Ghadeer Jaber Mkheemar

Ghadeer Jaber Mkheemar was a 10-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli soldiers while sitting at her desk at an UNRWA school in the Gaza Strip on October 12 2004. The fifth grader was shot in the stomach by Israeli soldiers firing from a military post at the Gush Katif Israeli settlement that overlooks the Khan Yunis Palestinian refugee camp and UNRWA Co-Ed Elementary D School in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army claimed that its soldiers opened fire on the school after being attacked by a Palestinian firing mortar shells.

Ghadeer was one of between 104 and 133 Palestinian fatalities killed by the Israel Defense Force during the two weeks of Invasion of Gaza, the most extensive Israeli military invasion of the northern Gaza Strip since the beginning of the Second Palestinian uprising in 2000.

Incident

The UNRWA Commissioner-General, Peter Hansen, called the killing of Ghadeer Mkheemer, the second act of its kind within the month, "horrific by anyone’s standards." He said that "the pace of child deaths in Gaza has been accelerating terribly in recent weeks," and that almost every day "the most basic of the rights of the child – to life – is now being violated."

Mr. Hansen said that the Israeli military has attacked UNRWA schools four times during the past two years. UNRWA has repeatedly called on the Israeli army to stop firing at its schools, an example of the Israel's indiscriminate and dangerous military tactics in civilian areas, according to UNRWA. [1]

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