When you see how close to the house the demonstrators would go to throw stones, you get a pretty good idea of why there were casualties. Note the kid standing in the left of the picture, just to the right of the pylon. He is about to get injured. Photo by Nigel Parry
After being hit by a rubber bullet in the right pelvis area (believe me it would hurt from that close), the kid is stretchered away by an ambulance crew. Naturally, they occasionally were hit by Israeli fire of one kind of another, a friend reporting seeing an ambulance that had had windows shot out. Other health workers were injured during these days. Photo by Nigel Parry
Still crouched round the side of the wall, I snapped this last photo of the boy, clearly around 15 or 16 years old. You wondered how come so many children were injured during the Intifada? This is how. UNWRA recorded 22,000 injuries to children from December 1987 to mid-1996 in Gaza alone. Clubs, beatings, rubber bullets, live amunition, etc... Anyway, this kid was lucky. Not so Ahmed, a Birzeit student wounded on the first day, pictured below. Photo by Nigel Parry
Ahmed was shot from wiithin 20 yards in the face with a "rubber" bullet, on the first day of the troubles. It damaged his sinuses and, we thought, possibly his eye, leaving him in incredible pain. So much for the "rubber" part of the 1cm diameter steel ball. I visited him a couple of days later and the worst of this seemed to be over. When I asked Palestinian Colonel Khalid Diab why the police, standing 30 yards away from the demonstrators, were not stopping them, he told me, "All day, we have asked the Israelis to stop firing so we can go in and remove them. They have not done this and continue to provoke the people. If I send my men in without a ceasefire and one gets injured, I will not be able to stop them from opening fire and the whole situation will escalate again. Because of this, the people are justified in throwing stones. The promises made to them in the peace process have not been fulfilled."Photo by Kifah al-Fani