Gazans pay tribute to drowned Syrian toddler with sand sculpture

One year after Hamas war with Israel, Palestinians replicate viral photo of Aylan’s Kurdi lifeless body washed upon a Turkish beach

By AFP and ToI Staff 7 September 2015, 11:42 pm

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Palestinian girls put flowers on a sand sculpture depicting Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy who drowned off Turkey, on September 7, 2015, on Gaza city beach. (AFP/MOHAMMED ABED)

Palestinians paid tribute to the tiny boy who drowned while fleeing the Syrian war by building a sand sculpture of him Monday on a beach in the Gaza Strip.

The sculpture, measuring a few meters (yards) in length, depicts three-year-old Aylan Kurdi in the same position and with red and blue clothing like he wore when his lifeless body was found last week.

Aylan’s body was photographed lying face down in the sand near Bodrum, one of Turkey’s prime tourist resorts, in a bleak image that rapidly went viral on social media.

The sand sculpture is located a short distance from where an Israeli strike killed four Gazan children as they played football during Israel’s 50-day war with Hamas militants in Gaza last summer.

“When I saw this statue representing Aylan Kurdi, the child drowned while fleeing Syria, I felt a deep sadness and great emotion,” said resident Arwa Arbijan. “It reminded me of the children of the Bakr family who were killed on the Gaza beach during the last war,” she told AFP.

Last year on July 16, cousins Ahed Atef Bakr and Zakaria Ahed Bakr, both aged 10, nine-year-old Mohamed Ramez Bakr and 11-year-old Ismail Mohamed Bakr were playing on the beach in Gaza City when they were hit in two separate Israeli air strikes.

Their death was one of the most widely covered and controversial incidents of the war.

Earlier this year, the Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Danny Efroni announced a number of Israeli military actions in Gaza resulting in civilian deaths would be investigated for possible criminal liability.

Efroni said the area that was hit had been a known base for Hamas naval forces, who used the area exclusively, and the children were mistaken as Hamas’s naval forces.

After a review of the investigation’s findings, Efroni found that the attack process in question “accorded with Israeli domestic law and international law requirements,” and closed the case.

Eyewitnesses said the four children had been playing on the beach and tried unsuccessfully to outrun the shelling.