Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Victims of Israeli War Crimes Die in Egyptian Hospitals, Transported for Burial Back in Gaza







Jan. 5, 2009

The corpses of three Gazan civilians (non-combatants) were transported back from Cairo to Al Arish General Hospital on Monday.

A 26 male youth (Ahmad Abul Hattab from Khan Younis - fatally wounded by shrapnel) and a 17 year old boy (Tha'er Zaidi from the Jabaliya Refugee Camp - killed in building collapse/shrapnel) are amongst the victims of Israeli war crimes. These critical cases had been transported to hospitals just outside Cairo where they received emergency medical attention, yet died of their injuries.

These two bodies were transported back to Gaza by Egyptian Red Crescent workers. A third corpse, that of a Gazan woman, was buried in Al Arish rather than Gaza - due to risks and difficulties associated with burial there.

Ahmad Abul Hattab's 60 year old father, Mohammad, angrily said that "Egypt only lets in those who are critically injured, like my now-dead son here; all the others are left trapped within the Gaza Strip while Israel besieges us and kills us."

He angrily waved a big stack of papers in his hand, shouting "I've had to get one hundred pages worth of bureaucratic paper work done at Egypt's state security, and other apparatuses. They demanded that dozens of forms be authorized by different security apparatuses - all this just to burry my dead son back in his home town.

"How does the body of this dead boy now threaten the Egyptian state's security?"

"My son was killed by shrapnel from an Israeli missile as he was walking down the street to check-up on his friends. The US and a number of European states are giving Israel the green light to go on killing indiscriminately in Gaza."

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State security officers deny local and foreign journalists entry into Egyptian Rafah.

Earlier in this day a group of around 20 journalists were stopped at the Abul Tawila Checkpoint (13 kilometers west of Rafah) and were all denied access into Rafah. A fellow journalist and I were also forbidden from passing this checkpoint - even though we had letters of authorization from the Egypt's Foreign Press Association with us.


Jano

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