Palestinian Twins Under Rocket Fire from Gaza

By Christoph Schult in Ashkelon

When a Palestinian woman gave birth to twins in an Israeli
hospital she experienced what it is like to be the target of
rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

The humming noise in the sky over Beit Lahia grows slowly
louder. It sounds as if the buzzing of a hornet were being
amplified by loud speakers in a football stadium. Residents of
the Gaza Strip call them "Sannana," or the humming ones, the
small unmanned drones that the Israelis use to scan the border
region for rocket commandos -- and then to liquidate them with
precisely targeted missiles.
Ashraf Shafii has climbed onto the roof his house and is looking
across strawberry fields toward the border wall. The
smoke-belching towers of the power plant in the Israeli city of
Ashkelon jut into the sky along the horizon. His wife is over
there in Ashkelon today.

Shafii, a 34-year-old lab technician at the Islamic University
of Gaza, glances at his six-year-old daughter. "We were so
desperate to have more children," he says. For years, he waited
in vain for his wife to bear a son. When she turned 30, the
couple decided to get fertility treatment.

Iman Shafii finally became pregnant. During an ultrasound
examination, doctors discovered four small embryos. The first
died in the fifth month of pregnancy and the second died a few
weeks later. Shafii was admitted to the Al-Shifa Hospital in
Gaza City, but the condition of the two remaining embryos became
increasingly fragile. "You have to go to Israel," the doctor
told her.

Because Israel refuses to engage in any contact with the
authorities in Hamas-controlled Gaza, patients turn to private
brokers who submit their entry applications to the Palestinian
Authority of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank
city of Ramallah. But it can be a lengthy process.

The Shafiis were lucky. Iman was permitted to enter Israel after
only 24 hours. She took a taxi to a spot near the Eres border
crossing, and then she was pushed in a wheelchair across the
last 500 meters of bumpy ground. She reached the Barzilai
Hospital in Ashkelon just in time. She gave birth on Feb. 25, by
Caesarean section, to a girl, Bayan, and to the couple's
long-awaited son, Faisal.

DER SPIEGEL
Graphic: Maximum Range of Palestinian Rockets

Iman Shafii, 32, wearing a headscarf and oval glasses, and
speaking in a soft voice, sits on a chair between two
incubators. Today is the first day she is permitted to hold her
babies in her arms. A nurse brings out the boy first, then the
girl. As the tears well up in her eyes, Shafii kisses her
children on their foreheads. "If the children had stayed in
Gaza, they would not have survived," she says.
Her only impression of Israel has been the one she gets on
Palestinian television, which usually shows tanks and soldiers,
and celebrates attacks, like the recent shooting inside a Talmud
school in Jerusalem, as acts of heroism. But now a doctor
wearing a yarmulke walks into the room, says "Shalom" and asks
her in English how she is feeling.

Dr. Shmuel Zangen, the director of the hospital's neonatal unit,
doesn't care who he treats. "As a doctor, I enjoy the privilege
of not having to think about it," he says. "It certainly is odd
that we take care of Palestinian children while they shoot at
us. It's the sort of thing that only happens in the Middle
East."

'Not a Just War'

In the past, Shafii saw the Israelis exclusively as
perpetrators, but in Ashkelon she is encountering, for the first
time, victims of the acts of terror committed by her own people.
One of them is nine-year-old Yossi, who is sitting in a
wheelchair. A steel frame holds his left shoulder together. It
was fractured by shrapnel from a rocket that landed in the city
of Sderot. "The people in Sderot are suffering just as we are in
Gaza," she says.

There was a sharp increase in the Palestinian rocket attacks
after Israel cleared the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip in
September 2005. The Israeli military counted 2,305 hits last
year, and there have already been 1,146 in the first two months
of this year. Until now, almost all of the missiles have been
Qassam rockets, which are made in the Gaza Strip and have a
range of about 12 kilometers (seven miles).

But the breaching of the border fence between the Gaza Strip and
Egypt by Hamas in January made it possible to bring in Russian
and Iranian rockets with longer ranges. This means that cities
considered safe in the past are now threatened. One of them is
Ashkelon. On the second day after the birth of Bayan and Faisal,
a Soviet-made "Grad" rocket landed on the hospital grounds. "I
heard it hit, 200 meters away from me," says Shafii. The
neonatal unit was moved to a bunker the next day. "The groups
that are firing the rockets are not fighting a just war," says
the Palestinian mother, adding that they are not abiding by what
the Prophet Muhammad said: that wars may only be waged between
soldiers, but not against civilians.

The buzzing drone in the sky over Beit Lahia has flown away to
the south. The sound of an Israeli missile striking its target
can be heard a short time later. Within a few minutes, there are
reports that a member of the group Islamic Jihad was killed.

Ashraf Shafii describes how young, masked men repeatedly set up
their rocket launchers under the cover of houses in Beit Lahia.
"They shoot at Israeli civilians, which is completely
unacceptable, " says Shafii. "And they put us Palestinian
civilians in grave danger, because the Israelis shoot back."

Why doesn't he object? "They are armed," says Shafii, "and they
shoot at anyone who gets in their way."

The father is holding the first photos of his newborn twins in
his hands. He is worried about the rockets being fired at
Ashkelon. He says that he would never have believed it possible
that he could be indebted to the Israelis for anything. "What a
confusing situation," he says.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

URL:

www.spiegel. de/international /world/0, 1518,540689, 00.html