Gaza Beach Explosion (2006)

Gaza Beach Explosion (2006)

The Gaza beach blast was an incident on June 9, 2006 in which eight Palestinians were killed and at least thirty others injured in an explosion on a beach near the municipality of Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip. The aftermath of the incident was captured on video and showed a distressed eleven-year-old girl, Huda Ghaliya, reacting to the loss of family members, most of whom were killed in the incident. The footage of Ghaliya, which received considerable media attention, was broadcast on news networks around the world, making her a symbol of Palestinian suffering. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung questioned the reliability of the video footage.

On 9 June 2006, between 4:31 and 4:50 p.m., Israeli artillery and a navy gunboat fired 8 artillery shells at the beach, with two shells landing 200 metres away from the family. The Israeli army and Israeli officials initially took responsibility. A subsequent investigation by the Israeli Defence Forces concluded that the explosion was not caused by the shelling of the beach and blamed it on a Palestinian land mine. This investigation was criticized by Human Rights Watch and The Guardian. The IDF acknowledged a flaw in the report in that it omitted mention of two 76mm naval shells, the IDF maintains had landed too far away to have caused the explosion. At this point, the IDF acknowledged that the cause of the blast may have been an unexploded 155mm artillery shell from an earlier shelling, but suggested it might have been used as an IED by Palestinians.

Huda Ghaliya's sister Ilham was reported in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz as saying her father caused the lethal explosion when he handled unexploded ordnance left behind from a previous incident, however other sources list her as one of the immediate victims of the explosion. Her brother Ayham, in an interview with the same newspaper, said the explosion was caused by an incoming shell.