Across West Bank, daily tragedies go unseen
Suzanne Goldenberg reveals the extent of abuses
against civilians in Israel's four-week military offensive
Suzanne Goldenberg
Guardian
Saturday April 27, 2002
Arif Said Ahmed's life ended at 5.05am on April 9 when two
Israeli helicopter gunships soared over the hillside, firing a rocket
at him and his cousin Naif as they walked home from morning
prayers.
The helicopters returned, firing their machine guns for several
terrifying minutes as Arif's wife, Samira, stumbled out to their
bodies with her infant daughter. Mother and daughter were saved
from serious injury by her brother Farooq, who flung himself over
them.
A bullet pierced his side and fragments ripped his leg.
That was the beginning of the invasion of Dura, a village
south-west of Hebron which marks the southernmost extent of
the Israeli army's offensive in the West Bank.
The Jenin refugee camp, whose physical erasure has come to
symbolise the devastation and death inflicted by the Israeli army
in the past four weeks, lies at the northern extremity of the
territory.
While the world has been preoccupied with the camp, the
stories beginning to unfold from the Palestinian cities, towns,
refugee camps and villages that lie between Jenin and Dura
show that the Israeli army has been engaged in systematic
abuse the length of the West Bank.
"Jenin is not so different from any of the other attacks," said
Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
"The focus of the international community has been on events in
Jenin, but equally serious violations took place in Ramallah,
particularly, and in Nablus."
The most grievous abuses break down into four categories: the
killing of Palestinian civilians, the denial of medical care, the
wanton destruction of civilian property, and the use of
Palestinian civilians as human shields for house-to-house
searches.
Human rights organisations have not even begun to investigate
the raids on the smaller West Bank towns and villages such as
Dura. The scale of the offensive, the biggest since Israel
occupied the West Bank in 1967, is too forbidding, as is its use
of a military curfew to deny international organisations access.
The first human rights field worker, from the Israeli group
B'Tselem, reached Dura on Thursday, when the village had been
under curfew for 17 days.
The first civilian deaths B'Tselem recorded were those of Arif
Said Ahmed, 34, a teacher and the acting imam of the local
mosque, and Naif Said Ahmed, 33, who was his cousin and
brother-in-law. After dawn prayers they had paused outside the
mosque to smoke a cigarette when the rocket killed them.
Their bodies were not removed for 36 hours. Despite his serious
injuries, Farooq Said Ahmed was rounded up with the other
Palestinian men of the village, propped up by two other men.
One asked the soldiers for a doctor.
"The soldier told him in Arabic: 'Whoever is dead is dead, and
whoever is injured can wait'," he said.
The army allowed an ambulance through 10 hours later, by
which time his jeans were so soaked in his own blood that he
considered wringing them out.
It took three hours to reach the hospital, he said. Twice soldiers
shot at the ambulance, and twice they stopped it, unloading him
on his stretcher, prodding his injured leg until he yelled in pain,
and flipping him over on his face to check for weapons on both
occasions.
Nothing that happened in Dura is extraordinary in the context of
the past month.
Six Palestinians were killed - three wanted militants and three
civilians - two houses were blown up, hundreds of men were
rounded up and a few men were used as human shields.
Human rights organisations accuse the Israeli defence force of
failing in its duty to the Geneva conventions to "refrain from
deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause
incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to
civilian objects, or a combination therefore which would be
excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military
advantage anticipated".
The Israeli army spokesman Captain Jacob Dallal said:
"Considering the type of war we are engaged in we have done
very, very well to protect civilians.
"This is a war being conducted in an urban setting. We are not
on a hilltop fighting another army. We are fighting an army of
terrorists, and terrorists hide in civilian areas."
In Arrabah, south-west of Jenin, a pair of helicopter gunships
fired on Mohammed Nabil Hardan and his wives, Amal and
Jamila, killing all three as they walked home from their fields.
Jamila was five months pregnant.
A few minutes later they fired a rocket at the barn where
Mohammed's father, Nafeh Abed Hardan, 67, was sleeping,
wounding him in the hand and the foot. The foot may have to be
amputated.
"I swear I don't know why," he said. "There was no reason for
them to kill my son and his wives, and if I knew they were going
to fire on the barn, I certainly would not have slept there."
During the siege of the Nablus casbah, doctors used a mosque
as a mortuary and hospital. It was strewn with the stained
mattresses of the wounded who bled their lives away. Two
dozen corpses lay there for six days, stacked up like firewood,
before a chaotic evacuation on April 8.
"If the Israelis are calling it a military zone, and not allowing
others in, there is an obligation to provide aid to friend and foe,"
said Hanna Megally, director of Human Rights Watch.
"They can prevent medical aid coming in for military reasons,
but they have to provide it themselves."
Capt Dallal said: "There have been very many cases where we
have allowed the ambulances to go through, but the drivers say
they are afraid of shooting."
He also denies that the army caused unwarranted destruction,
saying the buildings destroyed were used by snipers.
But the fighting devastated much of the West Bank. In the
Nablus casbah several historic buildings with 2ft-thick stone
walls, including a soap factory, were reduced to mounds of
rubble.
In the Balata refugee camp, homes were destroyed as
punishment. The army blew up four houses near the entrance of
the camp. One belonged to the Badawi family, whose two sons
were commanders in a Palestinian militant group.
Ramallah, the seat of Yasser Arafat's administration, was
another destruction zone.
This was where the army established its pattern of compelling
male civilians to walk in front of soldiers when they were hunting
the Palestinian militants and police.
On March 30, Israeli soldiers exchanged fire with more than 20
Palestinian policemen and threw grenades into their hideout in a
third-floor flat in a town centre building.
Moments later Nader Mansi, 22, an architecture student, was
ordered to enter the building and approach the flat to see if the
policemen would surrender.
In Jenin refugee camp the following Friday, Ali Mustafa Abu
Siria, 43, an Arabic teacher, was marched from his flat in
handcuffs and at gunpoint and forced to walk ahead of troops
and 13army sniffer dogs seeking gunmen.
He went to 11 houses before he was shot in the kneecap. "As
soon as I knocked on the door, a bullet was fired at me," he
said.
Capt Dallal emphatically rejected the term "human shield",
though he admitted that Palestinian civilians were used as
"guides".
On the eve of the arrival of a UN team to investigate the nine-day
battle for Jenin, such disputes about terminology, and what
really happened in the refugee camp, will likely grow more
heated.
Samira, wife of the dead Arif Said Ahmed, would like to welcome
the team to Dura.
"I believe this mission should visit every place in Palestine. The
behaviour of the Israeli army was savage, and it didn't distinguish
between Jenin, Hebron, Dura or any other place."
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