BEIT HANUN, Gaza Strip, April 30 — The Abu Odeh family was finishing Saturday lunch when there was a screaming across the sky.
‘Suddenly there was a huge explosion,’ said Intisar Abu Odeh, the family matriarch. ‘The dishes flew and the television jumped in the air.’
Her husband, Muhammad, 54, said with some awe: ‘Everything was upside down. And then I saw my son rushing out of the house, bleeding everywhere, so I took him to the hospital.’
When he got there, he heard that Intisar was at another hospital suffering from shock. With her was his grandson, also named Muhammad, 5, who had been wounded under the chin.
‘I didn't know where to go, where to be,’ Mr. Abu Odeh said. ‘With my son, or my wife and grandson?’
An Israeli artillery shell had slammed into the Abu Odeh house, which sits on the edge of Beit Hanun, in northern Gaza, overlooking an extraordinary vista of empty fields that once were orchards.
The shelling of the area, which began Friday night and lasted until Saturday night, was ordered, the Israeli Army said, in response to four Qassam rockets that had been fired from the Beit Hanun area on Friday night.
The army, said a spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal, did not aim at a civilian house and regretted any casualties. But the army has been returning fire toward the spots where rockets have been launched for a month now, he said. ‘In general, the heavy-handed response has proven itself,’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘The number and accuracy of the Qassams are down, and if the Qassams stop, the shelling will too.’
The army had just dropped leaflets in the area promising ‘quiet for quiet,’ apparently in an effort to enlist the residents' support to put pressure on Palestinian militants to stop firing the inaccurate, homemade Qassams, which — on Friday night, at least — fell harmlessly.
Before the Israeli Army withdrew from the Gaza Strip last year along with all 9,000 Israeli settlers, it cut down the orchards of Beit Hanun in an earlier effort to prevent the militants from firing rockets toward the Israeli cities of Sederot and Ashkelon, visible from the Abu Odehs' broken house.
In a way, the Abu Odehs were lucky. The shell hit their reinforced concrete stairs, which absorbed some of the impact. But the roof of some upper-story rooms collapsed, the walls of two bedrooms crumbled, windows blew out and closed doors were blown out of their frames, one of them hitting a wall and coming to rest across the top of a crib where a baby slept.
Abdel Rahman Abu Odeh, 13, Muhammad's son, was up on the roof filling a water bottle from the tap. Shrapnel pierced his thigh and threw him down, and his trousers filled with blood. His mother held up a pair of jeans that looked as though they had been dipped in a vat of rusty brown paint.
Abdel Rahman, pale and sweaty, lay on a mat in the house, his trousers rolled up over a thick bandage around his thigh. ‘It hurts,’ he said, then said it again. He said he remembered very little except filling the water bottle, the harsh whistling of the shell and the explosion. ‘Then they jumped on me and took me to the hospital,’ he said. On the ride, he said, he watched ‘the blood fill my clothes.’
There is still a piece of shrapnel in his leg, and he will need an operation in two weeks, said his uncle, Moussa Abu Odeh, who lives around the corner. There are school exams in a few weeks, and the family is afraid that Abdel Rahman will miss them, Moussa said as he tried to hold down 5-year-old Muhammad, who had a bandage on his chin.
Moussa and the elder Muhammad both used to work construction in Israel, with farming more of a family exercise than their main source of income. Now all that has stopped with the closing of the Erez crossing into Israel for nearly all Palestinian workers.
‘We have started to live our lives more simply,’ Moussa said. ‘I used to eat meat twice a week, but now it's less. We get food packages from the United Nations and charitable organizations,’ he added, mostly containing staples like rice and cooking oil, ‘and sometimes I can work a day here and there.’
In fact, Moussa had just returned from a protest rally of unemployed workers at the offices of the European Union and the United Nations, he said. ‘We gave them a letter explaining our bad situation,’ he said, ‘and asking for aid to continue to the Palestinian Authority,’ now run by the militant faction Hamas.
‘We were depending for help on our relatives who worked in the Palestinian Authority,’ Moussa said. ‘But now they need help, because they have no salaries.’
The authority paid February salaries in mid-March, but March and April salaries, due on the last day of the month, have not been paid, in part because Israel refuses to hand over tax receipts, and the West refuses to give budget aid, to a government run by Hamas, which is listed as a ‘terrorist’ group.
All told, seven Palestinians were wounded in the day of shelling, including another youngster in Beit Hanun. Since the Israelis pulled out of Gaza last September, 175 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli actions, and 34 Israelis (28 civilians, 3 soldiers and 3 foreigners) have been killed by Palestinians, according to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group gives similar figures: 170 Palestinians and 30 Israelis killed.
In the same period, the Palestinian group says, 713 Palestinians were wounded, compared with 176 Israelis, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Captain Dallal, the army spokesman, says the Israeli shelling has helped to reduce the number of Qassam rockets fired to 13 in the last week from 32 in the first week of April, with a total of 83 for the month, compared with 134 fired during March. ‘We have to stop this firing into Israel,’ he said. ‘Otherwise the situation will escalate, and a ground operation will cause many more casualties.’
Muhammad Abu Odeh held out his hand, which was filled with shrapnel. ‘I have no money to fix this house,’ he said. ‘I don't know what will happen. At least, thanks be to God, everyone is alive.’