This article was originally published by Haaretz and is republished with permission.

Palestinian boy watches a funeral in the Rafah Refugee Camp in southern Gaza. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza since late June. (Hatem Omar, Maan Images)

We drank tea with the head of the household. That was in May. Mohammed Abu-Ouda showed us the ruins of his house, which had been damaged by Israel Defense Forces fire. Boom after boom, shell after shell; the guns roared and the walls of the house trembled. Little Meisa walked barefoot among the ruins, stepping on shattered glass, refusing to let go of the bundle of clothes she was holding. Five years old, her gray face expressed shock. Abed, her cousin, was wounded in the shelling when he went up to the roof of the house to fill a container with water. Mohammed, short and bearded, accompanied us silently on a tour of his ruined house, whose roof had collapsed onto the balcony below.

This week we returned to that house, at the edge of the town of Beit Hanun in the Gaza Strip, opposite the orchards that the IDF uprooted and the row of Washingtonia palms that has survived. Mohammed is no longer there, nor is his son Ismail or his daughter Hanan. The three of them were killed by IDF fire. The house that was shelled a few months ago turned into a house of triple bereavement in September.

Mohammed was 53 years old; Ismail was 27 and Hanan was 15. Their only crime, according to the evidence, was that they emerged from their house in the middle of the night, frightened by the thunder of the shell or missile that landed on their house. And then the soldiers standing in the street fired at them, killing them one after the other.

Azhar, 16, is now limping, on crutches; she was also wounded. Together with her sister, Hanan, she was lying on the sand at the entrance to the house; the soldiers, say furious family members, denied them medical treatment and did not evacuate them for a long time. Hanan was bleeding and died about three weeks later at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, where she was finally taken. Azhar was saved.

On Hanan Abu-Ouda's death certificate, signed by a doctor, it says: "Cause of death: deliberate hit."

At about 2 A.M. they awoke, terrified. Something landed and exploded on the tin hut in the yard of the house, where several of the children of the family were sleeping peacefully under the asbestos roof. That was the night of September 2. The mother of the family, Intizar, and her husband Mohammed were sleeping in two different corners of the living room, whose windows are now covered over with gray bricks, as protection from the shelling

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Intizar was convinced that all her children had been killed. Mohammed ran out to the yard, to see what had happened. Hanan and Azhar rushed out after their father. When Intizar followed, she saw the two girls lying wounded on the ground in the darkness. Azhar moaned; Hanan didn't make a sound. Several soldiers, Intizar remembers now, were standing in the street with their faces covered with black paint, shining their flashlights on the wounded girls. Azhar was conscious and told her mother that the soldiers had shot at her.

Intizar called out to the family members who were still in the house, to come and rescue the girls. They managed to pull the two of them into the house and immediately tried to call an ambulance. The son, Younis, came out of the hut in the yard; he managed to enter the house through the window, after hearing his mother's screams. Intizar noticed that Younis' body was covered with blood.

"What happened, were you wounded?" she asked, shocked. No, he wasn't wounded. The blood was that of his brother, Ismail, who was killed next to the hut. Now Intizar already knew that she had lost a son, and her two daughters were lying wounded in the house.

Younis peered at the street from the window. In the dark he noticed his father also lying dead in the street. He had also been shot. Now Intizar realized that she had lost her husband, too. Hanan vomited blood in the living room. "The moment I knew that my husband had also been killed, I tried at least to try to save the girls," she says now, enraged, sitting on the floor of her house.

Younis decided to take the two wounded girls out to the street again. When the ambulance came, he thought, he would be able to evacuate them quickly. He dragged the two on the floor. Outside the soldiers stood around the girls and, according to the family, did not lift a finger. They begged the soldiers to evacuate them, but the soldiers, they say, only told them not to shout. No ambulance managed to come near. Desperate, Intizar waved with the white kerchief on her head, shouting for help.

The soldiers ordered all the members of the family to evacuate the house within five minutes, handcuffed the men and put them together in a nearby building. Intizar says that she became hysterical and began to beat herself. The soldiers ordered her to keep quiet. "Don't you have a mother? Don't you have sisters? Don't you have children? Don't you have feelings?" she says she shouted at them.

Another daughter, Meida, also pleaded with the soldiers on behalf of her sisters. She says it was "like talking to the wall." Hanan, barely breathing, was dying; Azhar kept moaning. "I felt that Hanan was dying," says Meida, "I exploded inside." After a while an armored IDF vehicle came from the east and the two wounded sisters were put inside. Azhar says that inside they were not treated; they remained there for about an hour and a half. Perhaps every moment seemed to her like an eternity.

Finally a Palestinian ambulance was allowed to remove them from the vehicle and to evacuate them to the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital, which they reached when it was already morning. After 10 days Hanan was transferred to Barzilai Medical Center. On September 20 she died there of her wounds.

The IDF Spokesman: "Throughout Saturday night, September 2, IDF special forces, in cooperation with forces from the security service, carried out a raid and arrested two Hamas operatives in the Gaza Strip. The men, Mohammed Tarabin and Younis Abed al-Fita, were involved in steep-trajectory firing and the placement of roadside bombs. During the course of the activity, there was shooting, including anti-tank fire, at the forces, from a house where the wanted men were hiding. The forces returned fire at the source of shooting and identified a hit.

During the exchange of fire there, a number of Palestinians who were staying in the area of the fighting were hurt. An armored military ambulance evacuated the Palestinians who were hurt and transferred them to two Palestinian ambulances for further treatment. The IDF does everything in its power to avoid harming innocent bystanders, and under no circumstances does it do so deliberately. The activity of the terror organizations is often carried out under cover of innocent bystanders, who are used as a human shield."

Now the women of the family are sitting on the floor - the two grandmothers, the mother and the sisters - and mourning. On the walls are posters of the dead, among them a huge poster of another son, Ismail, with a small photo of Yasser Arafat in the background, a billboard that takes up almost an entire wall. Ashkelon to the north, Sderot in the east, through the slits of the brick-covered window. The balcony that collapsed has yet to be repaired.

Another family incident, this time in the Sajiya neighborhood in Gaza. A row of grieving men are sitting with despondent, dark faces in the mourners' tent in the main street of the neighborhood, Mansoura Street, mourning for Osama and Iman al-Harazin, a father and his little daughter, who were killed here last week. A large number of Islamic Jihad flags, black with gold letters, are flying at the entrance to the tent.

Not that there is any shortage of bereavement in Gaza. Mourning prevails here. Here, Jamal Abu-Nasser is mourning for his child. The family spent 25 years in Abu Dhabi, where Jamal was a teacher, and two years ago they returned to the hell in Gaza. Jamal says he did so in order to enable three of his grown children to study at the university there. Now one son is studying pharmacology at the Islamic University, another son is studying computers at the Al-Quds Open University, a daughter is studying art at Al-Azhar University and the youngest, Mahmoud, 15 years old, is dead. He was born in Abu Dhabi and died in Beit Hanun.

Last Monday the Abu-Nasser family went on its daily trip to its plot of land on the outskirts of Beit Hanun. They have one-and-a-half dunams (less than half an acre), including a few fruit trees, a chicken run, a dovecote and a structure in which to rest, surrounded by a concrete wall with an iron gate - the property of a wealthy brother-in-law who lives in Cairo. They left the house at around 12:30 in the afternoon, Jamal and two of his sons, Mohammed, 16 and Mahmoud, 15, with their elderly neighbor, about 70, and his 7-year-old grandson, traveling in a Subaru. Jamal says that they came along for a change of scenery.

Jamal let them all out of the car and drove to get gas at the station opposite. When he returned he suddenly heard an explosion. A missile or a shell had hit Mahmoud. Hamal discovered that during the short period when he went to get gas, Mahmoud had noticed a Qassam rocket launcher on the ground, at a distance of about 100 meters from the family plot. The boy approached the launcher, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps someone sent him to get rid of it. The response of the IDF was immediate and lethal.

Jamal is convinced that his son was not involved in any Qassam launching. "Even if you gave him a pistol he wouldn't know how to use it," he says. "We only arrived here two years ago." When he heard the explosion Jamal lay on the ground, and when he got up he saw his dead son lying a few dozen meters away. His head had been crushed.

"I understood that the boy was gone," he says, adding that he later heard on the radio that Israel claimed that the family car had been loaded with missiles. But when the Palestinian forces checked it, they found only a few bags of garbage that was supposed to be used for feeding the chickens.

The bereaved mother, Marwat, serves the Israeli guests dates and tea, in spite of the Ramadan fast. "Why did they kill my son? Only a 15-year-old boy," she says. Mahmoud wanted to be a television actor when he grew up; last summer he participated in an acting workshop in the local community center and performed in plays for children. In his last photo he is seen taking his own picture with a camera - a double portrait of a boy, on a black background.