Drama and Death in the Strip

A YOUNG family and a misguided boy met on a road in Gaza several months ago. The encounter, which stunned all Israel, is reconstructed by TIME Correspondent Marsh Clark:

Robert Aroyo, his wife Preeti, and their children Marc-Daniel, 7, and Abigail, 4, had lived in Israel only eight months. Born on Malta, raised in England, Aroyo abandoned an advertising job in London to bring his family to the land of promise, where he felt they all belonged. Settled in the Tel Aviv suburb of Kiron, the Aroyos often spent Sabbaths touring their new country. One bright Saturday they set out south to visit a seaside nahal, or fortified camp, in the Sinai below El Arish.

Mahmoud Slieman Zak, 15, sat in the shade of an old building beside the highway that bisects the strip and gossiped idly with a friend. He was an indifferent pupil in school and wanted only to become a fulltime member of the Palestinian guerrillas for whom he had already been on eleven grenade-tossing missions. That morning Mahmoud fondled a grenade, wondering whether a target would present itself.

Carefully, the Aroyos checked with Kiron police before setting out on their trip to the nahal called Yam. The police saw no danger in their driving back to Tel Aviv by way of Gaza. Aroyo, therefore, was unconcerned as he reached the town of Gaza. The only thing he noticed on the road ahead of him was an old abandoned Seven-Up bottling plant.

Mahmoud's heart leaped. From the orange license plate on the slowly approaching car, he knew it was an Israeli and not a silver-tagged Gaza vehicle. Mahmoud' s friend, Wasfi Mussa Masharawi, 16, sauntered out into the middle of the street, forcing the car to slow to a crawl. Mahmoud tossed his grenade into a rolled-down window. The grenade had a four-second fuse, and he was gone before the explosion.

Aroyo braked his car to keep from hitting the boy who had walked out into the road in front of him. He never saw the missile that flew through the open window of his Cortina and landed on the back seat beside the children. All he heard was a muffled explosion and Abigail's cry, "Daddy, Daddy!" The back seat was bloody when he looked. Beside him Preeti moaned, "My back is broken."

Wasfi Mussa Masharawi watched indifferently as the man staggered out of the car, cradling a bleeding girl in his arms. He ran away when the man pleaded with him for help.

Abigail was dead by the time the Israeli military helicopter arrived. Marc-Daniel died soon after. Aroyo buried them on the Mount of Olives, smoothing the dirt over their graves with his own hands. Then he hurried back to the Beersheba hospital where his wife was being treated for injuries to the spine and pelvis that took six months to heal.

The search for the young grenadiers was more thorough and more brutal than any previous Israeli sweep. Green-bereted border police, rough Druze rather than Hebrew, came to help; incidents mounted until one officer and what the army described as "a number of soldiers" were charged with unnecessary brutality toward Arab civilians in the course of their searches. Informers eventually turned up Mahmoud Slieman Zak, who had been paid $28 to toss the grenade. Israel rarely invokes the death penalty, so the boy was sentenced to seven life terms plus 50 years. Mahmoud showed little emotion until the judge said that there was not enough evidence to prove that the boy belonged to a clandestine guerrilla organization. "You did that deliberately to make me look like a common criminal!" Mahmoud screamed.

After the tragedy Aroyo was a crushed man, hut he strained to be compassionate. "I do not hate the people who did this," he said. Few Israelis felt that way about it.

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