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Palestinians mull revenge for Israeli rocket hitting Gaza

Ali Al-Shaer was delivered in separate ambulances to the mob awaiting his arrival with a mixture of fury and obscene fascination at the Nasser hospital.

First came what remained of his charred torso after an Israeli rocket slammed into his car as it worked its way through the cluttered streets of Gaza's Khan Yunis refugee camp on Monday.

Minutes later, the Palestinian insurgent's head was delivered in the back of an ambulance followed by a cortege of young gunmen packed into a string of battered old Mercedes, apparently learning nothing about what had fallen from the sky minutes before.

Their Kalashnikov's clattered against the doors as they got out of their car. One man collapsed in tears, then rediscovered his anger and let off a burst of gunfire as the doctors shook their heads. The uproar at the hospital was a far cry from the resignation with which most Palestinians greet news of the all too routine "targeted assassinations."

Monday's attack only wounded its intended target, Mohammed Abu Nseara, who his colleagues at the hospital said was involved in an assault that killed three Israeli soldiers guarding a neighboring Jewish settlement last week.

Abu Nseara was hauled out of the ambulance charred and appearing to all who scrutinized his bloodied and immobile face as if the Israelis might indeed have brought him to the brink of death.

The killing in southern Gaza is mostly one way, with hundreds of Palestinians dead to less than a score of Israelis.

A few hours earlier, the Israeli army shot dead a man in the grounds of a UN boys' primary school adjacent to Nasser hospital.

The victim had come to visit a friend, the caretaker. The boys' school is opposite the UN's girls' primary school where 10-year-old Raghda Alassar was shot in the head by a soldier as she sat at her desk three weeks ago. She died last Friday.

Neither killing was deliberate, merely routine amid the indiscriminate gunfire from the army posts that arc around three sides of Khan Yunis. In both cases, stray bullets caught innocent victims.

Two weeks ago, an Israeli shell hit Nasser hospital, wounding a doctor and a nurse.
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