AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES

An Amnesty International fact-finding team arrived in Gaza City on
Saturday, 17 January, hours before the Israeli government announced a
ceasefire. The team travelled to Gaza by way of Egypt, entering the
Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing, and then travelled by road
north to Gaza City.

As we were crossing the Egypt-Gaza border at Rafah on Saturday (17
January), an Israeli F16 fighter jet dropped a bomb nearby shattering
windows and causing parts of the ceiling in the customs hall to fall.
We knew we had arrived in Gaza!

Bar few exceptions international journalists and human rights workers
have been shut out of Gaza since early November. We were among the
very first to get in.

We travelled up to Gaza City in a convoy of two dozen ambulances
returning from taking patients to the border for transfer to Egyptian
hospitals. It was a stop-start journey that took several hours to
cover 40km. We had to halt several times for long periods while the
convoy negotiated passage through areas where there were Israeli
tanks.

Several medical personnel – including ambulance workers – have been
killed and injured by the Israeli army in the last few weeks, and the
journey required precision co-ordination. The previous day an Italian
journalist had come under fire from Israeli tanks as he was trying to
make his way up to Gaza City.

He told us that Israeli soldiers had continued to fire in the
direction of his car for two hours, including as he was speaking on
the phone to the Israeli army.

On Sunday, with the news of the ceasefire overnight, people began
tentatively to emerge from wherever they had taken refuge over the
past few weeks.

For many, it was their first real chance to check on their families
and on the homes they had been forced to abandon because of the
bombardments, and to look for supplies. We found many residents
stunned by the devastation that the Israeli bombardments have brought
to the city since December 27.

Evidence of use of white phosphorus by the Israeli army (c)Amnesty International
We saw many buildings reduced to rubble. Some had been directly
targeted; others destroyed or damaged when nearby buildings were
bombed. In several places, the outer walls of buildings had been blown
off.

We found evidence of widespread use of white phosphorus by the Israeli
army in densely populated areas in and around Gaza City. In an
alleyway in Gaza City, we saw barefooted children running around lumps
of still smouldering phosphorus. We found more on the roof of a
family's house and still more on a busy street.

In the Zaitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, rescue workers were pulling
out the bodies of members of the Sammuni family from the rubble of
their home. They had been killed in Israeli strikes two weeks earlier
and Israeli soldiers had subsequently bulldozed the house on top of
them.

The Israeli army did not allow rescue workers to reach the area,
despite repeated requests, and the bodies were in a state of
decomposition. The smell was unbearable.

We later learned that today more than 100 decaying bodies have been
pulled out from under rubble in various parts of Gaza. At Zaitoun,
there was little machinery to help with the effort – teams of people
worked with sledgehammers and even bare hands to reach the corpses
buried under the flattened concrete.

Graffiti in Gaza city homes taken over by Israeli soldiers. (c)Amnesty
International
Next door, Israeli soldiers had taken over homes and used them as
military positions. The soldiers had not only smashed holes in the
outer walls to fire from, but also vandalized the furniture and
everything else in the houses. They also left graffiti such as "death
to the Arabs" and "1 down – 999,999 to go".

Throughout the day, wherever we went in Gaza City and surrounding
areas, we found more and more destroyed and damaged homes, mosques,
schools and government buildings; some completely flattened, by bombs
dropped by F16 fighter jets, others rendered uninhabitable by the
artillery and missile strikes.

Even though Israel declared a ceasefire the previous night, in the
afternoon, we heard repeated Israeli artillery fire north of Gaza
City. In the evening, local human rights workers and medical doctors
told us that an 11-year-old girl had been killed and her mother
injured in the morning in north Gaza.