The family house was small:
three rooms, a tiny kitchen and bathroom, built of poor-quality
concrete bricks with a corrugated asbestos roof, in block four of the
Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. There are hundreds of similar
homes crammed into the narrow streets, filled with some of the poorest
and most vulnerable families in the overcrowded Gaza Strip. But it was
this house, where Anwar and Samira Balousha lived with their nine young
children, that had the misfortune to be built next to what became late
on Sunday night another target in Israel’s devastating bombing campaign
of Gaza.

An Israeli bomb struck the refugee camp’s Imad Aqil
mosque around midnight, destroying the building and collapsing several
shops and a pharmacy nearby. The force of the blast was so massive it
also brought down the Baloushas’ house, which yesterday lay in ruins.
The seven eldest girls were asleep together on mattresses in one
bedroom and they bore the brunt of the explosion. Five were killed
where they lay: Tahrir, 17, Ikram 15, Samer, 13, Dina, eight and
Jawahar, four.

They were the latest in a growing number of
civilian casualties in Israel’s bombing campaign. At least 315
Palestinians have been killed and as many as 1,400 injured. On the
Israeli side, two people have been killed by Palestinian rockets.
Israel’s military offensive continues and may yet intensify.

Imam,
16, lay in the room with her sisters but by chance survived with only
injuries to her legs. She was eventually pulled free and rushed to
hospital. “I was asleep. I didn’t hear anything of the explosion,” she
said yesterday as she sat comforting her mother. “I just woke when the
bricks fell on me. I saw all my sisters around me and I couldn’t move.
No one could see me from above. The neighbours and ambulance men
couldn’t see us. They were walking on the bricks above us. I started to
scream and told my sisters we would die. We all screamed: ‘Baba, Mama.
Come to help us.’”

Her parents had been sleeping in the room next
door with their two youngest children, Muhammad, aged one, and Bara’a,
a baby girl just 12 days old. Their room was damaged and all were hurt,
but they survived and were taken straight to hospital even before any
of the older girls were found.

Imam eventually recognised her
uncle’s voice among the rescuers and she shouted again for help. “He
found me and started to remove the bricks and the rubble from me. They
started to pull me by my hands, the bricks were still lying on my legs.”

Her
mother, Samira, 36, had seen the pile of bricks in the girls’ bedroom
and was stricken with grief, convinced they were all dead. Like all the
family, she too was asleep when the bomb struck. “I opened my eyes and
saw bricks all over my body,” she said. “My face was covered with the
concrete blocks.”

She checked on her two youngest children and
then looked in the room next door. “I didn’t see any of my daughters,
just a pile of bricks and parts of the roof. Everyone told me my
daughters were alive, but I knew they were gone.” She sat on a sofa
surrounded by other women at a neighbour’s house further along the
street and struggled to speak, pausing for long moments and still
overcome with shock. “I hope the Palestinian military wings retaliate
and take revenge with operations inside Israel. I ask God to take
revenge on them,” she said.

Her husband, Anwar, 40, sat in
another house where a mourning tent had been set up. He was pale and
still suffering from serious injuries to his head, his shoulder and his
hands. But like many other patients in Gaza he had been made to leave
an overcrowded hospital to make way for the dying. Yesterday his house
was a pile of rubble: collapsed walls and the occasional piece of
furniture exposed to the sky.

He spoke bitterly of his daughters’
deaths. “We are civilians. I don’t belong to any faction, I don’t
support Fatah or Hamas, I’m just a Palestinian. They are punishing us
all, civilians and militants. What is the guilt of the civilian?”

Like
many men in Gaza, Anwar has no job, and like all in the refugee camp he
relies on food handouts from the UN and other charity support to
survive.

“If the dead here were Israelis, you would see the
whole world condemning and responding. But why is no one condemning
this action? Aren’t we human beings?” he said. “We are living in our
land, we didn’t take it from the Israelis. We are fighting for our
rights. One day we will get them back.”