were hiding something. Can Gazan rocketeers really act so casual? Then comes the blast and they disappear in a fire ball.

You can see this one for yourself if you want [2:42]:


The Israeli journalist Amira Haas has since reported in Haaretz newspaper what seems to have been the story that underlies this gritty video.

According to B'tselem and the Mezan center for human rights, the truck belongs to Ahmed Samur, 55, and is still standing, burnt, beside his workshop in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Next to it hang scorched oxygen balloons, a blade and cables. Nobody dares move the truck or the accompanying accoutrements for fear that the UAVs filming every detail from above will bomb whoever approaches.

"Everything is still there on the ground," said Samur on Thursday. "We only moved the dead."

Just three hours before the attack, Samur's daughter told him that she had heard on the local radio that a house next to his workshop had been bombed.

He immediately got into his Mercedes truck, along with his son and a few neighbors and relatives, and went to the workshop to see the damage.

They were shocked to discover that the neighboring house had collapsed onto his workshop and decided to pack up the expensive tools and take them home before they could be looted.

On the first round, they brought home a drill, a welding torch, a scale, other tools and a gas balloon for cooking. Then they went back to the workshop to pack up the rest: three of six oxygen balloons used for welding, two jerrycans filled with benzene and two filled with diesel.

As Samir's son Imad organized the tools in the truck, his brother-in-law packed his own smaller car with 50 packages of welding electrodes, 4 kilograms each, and drove off.

Samur himself stood on the other side of the street to keep the dust particles from the burning nearby house from flying into his lungs. He looked at the youths packing the truck and was reminded of working bees in a honeycomb - this was just before 5 P.M., he estimates.

"Suddenly I saw a flash of light next to my truck and then it caught fire and I heard the sound of an explosion. I started to run toward the blast, and when I got close and the smoke cleared, I saw bodies, one of them belonging to my son Imad. I fainted. When I woke up they told me that Imad and the seven other young people who were helping him had been killed," he recounted.

Speaking to Haaretz by phone, Samur said: "These were not Hamas, they were our children, and I will tell you their names. Imad Samur, 32; Ashraf al-Dabar, 30; Mahmoud Rabayan, 15; Rami Rabayan, 23; Ahmed Hila, 19; Mohammed Mahdi, 17; Wissam Eid, 14; Mohammed Haber, 20. Four others were hurt, two of them seriously: Bilal Rabayan, 19 and his brother Baha, 16."

Knowing their names doesn't make them any less dead.