'The Israelis Killed My Father'

Fares Akram’s family farm was a small “beloved place,” so close to the Israeli border that they’d always feared it would be hit by errant rockets launched by Hamas, he writes in the Independent. Instead, it was blown up by an Israeli bomb while Akram’s 48-year-old father was inside. There was no way to get an ambulance there with the Israelis blocking the roads, but there was nothing left to save anyway. “Just a pile of flesh,” Akram’s brother remarked.

“My father was no militant,” Akram notes. He was a Palestinian Authority lawyer who quit and became a farmer when Hamas took over. “My grief carries no desire for revenge,” he writes, but “I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading.” (More Gaza stories.)