The True Face of Sharon:
'They're shooting to kill, regardless of the target'
Doctors struggle to cope with the victims of Israel's
bloody assault on the West Bank in pursuit of
'terrorists'
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor, in Beit Rima
Sunday October 28, 2001
The Observer
observer.co.uk
He was at his checkpoint under an olive tree, at the entrance to
the West Bank village of Beit Rima, when the Israeli soldiers
ambushed and killed him.
Kamal Barghouti was not on any list of terrorists wanted by
Israel forces. In all likelihood he was sleeping. They killed him
just for being in their way.
Kamal was a handsome 20-year-old before a bullet wrecked his
face. An agricultural labourer in need of money, who worked
among the olive groves that ring Beit Rima, he had signed on
two months earlier as a 'soldier' in the National Security force of
the Palestinian Authority, to earn a regular wage.
The work they gave him was a 'beginner soldier's job', said his
sister Wafiyeh, speaking a few hours before his burial - one of
five victims of last week's brutal Israeli raid on Beit Rima.
They gave him a uniform and a gun - a big deal for a poorly
educated young man in the villages of the West Bank. They told
him to check the cars that came into the village. That was
Kamal's death sentence.
On Tuesday, the night before he died, he had a shower and
dinner in the pretty, old stone house his parents own in the
village next to the cemetery where he was later to be buried with
full military honours.
He spoke then of his fears of being a soldier amid the cycle of
retributive violence that has followed the assassination of the
racist Israeli Cabinet Minister Rehavam Ze'evi and claimed
dozens of Palestinian lives.
'He asked us, "If I die, will you remember me and love me still?",'
said his sister tearfully. His family will remember him. But the
men who killed him did not even know his name.
They arrived at his checkpoint under the olive tree in a van in the
early hours of Wednesday. According to his commander,
Colonel Kamal Khadami, the van was packed with a small unit
of plainclothes Israeli troops from the elite Dov Dovan - Cherry
Brigade - disguised as Palestinians.
They fired without warning, killing Kamal in one of the first
bursts. Moments later a second undercover unit attacked Beit
Rima's police station.
Taking their cue from their colleagues firing down the road, they
burst into the police post shouting 'What's happening?' in Arabic
before they too opened fire.
In the gun battle that followed, at least five men - by the Israeli
account - were killed. The Palestinians claim up to nine may
have died. They say some of the dead are 'missing'.
One thing seems certain. The Palestinian account of a lethal
ambush on Beit Rima, launched without warning by a massively
superior force equipped with tanks, helicopters and elite combat
troops against half a dozen men, is given credence by the
stories of the assault troops of the Nahal Brigade who attacked
them.
We met them at dusk on Wednesday walking out of the village,
two lines of young Israeli soldiers, heavily armed, their faces
blacked up for night fighting. Reaching the Israeli checkpoint
that blocked the entry of reporters into the village, they hugged
and cheered each other.
What had they done, we asked? 'We killed some Arab
terrorists,' the young men replied. It was, they told us, an 'easy
operation' despite some Israeli injuries. Combat, they added,
had been short - resistance light after the first assault by the
undercover soldiers. This contradicted the claims of army
spokesmen that the 'gunmen' had been killed during 'fierce
fighting'.
Was the fighting fierce, we asked? They laughed and shook
their heads. It was not fierce, say Palestinians, because some
of those who died - like Kamal - were executed as they slept.
This is a view endorsed by Dr Bassem Rimawi, who said he was
escorted by Israeli soldiers to inspect some of the dead and
wounded five hours after the raid. 'This man was lying right next
to his bed under the tree. It was obvious he was shot dead in his
bed and fell as he was dying.'
And we had seen one of the 'terrorists' arrested in the operation
a few moments before meeting the young soldiers on the road,
among another crowd of soldiers who had already come out of
the village - older and tougher-looking men, equipped with sniper
rifles, night vision goggles and hand-held rockets.
We were instructed not to take any pictures and we watched as
a slight man in a striped shirt with hunched and frightened
shoulders was led from one of their armoured trucks, his hands
bound tightly behind him, a bag over his head. He stood there for
a minute, before a sea of khaki bodies crowded round and
blocked our view.
The raid on Beit Rima has been portrayed by senior Israeli
officials and by politicians as an arrest operation to find the
killers of Israel's ultra-right-wing Tourism Minister, assassinated
on 17 October by gunmen of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine.
It is a village, say officers of the intelligence agency Shin Bet,
that was 'a viper's nest crawling with major terrorists'. Israel's
Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, was even more
forthright: 'We are talking about a very large concentration of
murderers and very dangerous terrorists. We arrested close to
11 people including the murderer's brother.'
The version of events that is beginning to emerge is bothering
some even in the Israeli media. The details of the raid on Beit
Rima do not stack up. Indeed, according to Ha'aretz, the raid on
Beit Rima was planned two weeks before Ze'evi's killing.
It is true that the flag of the PFLP was flying in Beit Rima on
Thursday during the funerals of some of those who died. It is
also true that suspected 'terrorists' have families here, among
them the mother, brother and sisters of Bilal and Abdullah,
whose family name is also Barghouti. Both were active in
Hamas, according to their neighbours.
It is also true that the brother of the alleged killer of Ze'evi lived in
the village. The brother. Not the killer.
The last issue aside, however, the same could be said of most
larger Palestinian villages and towns, radicalised by decades of
occupation. All have their men from the PFLP, from Hamas and
the Tanzim. There can be few without brothers, mothers or
cousins.
Instead, it seems what marked out Beit Rima for last week's
military action was what marked it out for attention in the first
place - a geographical peculiarity. Surrounded by the huge
Israeli settlements around Halamish to the west, it is a village
easily cut off at the end of a solitary road.
The suspicion that is emerging is that Beit Rima was selected
for no other reason than it was an easy target for Israeli forces to
make a lethal demonstration. Next time - the warning is explicit
- it will be the Palestinian state, not just a village, which will be
the target.
For while the soldiers did not catch Bilal or Abdullah, whose
organisation, in any case, has not been linked to Ze'evi's killing -
they took some men whose links to Ze'evi's death may be
tenuous at least. What they did do was force their way into the
homes of three families with links to suspected terrorists. Once
in the houses they destroyed them.
Among the houses demolished was that of Bilal and Abdullah's
Barghouti's widowed mother, Hana. We found her with her
daughters and her neighbours sitting beneath an olive tree
outside the collapsed wreckage of her home, one of three
demolished by Israeli soldiers.
'They came to the house at 5am,' she told us. 'They ordered us
out of our house and brought dogs to search it. They found
nothing. They made us sit on the steps for eight hours, while
they rested in our house and ate our food. Before they left they
blew up my home.
'I was a rich woman,' she added, close to tears. 'Now I have
nothing.'
In nine days of military operations, since Ze'evi's death, against
six Palestinian cities - and Beit Rima - Israeli politicians and
senior army officers have been crowing over their success. Thirty
people have been killed, they claim - 40 by the reckoning of
others. The majority of them, they say, were 'terrorists'. Among
those 'terrorists' have been at least 16 unarmed civilians -
including four women and five children.
And it is not only the dead and injured who are victims. For if it
is enough for Hana Barghouti to be punished as a proxy for her
Hamas sons, it is sufficient simply to be a Palestinian to share
in the punishment for what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has
decreed as the collective guilt for Ze'evi's killing.
The military operations against six Palestinian cities in the past
week became a vast reprisal raid against the entire Palestinian
people.
In Ramallah and in Bethlehem, in Tulkarm, Jenin, Kalkilya and
Beit Rima, it is ordinary civilians who are being given a brutal
lesson in the exigencies of the overwhelming nature of Israeli
military power and being punished simply for existing.
Last Monday in the El Bireh suburb of Ramallah, the centre of
the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, we watched Israel's
soldiers at work.
Tanks and armoured personnel carriers tore up and down the
road, intimidating the local population, their crews seizing the
keys of drivers foolish enough to go out on the road.
Occasionally a Palestinian gunman would fire a pointless burst
of shots from a long distance. In reply Israeli tanks used shells
and heavy cannon fire against surrounding buildings.
Ha'aretz 's courageous Palestinian affairs correspondent, Amira
Hass, who lives in El Bireh, recorded this exchange from an
Israeli tank as they met a group of residents examining a broken
water pipe by a demolished building.
'Break up this demonstration,' ordered one soldier in the tank.
'Throw a stun grenade,' urged another. They were the same
men, I suspect, in the same tank, who made as if to crush The
Observer's car beneath their tracks during an interview with a
similarly terrified group of local people a little later.
But for all the firing and intimidation in El Bireh, it has been a
picnic compared with the violence in Bethlehem, reputed
birthplace of Jesus, and one of Christianity's most holy sites.
At Beit Jala hospital on the outskirts of Bethlehem, I met Dr
Peter Qumri, the hospital's director. On our first meeting, three
days into the fighting, he appeared exhausted, blinking
haphazardly with darkened eyes. He said he had been sleeping
with his head on his desk. His surgeons had been sleeping on
chairs next to the emergency theatre.
Qumri listed the fatalities brought in. They were all killed, he
said, by shots to the head, the neck and chest.
'They are shooting to kill,' he said, 'regardless of whether they
can identify the target.'
We met again last Wednesday. A lull in the fighting had allowed
him to dash to his home a kilometre away to grab a shower and
clean clothes. He showed us around the hospital, pointing out
the walls where two Israeli tank shells had exploded; a
bullet-shattered window on an upper floor.
On this occasion he took us to meet Amjad Balawi, one of his
young staff, an anaesthetic technician shot in the leg last week
during heavy fighting when, he said, Israeli tanks fired in the
direction of the hospital itself.
Balawi was going to the assistance of a patient shot - and killed
- by a bullet through the chest the moment he left the hospital
compound as Israeli tanks were fighting in the street outside.
He was close to tears as they changed the dressing. The bullet
destroyed seven centimetres of bone. He may not have known it
yet, but he will be crippled.
'I was walking from the residential block next door,' he says. 'I
was wearing my uniform. My white coat. I decided to walk round
the front, down the main road, about 50 yards, as there was no
firing. I had just come through the main entrance of the hospital
when I heard a shot and heard a man shout for help. He had
been shot through the chest as I stepped across to help him I
felt the bullet hit my leg.'
Balawi was not alone among his staff in being injured.
The previous day a doctor who volunteered to go with a UN
ambulance to evacuate the wounded from Ayda refugee camp
near Rachel's Tomb also came under what he said was Israeli
fire, being shot through a borrowed bullet-proof jacket and
wounded in the side.
Qumri took us next to the children's ward. The night before there
had been 14 children sleeping in the corridor. But with the
fighting so bad, their mothers took them, untreated, back home.
The only children who remained were three suffering from
leukaemia. Among them was Rariman Maswadeh and her
three-year-old son Mohannand. Rariman had arrived that day
with her child for chemotherapy at the only haematologyunit in
the southern West Bank. Unable to get Israeli health insurance,
taking a taxi into a city under fire was her only option.
'I had a choice,' she said. 'I could stay at home in Hebron and
my son would miss his treatment or I could risk being shot
bringing him here. I had no choice and so I came.' Qumri looked
exasperated and I recalled a conversation we had nearly two
weeks earlier at our first meeting.
'I don't know what they are doing,' he said then. 'Is it just to
punish the people of Bethlehem as a whole? Or do they have
something else in mind? Do they want to have Bethlehem back
and turn it into part of their metropolitan Jerusalem?' |
