Sami Abu Jazar was fatally injured with his school bag still strapped to his back. A photographer captured the moment just after an Israeli bullet entered the 12-year-old’s skull, leaving a gaping wound in his forehead. Sami Abu Jazar was fatally injured with his school bag still strapped to his back. A photographer captured the moment just after an Israeli bullet entered the 12-year-old’s skull, leaving a gaping wound in his forehead.
The picture appeared on the front pages of many of the world’s newspapers on Wednesday. Later, the pictures were of Sami on his hospital bed, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat bending to kiss his tear-stained face.Yesterday Sami was buried in Gaza in an outpouring of Palestinian grief and anger. After two days on life support, but brain dead, his swollen eyes closed and his bandaged head tilted to one side, Sami’s heart stopped beating early in the morning, the machine was switched off – and he becamethe latest boy martyr of the Palestinian uprising.Sami was the 24th child victim of the past two weeks of violence.

Images of the funeral were shown repeatedly on television across the Occupied Territories throughout the day. Emotions can have been only heightened by the pictures, just as the images of the death of another 12-year-old, Mohammed al-Durah, turned him into an emblem of the conflict.Mohammed’s final moments were captured by television cameras, first as he cowered behind his father, anguish and terror showing on his face, and then slumped on the ground.Sami was shot on Tuesday. His family say his backpack proved that he was an innocent child returning from school, not part of a Palestinian mob provoking Israeli soldiers into retaliation. Inevitably the events surrounding his death will always be disputed.The Israelis say that their soldiers fired at a crowd of rioters at an outpost at Rafah on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

The crowd were throwing petrol bombs, which according to the rules of engagement observed by the Israeli security forces are deadly weapons and justify a lethal response. The family say he was the little boy from a farming family, his dream to make a living from growing flowers and selling them.. This is a story about lies, bias, hatred and death. It’s about our inability – after more than half a century – to understand the injustice of the Middle East.

It’s about a part of the world where it seems quite natural, after repeatedly watching on television the funeral of 11-year-old Sami Abu Jezar – who died two days after being shot through the forehead by Israeli soldiers – for a crowd to kick two Israeli plainclothes agents to death. It’s about a nation that claims “purity of arms” but fires missiles at civilian apartment blocks and then claims it is “restoring order”. It’s about people who are so enraged by the killing of almost a hundred Palestinians that they try to blow up an entire American warship

This is a story about lies, bias, hatred and death. It’s about our inability – after more than half a century – to understand the injustice of the Middle East. It’s about a part of the world where it seems quite natural, after repeatedly watching on television the funeral of 11-year-old Sami Abu Jezar – who died two days after being shot through the forehead by Israeli soldiers – for a crowd to kick two Israeli plainclothes agents to death. It’s about a nation that claims “purity of arms” but fires missiles at civilian apartment blocks and then claims it is “restoring order”. It’s about people who are so enraged by the killing of almost a hundred Palestinians that they try to blow up an entire American warship.
It’s as simple as that.

When I walked into the local photocopy shop yesterday afternoon, the boys there greeted me with ecstatic smiles. “Did you hear that an American ship has been attacked?” one of them asked. “There are Americans dead.” All I saw around the room were smiles. In a corner, on a small television screen, an Israeli Apache aircraft was firing a missile at Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Gaza.Seven years ago, CNN showed us the Israeli prime minister shaking Yasser Arafat by the hand, live on the White House lawn.