‘They don’t see us as humans’: Family’s anger at people smugglers after daughter dies in boat tragedy
Mohammed looks at me, his eyes wet from tears, and shakes his head gently. Grief is like a weight around him, which he meets with forced smiles and choked-back tears.
“Every day, I think of dying a hundred times,” he says.
Next to him is his wife, Nour, heavily pregnant and sobbing into her hands. She is due to give birth in just a couple of weeks, but now mourns her daughter just as she awaits the arrival of a son.
It is less than a week since Rula drowned in a French canal, and the devastation is still desperately etched on their faces.
Nour unlocks her phone and calls up a photo of Rula. She is smiling out from the screen.
“She was beautiful and I lost her. My little princess. She was seven years old, she had seen nothing in this world. We just wanted to make their lives better,” she says.
Rula died because of the family’s dream of reaching Britain. They had spent years travelling from Iraq, where their lives were threatened, across Europe, to Germany and then on to France.
Nour and her family had spent years travelling from Iraq, where their lives were threatened
A few days ago, the family boarded a boat in France, intent on reaching Britain. They had paid a people smuggler €6,000, and been promised seats aboard the sort of vessel used for tourist trips – safe and reliable.
Instead, they were placed on a death-trap – an overloaded stolen pleasure-boat with no life jackets that capsized on a canal. Rula, who had sought refuge from the noise in a small cabin at the front of the boat, was trapped inside.
“The water came into the cabin and she was stuck,” says Mohammed.
“The smugglers had left us. I had to rescue my wife, my son and another person. But I couldn’t rescue her.”
They are too tired to shout or become furious. But if you ask them about blame, then the answer comes back.
“My daughter died and the reason why is because of the people smugglers who have no morals,” he says.
“They fooled us, took money from us and threw us in the water without any mercy. They do not see humans as humans – they only see materials and money.”
Muhaimen pays his respects at his sister’s funeral
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Rula’s death poses tough question for politicians
Besides them are their three sons – Muhaimen, 14, Hassan, 10, and Moamel, eight. They listen and nod along quietly.
“She was very dear to us, but what do we do?” says Hassan, when I ask him about his sister.
“I want her to come back but she won’t.” His grief is so thick it bewilders him.
The family invited us to talk to them. They wanted the world to know about their daughter, but they also wanted to talk about their exasperation with the life they’ve ended up living – fleeing a home where they cannot stay, but struggling to find a place where they can actually settle.
“I do not know what to do or where to go,” Nour says. “What crime have these children committed? What is their future? I need a country to listen to me, just take their papers.”
Mohammed nods and holds his wife. “When you reach a point when your life is not secure, when your children could get killed, you have no choice but to migrate and go to countries that preach humanity.
Rula’s father Mohammed speaks to Sky News
“But when you talk to them, tell them your story, they threaten you with deportation. Our children are smart but honestly, sometimes we wonder – why did we bring them into this world?”
I ask if they would still like to go to Britain, despite all the trauma they have experienced. The answer is yes. Remarkably, they plan on trying again.
A message comes through. The family has been asked to go to the morgue in Lille.
Mohammed comes in and out, a ball of nervous tension. Hassan and Moamel play with a paper aeroplane on a patch of lawn over the road from the morgue. They find a ladybird and agree that Rula would have loved it.
But then they are called back in, and they see her body, and when we see the boys next they are silent but for their weeping.
A short while later, Rula’s body is released to the family but there is little time to waste. Muslim tradition dictates that the burial must take place before sunrise.
When we get to the graveyard, there are dozens of people waiting – sympathetic strangers who’ve come to offer solace. You can see the family are touched.
At the far end, under the shadow of a tall electricity pylon but shaded from the traffic noise, Rula’s coffin is lowered into a grave.
Rula was buried during a small ceremony
There is a prayer, a moment of reflection, and then the grave is filled in. Her father and brothers all rub their hands in the soil. A bag is filled with the dirt and given to Nour. Flowers are placed over the grave, as well as photos of Rula. A marker is put in place, remembering her name. Hassan kisses it.
We say goodbye to the family, and one thing strikes me. If Mohammed, Nour and their children do eventually get to the UK, they will not be allowed to travel abroad again for a long time.
Reaching Britain will mean being cut off from their daughter’s final resting place, unable to lay flowers on Rula’s grave. Like so much in the story of migration, it is also a tale of making terrible choices.
World
Israeli soldiers ‘psychologically broken’ after ‘confronting the reality’ in Gaza, UN expert says
A UN expert has said some young soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces are being left “psychologically broken” after “confront[ing] the reality among the rubble” when serving in Gaza.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, was responding to a Sky News interview with an Israeli solider who described arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza.
She told The World with Yalda Hakim that “many” of the young people fighting in Gaza are “haunted by what they have seen, what they have done”.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Ms Albanese said. “This is not a war, this is an assault against civilians and this is producing a fracture in many of them.
“As that soldier’s testimony reveals, especially the youngest among the soldiers have been convinced this is a form of patriotism, of defending Israel and Israeli society against this opaque but very hard felt enemy, which is Hamas.
“But the thing is that they’ve come to confront the reality among the rubble of Gaza.”
An Israeli soldier directs a tank near the border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel. Pic: AP
Being in Gaza is “probably this is the first time the Israeli soldiers are awakening to this,” she added. “And they don’t make sense of this because their attachment to being part of the IDF, which is embedded in their national ideology, is too strong.
“This is why they are psychologically broken.”
Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman who is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, said he believes the Sky News interview with the former IDF solider “reflects one part of how ugly, difficult and horrible fighting in a densely populated, urban terrain is”.
“I think [the ex-soldier] is reflecting on how difficult it is to fight in such an area and what the challenges are on the battlefield,” he said.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Ex-IDF spokesperson: ‘No distinction between military and civilians’
‘An economy of genocide’
Ms Albanese, one of dozens of independent UN-mandated experts, also said her most recent report for the human rights council has identified “an economy of genocide” in Israel.
The system, she told Hakim, is made up of more than 60 private sector companies “that have become enmeshed in the economy of occupation […] that have Israel displace the Palestinians and replace them with settlers, settlements and infrastructure Israel runs.”
Israel has rejected allegations of genocide in Gaza, citing its right to defend itself after Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
‘Israel has shifted towards economy of genocide’
The companies named in Ms Albanese’s report are in, but not limited to, the financial sector, big tech and the military industry.
“These companies can be held responsible for being directed linked to, or contributing, or causing human rights impacts,” she said. “We’re not talking of human rights violations, we are talking of crimes.”
“Some of the companies have engaged in good faith, others have not,” Ms Albanese said.
Read more:
Israeli soldier describes arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza
British surgeons on life in Gaza
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
The companies she has named include American technology giant Palantir, which has issued a statement to Sky News.
It said it is “not true” that Palantir “is the (or a) developer of the ‘Gospel’ – the AI-assisted targeting software allegedly used by the IDF in Gaza, and that we are involved with the ‘Lavender’ database used by the IDF for targeting cross-referencing”.
“Both capabilities are independent of and pre-ate Palantir’s announced partnership with the Israeli Defence Ministry,” the statement added.
An Israeli reservist who served three tours of duty in Gaza has told Sky News in a rare on-camera interview that his unit was often ordered to shoot anyone entering areas soldiers defined as no-go zones, regardless of whether they posed a threat, a practice he says left civilians dead where they fell.
“We have a territory that we are in, and the commands are: everyone that comes inside needs to die,” he said. “If they’re inside, they’re dangerous you need to kill them. No matter who it is,” he said.
Speaking anonymously, the soldier said troops killed civilians arbitrarily. He described the rules of engagement as unclear, with orders to open fire shifting constantly depending on the commander.
The soldier is a reservist in the Israel Defence Force’s 252nd Division. He was posted twice to the Netzarim corridor; a narrow strip of land cut through central Gaza early in the war, running from the sea to the Israeli border. It was designed to split the territory and allow Israeli forces to have greater control from inside the Strip.
He said that when his unit was stationed on the edge of a civilian area, soldiers slept in a house belonging to displaced Palestinians and marked an invisible boundary around it that defined a no-go zone for Gazans.
“In one of the houses that we had been in, we had the big territory. This was the closest to the citizens’ neighbourhood, with people inside. And there’s an imaginary line that they tell us all the Gazan people know it, and that they know they are not allowed to pass it,” he said. “But how can they know?”
People who crossed into this area were most often shot, he said.
“It was like pretty much everyone that comes into the territory, and it might be like a teenager riding his bicycle,” he said.
The soldier is seen in Gaza. Photos are courtesy of the interviewed soldier, who requested anonymity
The soldier described a prevailing belief among troops that all Gazans were terrorists, even when they were clearly unarmed civilians. This perception, he said, was not challenged and was often endorsed by commanders.
“They don’t really talk to you about civilians that may come to your place. Like I was in the Netzarim road, and they say if someone comes here, it means that he knows he shouldn’t be there, and if he still comes, it means he’s a terrorist,” he said.
“This is what they tell you. But I don’t really think it’s true. It’s just poor people, civilians that don’t really have too many choices.”
He said the rules of engagement shifted constantly, leaving civilians at the mercy of commanders’ discretion.
“They might be shot, they might be captured,” he said. “It really depends on the day, the mood of the commander.”
He recalled an occasion of a man crossing the boundary and being shot. When another man came later to the body, he too was shot.
Later the soldiers decided to capture people who approached the body. Hours after that, the order changed again, shoot everyone on sight who crosses the “imaginary line”.
The Israeli soldier during his on-camera interview with Sky News
At another time, his unit was positioned near the Shujaiya area of Gaza City. He described Palestinians scavenging scrap metal and solar panels from a building inside the so-called no-go zone.
“For sure, no terrorists there,” he said. “Every commander can choose for himself what he does. So it’s kind of like the Wild West. So, some commanders can really decide to do war crimes and bad things and don’t face the consequences of that.”
The soldier said many of his comrades believed there were no innocents in Gaza, citing the Hamas-led 7 October attack that killed around 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage. Dozens of hostages have since been freed or rescued by Israeli forces, while about 50 remain in captivity, including roughly 30 Israel believes are dead.
He recalled soldiers openly discussing the killings.
“They’d say: ‘Yeah, but these people didn’t do anything to prevent October 7, and they probably had fun when this was happening to us. So they deserve to die’.”
He added: “People don’t feel mercy for them.”
“I think a lot of them really felt like they were doing something good,” he said. “I think the core of it, that in their mind, these people aren’t innocent.”
The IDF soldier during one of his three tours in Gaza
In Israel, it is rare for soldiers to publicly criticise the IDF, which is seen as a unifying institution and a rite of passage for Jewish Israelis. Military service shapes identity and social standing, and those who speak out risk being ostracised.
The soldier said he did not want to be identified because he feared being branded a traitor or shunned by his community.
Still, he felt compelled to speak out.
“I kind of feel like I took part in something bad, and I need to counter it with something good that I do, by speaking out, because I am very troubled about what I took and still am taking part of, as a soldier and citizen in this country,” he said
“I think the war is… a very bad thing that is happening to us, and to the Palestinians, and I think it needs to be over,” he said.
He added: “I think in Israeli community, it’s very hard to criticise itself and its army. A lot of people don’t understand what they are agreeing to. They think the war needs to happen, and we need to bring the hostages back, but they don’t understand the consequences.
“I think a lot of people, if they knew exactly what’s happening, it wouldn’t go down very well for them, and they wouldn’t agree with it. I hope that by speaking of it, it can change how things are being done.”
The soldier is a reservist in the Israel Defence Force’s 252nd Division
We put the allegations of arbitrary killings in the Netzarim corridor to the Israeli military.
In a statement, the IDF said it “operates in strict accordance with its rules of engagement and international law, taking feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm”.
“The IDF operates against military targets and objectives, and does not target civilians or civilian objects,” the statement continued.
The Israeli military added that “reports and complaints regarding the violation of international law by the IDF are transferred to the relevant authorities responsible for examining exceptional incidents that occurred during the war”.
On the specific allegations raised by the soldier interviewed, the IDF said it could not address them directly because “the necessary details were not provided to address the case mentioned in the query. Should additional information be received, it will be thoroughly examined.”
Read more:
What is the possible Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal?
Two security workers injured at Gaza aid site, group says
The man acting as backchannel for Hamas in US negotiations
The statement also mentioned the steps the military says it takes to minimise civilian casualties, including issuing evacuation warnings and advising people to temporarily leave areas of intense fighting.
“The areas designated for evacuation in the Gaza Strip are updated as needed. The IDF continuously informs the civilian population of any changes,” it said.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike