Never flinch until justice is served


Huda Ghalia looks at her younger self

Ola Moussa writes in The Electronic Intifada:

Huda Ali Ghalia is a young woman on a mission.  On 26 January, the 25-year-old earned her law diploma, the equivalent of taking the bar. She is now able to practice law in Gaza where she is from and where, a year ago, she was similarly qualified in sharia law.

Now she intends to secure a scholarship to study abroad for a degree in public law in order to familiarize herself with international humanitarian law.

But Huda is, even by Gaza’s standards, no ordinary ambitious young person.

Fourteen years ago, on 9 June 2006, Huda’s was the face of Gaza’s pain. Days shy of her 12th birthday, it was her anguished expression – as she threw herself in the sand crying out for her father, dead on a Gaza beach along with six other family members after an Israeli shelling – that became the symbol of everything that is wrong in Palestine and with a world that simply doesn’t care.

The footage was as heartbreaking as the aftermath was tawdry. Israel disputed accounts of the massacre that laid the blame on its military, insisting instead that Hamas mines had been the real cause of the fatal explosion.  It also refused an international investigation.

Israel’s version of events has been widely dismissed. Human Rights Watch called it the least likely of three possible scenarios.

But no justice has been granted the surviving members of the Ghalia family, nor has anyone been held accountable.  This is partly what motivates Huda today.  “I want to reactivate my family’s case,” Huda told The Electronic Intifada. “There must be justice.”

But it’s not just personal. The more she studied law, she said, the more she has found it remarkable how Israel has never been held accountable for its crimes. She wants, she said, to represent all Palestinians who have suffered from Israel’s oppression.

More ….

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