User:Tiamut/Samar

Samar Abed Rabbo is a Gazan (Palestinian) child who was shot in the spine on 7 January 2009 during the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict. When she was shot, she was 4 years old. Two of her sisters were killed in the same incident: Amal, who was 2 years old, and Souad, who was 7 years old. Souad was reported to be torn into two pieces by the M16 burst directed at them by the IDF.

Samar's uncle Hassan escorted her to a hospital in Egypt for treatment. Her father Khaled did not know anything further about her until he met a BBC reporter Christian Fraser who informed him that Samar might not walk again.

In a BBC.co.uk story dated 21 January 2009, Samar's father Khaled described the incident to BBC's Christian Fraser as follows : "The tank was over here. It was ten to one in the afternoon.  We were told to come out of the house---the women and my three daughters Samar, Amal, and Souad.  A soldier came out of the tank carrying an M16 rifle and he started to shoot at the children.  Some of the soldiers were eating chocolate and crisps." In the same story, Samar's grandmother told the BBC "The Israeli soldier shot at us deliberately---slowly, slowly."

An IDF spokeswoman commented on the incident, stating that IDF troops were shooting back at Hamas who were engaged in a gunfight with them. However, eyewitnesses confirmed no gun fights in that area (Jabaliya Ezbat Abed Rabbo) during that incident, and said that two of the troops were eating chocolate and crisps.

Details of the incident vary between media interviews, and these discrepancies were pointed to by the pro-Israeli media monitoring website CAMERA, which questions the veracity of the reports. For example, in some stories the ambulance driver says he was beaten by the IDF soldiers, in others he was forced to strip before he was beaten, in still another he claims the IDF soldiers ordered to "walk straight out of the neighborhood" with no mention of a strip or beating. Forensic psychiatrists have noted that eyewitnesses accounts of traumatic events are not always consistent, and often are "a product of how the question is asked." (http://martinblindermd.com/witness.html) If all accounts are identical, word for word, it raises the suspicions of authorities that a conspiracy to "stick to a story" is underway.

The initial news story dated January 7, 2009 from Ma'an News Agency, a Palestinian wire service based in the West Bank, reported that the two sisters died in an airstrike, giving their names, but different ages. But no western reporters accredited by the Israelis were permitted inside the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead, and they could only enter after the unilateral ceasefires on 18 January. Three days later Donald Macintyre of the Independent filed a piece on the white flag killings of these girls. The next interview was Tim McGirk's article for Time on January 29. The incident was one of five "white flag shootings" which the United Nations concluded should be investigated as war crimes. They also cited Hamas for the war crime of shooting rockets into civilian residential areas inside Israel. See this article