Palestine Think Tank

By Mary Rizzo from the Bruxelles Tribunal. At the left, Mr Shokr holds a piece of the US-made rocket that destroyed his house.

At the Bruxelles Tribunal, several people represented the victims of the war. It was very interesting to note how different these people were from one another, judging by the type of presentation they wanted to share with us. Yet, at the moment of questioning by the lawyers and judges, they all came to the same conclusions about their experiences.

The first witness was a gentleman named Mohammed Shokr. The story of his family was an incredible odyssey of seeking refuge in a moment when the family was being reunited after much time spent far from one another. His family lives in Belgium and what should have been a simple family holiday when the grandparents and aunts and uncles could spend time with the children living in Europe became a nightmare of death and total devastation. They were in the village of El Nabi Chit, near Baalbeck in the Northern area, and when the bombing started to be frequent, thought that it would be a good idea to leave and go to their house near the Beirut Airport. Belgium had already asked her citizens to leave Lebanon entirely, but this possibility, as the days passed, was growing ever more remote. When they arrived in Beirut, they were once again victims of shelling, and the decision was made to go to a Christian village where a family member lived. �We thought this would be the safest place after our other homes had been shelled.�

A second witness was Hassan Al-Akhrass, a citizen of Canada whose flight was to leave for Lebanon allowing him to join his family the day before all flights had been cancelled. This spared him his own life, but tragically, it did nothing to save the others precious to him as they were crushed under the rubble of their own home in Aytaroun, destroyed by Israeli bombs. He lost 12 family members in the war, including his father, his uncle, his cousin and his wife and four small children and their grandmother. Other family members were wounded. He decided to bring photos of his loved ones in happier moments, days before their lives were taken. There were pictures of them by the sea, babies in the arms of their mother, children being cuddled by their grandparents, beautiful smiling faces that no longer exist if not in the memories of this man, and whose story he put on a DVD called �In the Line of Fire�. In the composition here, we see some of the victims. To spare older family members the grief of learning the fate of their loved ones, it was decided to not reveal the news of the deaths to those who might not be able to handle such pain. Frequent questions about the family�s whereabouts could not be kept unanswered forever, and that compounded the sense of helplessness. �My real hope is that there will be justice for them.� Looking at the innocent faces of these people, and considering the tragedy of the loss of their lives, it is the least that we should expect, and all of us owe them this much.