Tuesday 23 December 2008

World Bank: Israel Halting W. Bank Trade

The Palestinian private sector won't prosper as long as Israeli checkpoints in the occupied West Bank and cumbersome cargo crossings hamper trade, the World Bank said in a report Monday.

Israel has been slow in easing its tight restrictions on Palestinian movement, citing security concerns. However, the World Bank said Israel could make improvements even within this closure regime.

It singled out the Israeli-run Allenby Bridge crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, the main route for Palestinian exports to the Arab world.

Palestinian traders face a series of obstacles as they try to get their goods to market. Goods have to pass through Israeli roadblocks within the West Bank and through crossings points for export cargo, including the Allenby Bridge and terminals along Israel's separation barrier with the West Bank.

Many of the restrictions were imposed after the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian fighting in 2000. Israel argues that it must move cautiously in easing restrictions, though critics say Israel could do far more.

The World Bank warned that the Palestinian economy, heavily reliant on trade, will not recover unless the restrictions are eased significantly.

"As long as the internal barriers exist, and imports and exports are forced to go through a system of back-to-back transfer, the Palestinian private sector is unlikely to prosper," the bank wrote.

Under the back-to-back system, cargo is loaded from one truck to another at crossings to allow for stringent security checks.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev did not address the specifics of the report, but said Israel is committed to easing Palestinian movement and access. "Much depends on the security situation," he said.

However, the report noted that shipping goods from the West Bank to Israel is becoming increasingly difficult as Israel completes its separation barrier.

The bank said that, on average, it took almost two hours for a shipment to pass through barrier crossing points. Israel's Crossing Point Authority had set 30-60 minutes as a target, the bank said.

The bank predicted that these delays would grow significantly. The crossings now only handle a fraction of the traffic between the West Bank and Israel, but this will change when Israel completes the barrier and all traders must use the crossings, the report said.

Improving operations at the Allenby Bridge, the West Bank's link to Jordan and the Arab world, will be crucial, the report said. Israel could obtain larger scanners, extend working hours and allow the use of containers, the bank said. It proposed posting a Palestinian liaison official at the crossing and allowing cargo from trusted shippers to pass without extensive security checks.

Nazi Israel...Indeed

"...Israel is, still up till today, carrying these same genocidal Nazi-like holocaustal crimes gradually choking 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza to death by starvation, thirst, lack of fuel and disease. Israeli army is in the process of demolishing 40 Palestinian villages in the Negev desert. Army bulldozers are daily destroying Palestinian homes in major Palestinian cities such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus..."



Elias Akleh

Richard Falk, the professor of international law at Princeton University and the UN’s special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, had accused Israel of violating international law, international humanitarian laws, and the Geneva Convention. He described Israel’s policies against Palestinians and its siege of Gaza as “war crimes”, “genocidal tendencies”, “holocaust implications”, and “holocaust-in-the-making”. He urged the International Criminal Court to look into the possibility of indicting Israeli leaders for war crimes.

Professor Falk had a little taste of Israel’s Nazi-like crimes and human rights violation when he traveled to Israel, last Sunday December 14th, 2008, to visit the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to report on Israel’s compliance with human rights standards and international humanitarian law. The Israelis “detained” Professor Falk at the airport, treated his as a criminal and a threat to the state, humiliated him and deported him next day back to Geneva.

Despite Israel’s strong declaration that every Jew in the world is automatically granted full Israeli citizenship with all the protections this entails, and despite being a Jew himself, Professor Falk was not spared the humiliations and cruelty Israel treats its enemies with

Emboldened by the American blind and unconditional support, defiant Israel wanted to publicly give its finger to Falk and to the UN he represents, declaring itself above all international laws and above any criticism of its crimes and human rights violations even if such criticism comes from a Jew himself. Such defying humiliation of the world political body is meant to distract the UN, and thus the whole world, away from the holocaust it is perpetrating against the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, and all its on-going war crimes against the rest of Palestinians throughout the whole Palestine.

Falk’s accusations of Israel’s Nazi-like holocaustal implications are no different from those made by John Dugard, his predecessor, in several reports on conditions in occupied Palestine. Many conscientious political figures, as well as regular citizens, around the world had described Israel’s policies in occupied Palestine in specific and in the Middle East in general as war crimes and threat to world peace.

Comparing the present-day Israel with Nazi Germany one discovers that the majority of the Israeli policies are the exact copies of the Nazi policies. Nazi Germany had invaded its European neighbors extending from England to Russia. Israel had also invaded all its neighboring countries; Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. It is also heavily involved in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Its tentacles had also reached African countries as far as South Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, and Sierra Leone.

Nazi war machines used to invade resisting towns, line up the men in the center of the town to be executed in cold blood, and destroyed the whole town as a deterring example for any possible other resisting towns. Worse than the Nazis Israeli forces used to invade peaceful Palestinian towns, execute men, women and children in cold blood everywhere and anywhere they encounter them, dynamite their homes on top of their residents, and finally demolish the whole town making room for new Israeli colonies. Throughout 1948/49 Israelis had committed 70 ugly massacres against Palestinian villagers, and totally destroyed 675 Palestinian towns and villages including their churches and mosques. Such massacres and demolitions followed a set pattern, repeated in one village after the other, indicating a pre-meditated genocidal plan.

In the words of the late Israeli General Moshe Dayan: “The declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 was at the expense of ethnically cleansing 513 Palestinian villages, creating over 700,000 Palestinian refugees and expropriating their lands, homes and businesses in 78% of Palestine … There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former (Palestinian) population.”

Israel is, still up till today, carrying these same genocidal Nazi-like holocaustal crimes gradually choking 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza to death by starvation, thirst, lack of fuel and disease. Israeli army is in the process of demolishing 40 Palestinian villages in the Negev desert. Army bulldozers are daily destroying Palestinian homes in major Palestinian cities such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus.

The Nazi army perpetrated many massacres against prisoners of war. They used to execute prisoners and dump them in graves the prisoners where ordered to dig for themselves. The Israeli army followed the same method of executing prisoners of war especially during 1956 and 1967 Israeli-Egyptian wars. This was reported in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper in June 27th 2000. The Egyptian Human Rights Organization Secretary-General, Muhammad Munib, submitted a report confirming that Israel had killed between 7,000 to 15,000 Egyptian prisoners of wars of 1956 and 1967. The report also identified the locations of 11 mass graves in Sinai and Israel in which thousands of Egyptian prisoners were buried.

The most prominent of these massacres was the El-Arish massacre, where Israeli forces murdered at least 150 Egyptian prisoners of war. Some of the prisoners were run over by Israeli tanks several times, a crime that is still practiced by Israeli army especially in the Gaza Strip. The story of the massacre was originally reported by Israeli eyewitnesses in Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper, and later by Israeli journalist Ran Adelist on Israeli television. It was also reported by the Washington Report of May/June 1996 pages 27 and 28. The massacre was also recorded by the American USS Liberty surveillance ship that was sailing 12 miles off the shore of Gaza. This massacre was a serious war crime and could have been the main reason for the Israeli attack on the Liberty.


Worse than the Nazis the Israeli army had adopted the policy of targeting young Palestinian children in an attempt to “nudge” Palestinian families to leave the country for the sake of the future of the children, and/or to exhaust their financial resources in treating and caring for their disabled and crippled wounded children; the victims of Israeli snipers. Since the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada, September 2000, Israeli forces have murdered 1050 children in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; see also the Guardian, October 21, 2008, and Al-Jazeera, October 22, 2008. A Palestinian Centre for Human Rights report documented, with eyewitness testimonies, at least 68 children were murdered by Israeli army during 12 months from June 07 to June 07 just before the cease fire agreement. The child murder toll rose dramatically during the first six months of 2008 with the Israeli army massive assault of “Operation Winter Heat” against Gaza Strip. Children were directly targeted by Israeli snipers while walking in the streets, while standing in front of their homes, and even while sitting in their school rooms, also directly by drone missiles while playing in courts. They are also the indirect victims if Israeli deliberate targeting densely populated residential areas (Gaza is densely populated) including schools, hospitals and food markets.

The average age of the targeted children was ten years old according to a thousand-page document by Save the Children. The majority of these children were innocent bystanders not participating in any “hostile” activity or causing any threat to the heavily armed Israeli soldiers. In the 80% of the cases of targeted children, the Israeli army prevented the victim from receiving any medical attention. The report also documented that more than 50,000 child victims required medical attention for injuries including gunshot wounds, tear gas inhalation and multiple fractures. A bulletin titled “Deliberate Murder” published in 1989 by the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights reported the targeting of Palestinian children by Israeli army and snipers from “special unit” had “carefully chosen” the children, who were shot in the head or heart and died instantaneously (Mike Berry & Greg Philo, ‘Israel and Palestine-Competing Histories’, Pluto Press, London, 2006, pp. 86-87).

According to the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, and the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (signed by Israel) children are to be afforded special protection during international armed conflicts. Israel had, and still is violating these international laws.

Like Nazi Germany, who developed and used all kinds of new weapons including the V2 rocket bomb and nerve gas, Israel has used every kind of weapons, even new experimental ones, against Palestinian civilians. This included the Dumdum exploding bullets, nerve gas, experimental chemical and biological weapons, flying drones, and DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) and the latest remote control high power machine guns (seer shoots) installed on the high towers of the imprisoning wall (separation wall) and operated by teen aged female soldiers in far away operating rooms like computerized war games. Israel is also know to be a nuclear weapon and is always hinting at using it if/when they feel threatened.

Nazi Germans were brainwashed and driven by a social supremacist ideology of the superior Aryan Race (Der Supermann). They believed that they were superior to the rest of the people and that they should rule the world. Similarly the Israelis are brainwashed and driven by the religious supremacist ideology of god’s chosen people in god’s promised land, and believe that it is their religious duty (mitzvah) to cleanse the world from all gentiles (non-Jews), and to establish a Jewish only world government in preparation for the coming of the Messiah. Such dangerous extreme ideology is taught to Israeli children since childhood.

Moshe Feiglin, who won a respectable position on the Likuds’ Knesset list for the upcoming Israeli election is an admirer of Hitler and his superior ideology. In an interview with the Ha’aretz Newspaper in 1995 he described Hitler as a military genius and a great nation builder. “Hitler was an unparallel military genius. Nazism had transformed Germany from a low to a fantastic physical and ideological status. The ragged, trashy youth body turned into a neat and orderly part of society and Germany received an exemplary regime, a proper justice system, and public order. … This was no bunch of thugs. They merely used thugs and homosexuals”. His holocaustal solution to the Palestinian problem, according to his Manhigut ha’Yehudit (Jewish leadership) website, is to order “the complete stoppage of water, electricity and communication” to the four million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Feiglin expresses the inner sentiment of every Israeli political leader starting from their first Prime Minister Ben Gurion up to Tzipi Livni, the latest acting Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affair, who have been calling for the murder and the transfer of Palestinians out of the god’s promised land of Israel (Erez Israel). Their real policies become obvious and louder in their campaign rhetoric.

Such genocidal holocaustal tendencies are nurtured, encouraged and called for by top Israeli Rabbis and political leaders. Rabbi Yousef Obadia, the top Israeli religious leader, Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, director of the Tsomet Institute, Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, the leading religious authority in Israel’s religious national current and former chief Eastern rabbi for Israel, Rabbi Dov Lior, president of the Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed and a candidate for the post of chief rabbi or Israel, Rabbi Eliyahu Kinvinsky, the second most senior authority in the Orthodox religious current, Rabbi Israel Ariel, one of the most prominent rabbis in the West Bank colonies, and Rabbi Yitzhaq Ginsburg, a top rabbi in Israel among many other extremist religious Israeli leaders are continually calling for total extermination and transfer of Palestinians.

Brainwashed and misguided Israelis, especially religious fundamentalists, regularly attack Palestinian towns, vandalize their churches, mosques and cemeteries with graffiti slogans such as “Death to Arabs”, “Gas the Arabs”, and “Mohammad is a pig”, occupying Palestinian after forcefully evicting their Palestinian owners, attacking farmers, burning their crops, cutting their fruit trees, poisoning their water wells, killing their farm animals, destroying properties, looting shops, terrorizing civilians and children and shooting people. Searching youtube.com for “Israeli settlers violence” to watch the hundreds of videos showing Israeli settlers terrorism.

One prominent similarity between Israel and the Nazis is their state sponsored terror groups. According to articles “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story”, Life Magazine, Volume 49, Number 22, (November 28th 1960) pp. 19-25, 101-112, and “Eichmann’s Own Story: Part II”, Life Magazine, December 6th 1960 pp. 146-161, Adolf Eichmann stated how Zionist leaders were idealist like Nazi leaders, willing to sacrifice hundred thousands of their own blood to achieve political goal. Lenni Brenner explains in his book “Zionism in the Age of Dictators”, in chapter 25, that Eichmann was referring here to a deal the Nazi struck with Zionist leaders, such as Hungarian Rezso Kastner, to save a few thousand hand-picked Zionists and wealthy Jews, who would immigrate to Palestine, in return for leading 750,000 Hungarian Jews, and other millions of European Jews to their death to make Jews “rightful victim”, so that World Zionist Organization would have the “right” to come “ before the bargaining table when they divide nations and lands at the war’s end...for only with (Jewish) blood shall we (Zionists) get the land.”

The Nazis set up Police Battalion 101, a terrorist group, whose sole purpose was hunting Jewish citizens, killing them and looting and destroying their property. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen states in his book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” that Battalion 101 was responsible for “the deportation and gruesome slaughter in Poland of tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children”.

Israel had its own exact copy of Battalion 101 called Unit 101 under the terrorist Ariel Sharon, who later became Israel’s Prime Minister. Under Sharon’s leadership Unit 101 adopted the same criminal methods to terrorize Palestinians. It also implemented what became known as jeep raids; driving jeeps, with machine guns mounted on the front and rear, into Palestinian towns murdering inhabitants, dynamiting homes, and burning their fields. Since early 1950s Unit 101 was responsible for massacres in Palestinian towns such as Bureij refugee camp, Qibya, Idna, Surif, Wadi Fukin, Falameh, Rantis, Jerusalem, Budrus, Dawayima, Beit Liqya, Khan Younis and Gaza.

Israel had always resorted to terrorist attacks against Jews in other countries especially Arab countries, such as North African Arab countries, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan, to encourage Jewish Arab residents to immigrate to Israel. The Lavon Affair is just one famous terrorist related incident in Egypt.

In January 29th 1999 article in Israeli Ha’aretz paper, Gideon Spiro, a former member of the 890 battalion, stated that Unit 101 was an early, more primitive prototype for the more sophisticated liquidation units of Duvdevan and Shimshon established during the Intifada” Its operations were characterized by “lots of killing of civilians and little real combat”.

Israel is the only county in the world with many Prime Ministers, who were members of terrorist and state-sponsored terrorist organizations directly involved in slaughter of civilians. These include Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Shimon Peres.

Arnold Toynbee wrote “It was a supreme tragedy that the lesson learnt by them (the Jews) from their encounter with the Nazi German Gentiles should have been, not to eschew but to imitate some of the evil deeds that the Nazis had committed against the Jews.”

Israelis and Jews of the world have relentlessly pursued Nazi war criminals for decades for their war crimes committed during WWII. They chased Nazi war criminals for the rest of their lives, even when they were old and close to their death, to make them pay for their crimes. No doubts in my mind that Israeli war criminals, in turn, will be pursued and sentenced for their war crimes committed against Arabs.

Elias Akleh a contributing editor to MWC, is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was first evicted from Haifa after the “Nakba” of 1948, then from Beit Jala after the “Nakseh” of 1967. He lives now in the US, and publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic.http://mwcnews.net/eliasakleh

Strangling Gaza to near death while pretending to be victim



"...How many western leaders have had the moral courage to visit the Gaza Strip and see the slow-motion holocaust on the ground?

How many western leaders have dared utter the politically innocuous but balanced view that Israel should lift the siege on Gaza and Palestinians ought to stop their nearly innocuous attacks on Israel?

Why is Tony Blair telling Israel that it has the right to bomb Gaza? Is he completely oblivious of the existence of 1.5 million human beings who have been forced into a situation that doesn’t really differ much form that faced by much of the European Jewry several decades ago?..."


Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

No one is enthusiastic about the latest escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip, except perhaps the warmongers in Tel Aviv and the American-backed Arab and Palestinian traitors who would do anything and go to any extent to please their masters in Washington, D.C.

In Israel, the Gaza Strip is becoming the central election issue in a country deeply menaced by political and religious extremism.

Israeli political leaders from right and left are already promising the Jewish public that they will destroy Gaza and murder untold thousands of poor Gazans if only they are elected in the 10 February polls.

Tzipi Livni, leader of the Kadima party, was quoted as saying on Sunday, 21 December, that if she becomes Israel’s next Prime Minister, she will destroy Hamas’s government in Gaza, using military, economic and diplomatic means.

Similar remarks have been voiced by other Israeli leaders, which really underscores the cannibalistic instincts and jingoistic trends permeating through the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society.

After all, experience shows that the more racist, more criminal and more vitriolic a given Israeli politician is perceived, the greater the likelihood he will be elected.

In contrast, an Israeli politician who advocates a humane approach toward the Palestinians, like, for example, calling for lifting the Nazi-like siege imposed on the 1.5 million innocent Gaza inhabitants, will be committing a political suicide. Such a politician would instantly be called “Self-hating Jew,” “Hamas lover,” or even “a Nazi.”

This background is essential for understanding the present situation in Gaza as the huge Israeli propaganda machine would have us believe that Israel is the victim of aggression and that the Palestinians are the aggressors.

Israel claims ad nauseam that its Nazi-like blockade of Gaza, which is a brazen violation of international law, is in response to the firing by Gaza guerillas of generally ineffective home-made projectiles known as Qassams.

This is simply a big lie. The Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip began immediately after Hamas won the legislative election in January 2006, and the main driving goal was to punish, as much as internationally acceptable, the people of Gaza and Palestinians in general for electing a government that Israel didn’t like.

Indeed, some Israeli leaders admitted then that Israel wanted to put the Palestinian on a diet, a euphemistic expression connoting the subsequent and continuing Israeli policy of starving and killing and savaging the people of Gaza very much like the Nazis did to Jews at Ghetto Warsaw in 1942-43.

Determined to survive, in spite of a malicious cruel world that preaches human rights while crushing human lives, Gazans appealed to everyone and anyone willing to listen all over the globe, but to no avail.

It was only after it became clear that Israel was hell bent on destroying Gaza and its inhabitants through a slow process of extermination that Gazans began firing these largely psychological weapons which inflict little damage and rarely cause human casualties among Israelis.

In June, Hamas agreed to stop all “belligerent acts and hostilities” against Israel in return for Israeli reciprocity and the lifting of the hermetic siege on the Strip which obliterated Gaza economy and caused the death of hundreds of innocent people.

However, instead of dealing in good will with the Egyptian-mediated understanding, Israel never lifted the siege nor allowed the reopening of the border crossings.

Using the words of a Gaza journalist, Israel resorted to the policy of “strangling Gaza to near death,” by preventing the delivery to Gaza of most consumer goods and products from vital medical material to food products.

More to the point, Israel did violate the ceasefire understanding several times, killing as many as 49 Palestinians from June-19 when the truce began to December-19 when it ended.

During that period, not a single Israeli civilian was killed by Palestinian factions in the Gaza strip.

Hence, one is always prompted to ask what the Palestinian Authorities in Gaza are supposed to do when Israel is effectively telling them that they have only two choices awaiting them, to die a slow agonizing death as a result of this criminal siege, or be killed and decimated by the Israeli occupation army.

A few months ago, this writer challenged a rabbi from the West Bank to ask his government to end the siege in Gaza and allow normal economic activities between Gaza and the outside world.

I assured him that if Israel were to carry out such a step, there would be a total stoppage of all attacks and hostile activities against Israeli settlements bordering the coastal territory.

Predictably, the Israeli government dismissed the proposal, telling the rabbi rather tersely that they respected his efforts.

Unfortunately, Israel is allowed to keep up starving and killing Gazans thanks to a hypocritical world whose leaders keep telling Israel that “it has the right to defend itself,” while utterly ignoring the fact that the Palestinians, too, have at least an equal right to life and human dignity.

How many western leaders have had the moral courage to visit the Gaza Strip and see the slow-motion holocaust on the ground?

How many western leaders have dared utter the politically innocuous but balanced view that Israel should lift the siege on Gaza and Palestinians ought to stop their nearly innocuous attacks on Israel?

Why is Tony Blair telling Israel that it has the right to bomb Gaza? Is he completely oblivious of the existence of 1.5 million human beings who have been forced into a situation that doesn’t really differ much form that faced by much of the European Jewry several decades ago?

How about Sarkozy, who claims to represent western enlightenment? How about the leaders of EU states? Do they all enjoy watching the people of Gaza getting savaged and killed by the crime against humanity, otherwise known as Israel.

Have all they succumbed to moral blindness and callousness in the face of an evil state that claims to be a light upon the nations while thinking, behaving and acting very much like the Third Reich?

Well, shame on you all. History won’t be kind to you.

'Major Israeli settlement built on Arab land'

An Israeli human rights group says it has found records showing that a major Israeli settlement is constructed on private Palestinian land.

The B'Tselem group released a report on Monday, saying more than half of the Ofra settlement was constructed on Palestinian land and the government should treat the Ofra settlement like an unauthorized settlement outpost and dismantle it as it is illegal.

Israel differentiates between more than 130 sanctioned settlements and dozens of outposts.

B'Tselem notes that while all West Bank settlements are deemed illegal under international law, Ofra should now be treated like an outpost.

The group says that according to the government's own position, a settlement cannot be considered authorized if built on private land.

"The Israeli cabinet decided that an Israeli community in the West Bank that is built on land registered to Palestinians and that was constructed without the requisite permits and without declared boundaries is an illegal outpost which must be dismantled," the report said.

Ofra, near Ramallah in the West Bank, was established in 1975 and has about 3,000 residents.

Israeli settlements on the Palestinian territories are among key issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Despite Israel's promises made at the US-hosted Annapolis conference, Tel Aviv keeps destroying Palestinian homes and expanding Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. Israel argues that Palestinian houses in the West Bank are built without the required permission.

The international community has repeatedly criticized Israeli settlement activities on the Palestinian land.

Press TV

Israeli blitz wounds 4 including child

Israeli air strikes on the besieged Gaza strip have wounded four Palestinians including a child, Palestinian security sources and medics say.

Israeli helicopters hit eastern Gaza City on Sunday night with two air-to-ground missiles, wounding three Palestinian resistance fighters and one child.

The sources said Gaza residents heard two huge explosions after two Israeli helicopters which were hovering over eastern Gaza City fired two missiles at Sheja'eya neighborhood near the border between eastern Gaza and Israel.

Israel has escalated its attacks against the Palestinians in the Gaza strip since Friday when an Egyptian-brokered truce between the two sides expired after six months.

On the expiration day of the truce, Hamas announced that it would not accept to extend the ceasefire, saying Israel had not observed its commitments under the deal including easing its blockade on the 1.5 million Gaza residents.

In response to the Israeli attacks, Palestinian fighters fire home made rockets at Israeli towns.

Israel has threatened to launch a major military strike against the coastal strip to halt the rocket firings.



Palestinian children crying over the dead body of one of their playmates killed in an earlier Israeli raid.