By SPIEGEL Staff
Israel launches the second phase of the war, the ground invasion, on Jan. 3. The army cuts the Gaza Strip in half and its tanks advance into the region surrounding the former Jewish settlement of Netzarim.
On Sunday, Jan. 4, at 9 a.m., soldiers knock on the doors of the homes owned by the al-Samuni family, an extended clan of Palestinians living in Saitun, south of Gaza City, where olive and orange plantations begin. A dirt road leads to the Samunis' homes.
Destructive Fury
Almasa al-Samuni, a beautiful 13-year-old girl, is terrified when she sees the soldiers in the doorway. They are wearing bulletproof vests, they are carrying automatic weapons and their faces are blackened. They herd Almasa and the remaining relatives into the house owned by her Uncle Wail.
There is shooting on all sides as they run across to the uncle's house. Almasa later describes seeing her father's house being blown up. About 100 people spend the night in her uncle's house. There is no food or water, and it is very cold.
The next morning, at about 6:30 a.m., Almasa follows her brother Mohammed, 25, outside to fetch straw and kindling to build a fire. She hears the helicopter, sees her brother being shot to death in a hail of bullets in front of her, and feels the explosion behind her at the same time. It has struck her uncle's house. According to witness accounts, 29 people are killed, including Almasa's mother Leila, 40, her brothers Ismail, 15, Ishak, 14, Nassir, 4 and Mohammed's baby son.
Those of the wounded who can still walk manage to reach an ambulance about a kilometer away. The others remain in the house. They are not evacuated until two days later, and some bleed to death. In the following weeks, 19 other bodies are discovered in the rubble of the small settlement.
Israeli soldiers have even vented their destructive fury within the ruins of the houses, where they have smeared graffiti on the walls. The words "Arabs are a piece of shit" are written on one wall, and Stars of David are scratched onto the wallpaper. The toilets are overflowing, and the floors are littered with plastic bags filled with excrement.
It is one of the most tragic and still inscrutable stories of this war. Why was this small collection of houses wiped out? It lies well within the interior of the Gaza Strip, not on the periphery where most of the rockets were fired at Israel.
The Israelis have not commented on the case, saying that they want to investigate the incident first.
On the day of the attack on the Samuni settlement, Israeli government spokesman Regev says: "Both the civilian population of southern Israel and the civilian population of the Gaza Strip have been victims of this terrible, extremist Hamas regime."
An Attack on UN Facilities
On the next day, Jan. 6, tanks fire at a United Nations school in Jabaliya, a refugee camp. About 40 people are killed. At this point, John Ging, the UN representative in Gaza, can no longer contain his rage -- this was his school, the international community's school. Where, he asks, can civilians be safe, if not here?
Ging is more than a UN official. He's the de facto manager of the Gaza Strip, where 800,000 people are directly dependent on the food his organization distributes, where 250,000 children attend the schools it operates, and where 10,000 people work for him.
During the following days, Ging becomes the UN's most visible representative in a long time, appearing simultaneously on CNN, Al-Jazeera, Israeli television and German public broadcaster ZDF. Wearing a black suit with no tie, he stares fiercely and earnestly into the camera.
He speaks loudly and accusingly: "Our warehouse. The schools with the refugees. The university laboratory! The American school, which was built for $7 million, where girls and boys were taught together -- in English! Everything is gone!"
Mark Regev says: "We are seeing fire from the facility. If Hamas turns a UN facility into a battle zone, if Hamas takes over a UN facility which is supposed to be a neutral facility, then that's a crime."
By this time, the war has turned into a dirty one. Eight hospitals and 26 clinics are damaged or destroyed. The bombs have completely destroyed 4,100 private residences, and 100,000 people are fleeing the violence.
The third phase of the war begins on Monday, Jan. 12, as Israeli ground troops advance into Gaza City to conduct house-to-house combat.
Hamas fighter Abu Hamza is still waiting in the streets to fight Israel. But it will never happen. Israeli soldiers later report that the Hamas fighters they encountered promptly took to their heels. The war is almost over, and Israel is pleased with the successes of its military. Public confidence in the country's leadership has almost doubled. By this point, diplomatic efforts to bring about a cease-fire are in full swing.
A Voice of Reconciliation Experiences His own Tragedy
On Friday, Jan. 16, Bisan, the daughter of Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish, bakes a cake to celebrate the coming cease-fire.
Later that day, Abu al-Aish calls Israel's Channel 10 television station. He has provided commentary several times since the war began. He's been popular because he hadn't condemned or accused, but merely reported. A Palestinian who speaks Hebrew, he describes himself as a voice of peace.
But this time, when anchorman Shlomi Eldar takes the call, he hears nothing but the voice of a distraught man: "My girls, oh God, they have killed my girls," Abu al-Aish shouts from his house in Jabaliya, his voice raw with pain. Two tank shells have struck the house, and three of his daughters -- Bisan, 20, Mayar, 15, and Aya, 13 -- are dead.
His call is broadcast live for three-and-a-half minutes, an eternity on television, as viewers hear only his voice and see Shlomi Eldar fighting back tears. The father shouts and sobs, speaking in Hebrew and Arabic, repeating the same phrase over and over again: "Why, God, why?"
The father's pain fills the studio and hundreds of thousands of Israeli living rooms. It is the first time in this war that viewers witness the unfiltered suffering of others.
It clearly shakes the anchorman, who is suddenly confronted with a grieving, 53-year-old, Palestinian man whose daughters have in the past traveled to peace camps in the United States -- a man who calls Israel his second home and Israelis his friends, someone who works in Israel as a doctor and helps Jewish women have children.
"I must confess that I don't know how I should end this conversation," the anchorman says to viewers. He gets up, walks out of the studio and calls the army and the Red Cross, begging them to help the children of his friend. He manages to have an Israeli ambulance sent to Gaza to bring the doctor and a wounded daughter to Israel's Sheba Medical Center, where Abu al-Aish works.
Later on, when the anchorman asks an army spokesman why the house was bombed, he replies that snipers had been shooting at soldiers from there. Abu al-Aish replies: "All these little girls fired off was laughter and love and peace, nothing else."
Two days later, on a Sunday, the war comes to an end, for the time being, after both sides declare cease-fires.
So was it a successful war?
Israel says that its air force bombed more than 2,000 targets and destroyed half of all Hamas rockets, as well as 200 residences of Hamas commanders, all government buildings and 80 percent of all smuggling tunnels.
Isreali spokesman Regev says: "It would have been easier for us to carpet-bomb this whole neighborhood to get rid of Hamas. But we are (instead) risking the lives of our young servicement (and) using surgical military ground tactics to deal with Hamas military facilities."
In the meantime, Mohammed Abu Ahmed has already crawled through one of his tunnels to Egypt once again. He says the tunnel will be back in operation soon.
John Ging, the UN representative, is sitting in his office in Gaza City, back to making demands. He wants Israel to open the border crossings, and he says that this war has only strengthened the extremists on both sides.
Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas official, slept at the homes of relatives during the war, but his own house wasn't hit. He even says he could accept an Israel within the 1967 borders. He talks a lot about reconciliation between Hamas and its rival, the Fatah movement. Oddly enough, his position has suddenly become more popular, even within Hamas. Many Gaza residents are furious with the hardliners, who provoked the war with their rockets.
Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish has had little time to grieve. He gives press conferences and interviews. He wants to be the face of Palestinians in Gaza. He hopes that his pain will rub off on Israeli society, and that his daughters will have been the last victims in this war.
This is his mission, and it is what keeps him going during this difficult time.
Five days after the attack, the doctor is permitted to drive to Gaza to pick up his four surviving children. Along the way he encounters tanks loaded onto trucks, as the Israelis withdraw. Busses, parked at the border crossing, wait to pick up refugees. At a time when everyone wants to get out of Gaza, the doctor is going back in. He needs to.
He sees his destroyed home for the first time, and the graves of his daughters. There are no flowers in Gaza, nothing he can place on the graves. He's now convinced the shells were fired by Israelis, and he remembers having seen a tank just before the attack.
"It is a crime," Abu al-Aish says for the first time. He will repeat his assertion again and again in the coming days. "It was no mistake," he says. "It was deliberate."
It has become difficult for him to be the one to bring a reconciliatory voice to this conflict.
When Abu al-Aish leaves Gaza with his children, his son asks: "Papa, are the Israelis bad people?" The father tries to explain that it isn't that simple, and that there are bad Israelis and good Israelis. "I don't want my children to sink into hatred," he says.
It is dark by the time they arrive at the hospital. Hesitantly, the two youngest children step out of the car and stand there, frozen, suddenly facing half a dozen television cameras. It is the first time that the children have ever set foot on Israeli soil. They have come to visit their wounded sister in the hospital.
The cameras record everything. Israeli reporters stroke the girl's hand as she sits in her wheelchair, and they embrace Abu al-Aish, attempting to comfort him. The entire scene is broadcast live, and at that moment it seems like an attempt by both sides to exorcise the demons of an old hostility.
SUSANNE KOELBL, JULIANE VON MITTELSTAEDT, MATHIEU VON ROHR, VOLKHARD WINDFUHR, BERNHARD ZAND
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.
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