MIDDLE EAST:In their bedroom the boys' clothes were still hanging from hooks by the door and matching pink blankets lay over their beds. From the windows of the 12th floor apartment, relatives peered down at the point just a few hundred yards away where the three young sons of a senior Fatah security official were gunned down as they were driven to school yesterday morning.
An act of apparent factional Palestinian violence, it was extraordinary in its brutality even by Gaza's standards.
Sitting on one of the beds was Lydia Abu-Eid the boys' six-year-old cousin and the only person to emerge from the car virtually untouched, aside from a handful of scratches on her face.
She explained how yesterday, as every morning, the bodyguards for the Balousha family came first to her house before 7am to begin the school run. She sat in the back seat, to the left, just behind the driver. A second armed bodyguard sat in the front passenger seat of the white Skoda saloon.
From the Abu-Eid family house, the Skoda drove to Baha Balousha's flat in the Rimal district of Gaza City where his three boys got in. Osama (9) sat in the middle of the back seat, his brother Ahmad(6) sat on the right. The youngest, Salam (3) sat on the lap of the bodyguard in the front passenger seat.
They drove up the road to the first junction from where they would turn right and head across town to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate school, a respected private school catering for Christian and Muslim pupils. Lydia, Osama and Ahmad all studied there and were all wearing the school's simple uniform: white shirts and blue cardigans.
But the car never got past the junction. "Masked men fired one bullet and then we stopped," said Lydia. The car was then sprayed with dozens of bullets that flattened the tyres, shattered the windows and tore through the doorframes. "There was a lot of shooting. Then it stopped and the men left."
She crouched on the floor as the bullets flew over her head. She noticed the driver was already covered in blood. She turned to her cousin: "I asked Osama to give me a towel to clean the blood from my head," she said. "But he didn't respond."
In the back seat of the car, Lydia was barely touched but Osama and Ahmad were dead. In the front, Mahmoud Habeel, the bodyguard, and the youngest boy Salam were dead in the passenger seat and Ayman Ghoul, the driver, was seriously injured by shots to the neck and shoulder. Yesterday he was in intensive care in Gaza's al-Quds hospital, where doctors tried to make arrangements for him to be sent to Israel for more advanced medical care.
The street around them was full of children walking to their classes. At least two were injured in the gunfire, including Huda Awadi (12) who was hit in the lower left leg, and her sister Nasma (7), who was hit in the hand and needed 18 stitches. The girls' grandfather, Ibrahim Abu Shaaban, sat on a chair by Huda's bed in the Shifa hospital yesterday. "As long as there is no security and no unity between the Palestinian factions, then worse things will happen," he said.
Mr Balousha, a former militant - now a lieutenant colonel in the Palestinian intelligence service- and a long-time Fatah activist, knew the importance of security precautions in Gaza's fragile climate. The children always travelled separately from their father, always with two armed guards and always in the same white Skoda with its tinted windows.
Twice in recent months he had escaped assassination attempts, the result of a worsening rivalry between his secular Fatah faction, led by the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, which defeated Fatah in elections at the start of the year and now runs the government.
Mr Balousha had taken part in prison interrogations of Hamas fighters during a crackdown a decade ago. "I have no words," he said. "I am a father who has lost his children." - (Guardian service)