Palestinian woman killed as Israelis demolish her house

A 65-year-old Palestinian woman was killed yesterday when the Israeli army demolished her house while she was still inside, according to Palestinian witnesses and officials.

The body of Kamla Sa'id was found in the rubble of her family home after Israeli army sappers dynamited it during a raid on the Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources said. Doctors at the nearby Al-Aqsa hospital, where the body was taken, said she died of a crushed chest.

The Israeli army said it was checking the reports of Ms Sa'id's death, and claimed soldiers had carefully checked the building before demolishing it. Ms Sa'id would not be the first Palestinian to die in this way: there have been previous well documented cases.

"Israeli troops were acting in a brutal way, they got us all out of the house so fast and in an aggressive manner, they gave no chance for us to see who was out and who was in," one of the dead woman's stepsons, Khaled Sa'id, said yesterday.

He said Ms Sa'id was partially deaf and could not hear warnings from the soldiers to leave the house. The Israeli army demolished the house because it used to be the home of another of Ms Sa'id's stepsons, Baha Sa'id, a Palestinian militant who killed two Israelis in an attack on the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom in September 2000 before being shot dead himself by Israeli soldiers.

There have been previous occasions when Palestinians were crushed to death when the Israeli army demolished their homes on top of them. One of the best documented cases was in Nablus in April last year, when eight members of the al-Shu'bi family died when an Israeli soldier bulldozed their house, despite warnings from neighbours that there were people still inside.

In December last year, just a few kilometres north of Ms Sa'id's demolished home, Ashur Salem, a 68-year-old man, was crushed to death when Israeli soldiers blew up his house, according to witnesses. His son said when he found the old man's body, his head was "like a bar of chocolate, it was only two centimetres thick".

But there have also been instances when Palestinian claims that people had been crushed to death in house demolitions turned out not to be true, including a case in Jenin where Palestinians assumed a missing relative had died in his demolished home, only for him to later turn up alive.

The Israeli army routinely demolishes the homes of Palestinian militants, even after their deaths, claiming the suffering it inflicts on their families acts as a deterrent. International human rights groups have condemned the practise as collective punishment, which is outlawed under the Geneva Conventions.

In practice, the relatives of suicide bombers and other dead militants are often provided with new homes by the militant groups, while their neighbours, whose homes are often also damaged or even destroyed in the course of the demolition are the ones who are left homeless.

- INDEPENDENT