Hi,
About two weeks ago a mortar shell fell near an Engineering corps platoon in our company. They were about to demolish some buildings by explosives (as they are doing in the last couple of months).
It was then, when the house was full of explosives, that a mortar shell had exploded next to them. For their luck, nobody was hurt from the mortar shell sharpanels, and more lucky for them – it did not ignited the explosives in the building.
If it had hit the building and the explosives in it, I guessed we would crawl on our knees looking for the remains of the bodies of those Engineering Corps soldiers. Just like we did on Philadelphi route (back on 2004).
Today ot happened again, but this time, it was I and my platoon who were sitting in this house while the mortar shell had landed.
I was standing outside the building, and suddenly saw an explosion to my right, about ten meter away the cloud of smoke above it. A second later I heard the boom and one calls Purple rain (the military code for high-trajectory weapon).
We run away from the building as fast as we can, as to not evaporate away with the building. We were not far away from being collected piece by piece.
We were also lucky as there were no sharpanels from the mortar shell. Gaza strip is all sand, and apparently a mortar shell which explode on that soft sand have no sharpanels spreaded all around it.
Take Care
Gad
The street we were working at
The building we were standing in (on the right of the pic, where the blue marker is) with couple of hundreds kg of Hanamex explosive, on the mortar shell carter on the left of the pic (red marker)
