Israeli dart shells kill family of Palestinians

The gap between the rhetoric and reality of the Middle East conflict was to be found yesterday in the form of a small, finned dart buried deep inside the chest of an unconscious 16-year-old Palestinian boy.

It stood out on the X-ray in perfect silhouette, a missile in miniature embedded in the flesh about half-way up the right side of his rib cage. One and a half inches higher up, just below the armpit, there was a second dart, pointing in a different direction. A third had torn its way into his stomach.

Salah al-Hajeen was one of at least six people blown up by a shell packed with some 3,000 inch-long arrows fired by an Israeli tank into a fruit-pickers' encampment in the orchards of Gaza. The darts are known technically as "flechettes"; the Palestinians simply call them nails. The shell killed four members of his family: Ruwaida al-Hajeen, 55, her sons, Ashraf, 23, and Nihad, 17, and 20-year-old Mohammed, a cousin. Though he was critically injured, doctors at Gaza's Shifa Hospital expected Salah to recover. Two beds along from him lay another family member – a 21-year-old man, also called Mohammed. He was unlikely to be so fortunate. He was in a deep coma, suffering from brain damage, two severed arteries, and a nail-shredded leg.

The Palestinian doctors showed us Salah's X-ray with no air of surprise or excitement. They made no mention of the darts when we first interviewed them.

The images of the youth's damaged insides were produced at our request after we returned to the hospital to check out whether the flechettes that we had discovered at the scene, buried to their hilts in the branches of blast-torn fig trees, had also hit people. "We have seen these nails many times before," said Dr Hani Sammour, quietly. "Some people die from them." Palestinian suicide bombers routinely pack their bomb-belts with nuts and bolts to maximise the injuries of the Israeli civilians whom they target. The Israelis always – reasonably enough – furiously condemn this revolting tactic, citing it as evidence of their attackers' terrorist credentials.

But the Israeli armed forces, whose Chief-of-Staff was trained in Britain and which is funded and equipped in large part by the United States, have a similar weapon. It is an Israeli-manufactured 120mm shell, fired from a tank, which can be set to explode in the air at a specified distance and fires out its payload of darts in all directions. It has been the subject of complaints by human rights groups and foreign diplomats, including Britain's. But, according to military experts, the flechette bomb is not banned under international conventions.

The flechettes are designed to kill and maim armed men on the ground. You only have to examine their effect on a tree – they can scythe clean through an inch-thick branch – to appreciate their deadliness. But late on Wednesday night – not for the first time in this 23-month conflict – they were used by Israel against Palestinian civilians to fatal and indiscriminate effect.

Palestinian neighbours of the al-Hajeen family said that they came from a refugee camp in Gaza City. They had been spending the nights on a family-owned plot in the fields south of Gaza City with more than a dozen other people, in order to get up at dawn to pick the figs and grapes to sell to wholesalers who took them to market. The nearby Israeli troops must have known civilians were in the area. "There were at least 20 people here every night for the last two months," said Majdi Siam. As it was hot, they slept outside, under a lemon tree. That proved to be a fatal mistake.