The ‘brilliant’ way Israel kills innocents
Relatives mourn Fatima Abdallah, a 10-year-old girl killed after hundreds of paging devices exploded in a deadly wave across Lebanon, during her funeral in the village of Saraain in the Bekaa valley on 18 September 2024
Andrew Mitrovica writes in Al Jazeera on 25 September 2024:
By now, save her family and friends, the short life and dreadful death of 10-year-old Fatima Abdallah Jaafar will likely have been forgotten.
But the sick circumstance of how, where and why Fatima was killed requires remembering. It requires remembering because her sudden, disfiguring death stands a searing antidote to the almost giddy celebration of the “ingenious” ways Israel devises to assassinate its adversaries.
It is also a halting harbinger of the scores of other innocents who are bound to perish as the Middle East appears destined to be engulfed by an even wider war. In 48 hours alone, 50 children have been killed in Lebanon – all casualties of the latest Israeli strikes.
Fatima and an 11-year-old boy, Bilal Kanj, were killed during the first wave of Israeli attacks targeting Hezbollah fighters involving pagers housing explosives that detonated simultaneously at 3:30pm on September 17 throughout Lebanon and Syria.
Fatima had just arrived home from the first day of the new school year. She was in fourth grade. Her aunt remembered how eager Fatima was to learn English. “Fatima was trying to take courses in English,” she said. “She loved English.”
Fatima was in the kitchen when a pager, resting on a table, began beeping. She picked up the device, intending to deliver it to her father. En route, it exploded. Fatima’s small, cherubic face turned instantly into a mangled mess. The room was now awash in the schoolgirl’s blood – an awful testament to the improvised bomb’s lethal force.
At her funeral held in Lebanon’s Bekka Valley, grieving classmates carried a large picture of Fatima aloft. Her mother, walking alongside a tiny flower-draped coffin, wept.
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Among them is Artur Wilcynski, a former Canadian ambassador and senior security official, who promptly took to X to describe Israel’s ruthless gambit that claimed the budding lives of Fatima Abdallah and Bilal Kanj as “brilliant”.