Twilight Zone - `I'm sorry for your loss,' the officer said

For nearly three hours two Sundays ago, farmer Mohammed Abu Samra Zakarna sat in the vineyard he works, the bodies of his wife and daughter stretched out before him. For part of that time, his young son lay crying and dying next to them. Mohammed's hands were tied behind his back, and his pants had been taken away at the order of the soldiers who had just killed his family. It happened in the vineyard belonging to Khalid Ibrahim, which Zakarna works as a tenant farmer, at the side of the Jenin bypass road, in the early morning hours, when the soldiers thought that their tank had hit a roadside bomb. Only there was no bomb, and the soldiers shot and shelled the Zakarna family, the parents and their two children, who were picking grape leaves.

A week later, on this past Sunday, the bereaved father and widower sat in his one-room apartment in the extended family's home in the town of Qabatiyah, holding his two remaining children in his arms. Seven-year-old Yasmin, the eldest, keeps crying. She knows that her mother, sister and brother were killed, but she has no idea how this happened. The IDF tried to save Basel, but when their efforts failed, the body was returned to the hospital in Jenin.

When he went to the hospital to claim the bodies of his wife and daughter, he also found the body of his son, who had been taken away by an Israeli ambulance a few hours earlier.