To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 3:15 AM
Subject: [AL-AWDA-News] Innocent draw
breath as dust of war settles
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,668834,00.html
Innocent draw breath as dust
of war settles
The latest fighting between Israel and Palestine
has taken a heavy toll, reports Graham Usher
from Ramallah
Sunday March 17, 2002
The Observer
Two Palestinian militiamen hug on Hospital Street,
laughing, slapping each other on the back. Women
kiss and cry, relieved that their sons have been
spared. An old man steers his wheelchair across a
road littered with spent bullet cases, furrowed by tank
tracks. He smiles toothlessly.'This is our victory,' says
Darweish Abu Rish, a local Palestinian.
It doesn't look like victory. It looks like defeat. Hospital
Street looks like Beirut, 1982: a tree-lined avenue of
gutted cars, wrecked apartments, shops with their
windows gouged out and swirling, choking dust.
It is Ramallah 2002, the morning after Israeli tanks
withdrew from the West Bank town following a
'blunt demand' from US Secretary of State Colin
Powell to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that he
'not hinder' the ceasefire efforts of US special envoy
Anthony Zinni, who arrived in Israel on Thursday night.
Yet, whatever the guarded optimism, violence
smolders on in the occupied territories. On Friday
12 Palestinians lost their lives, including a mother
and four children, killed by a landmine on Gaza's
border with Israel. On Saturday a Palestinian was
shot dead by the army at a checkpoint near Hebron.
Israel reoccupied Ramallah last Tuesday, when 15
tanks descended on Hospital Street and encircledits
hospital. The invasion came after a weekend in which
Israeli civilians had been killed by Palestinian attacks
inside Israel.
The purpose, said army spokesmen, was to impress
on the Palestinian 'terrorists' that there was no haven
the army could not reach, including the 'temporary
capital' of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Ramallah
was put under curfew for three days. The army declared
victory.
'It was no victory,' says Ghazi Hanania, a doctor
at Ramallah hospital. 'Israel thought by reoccupying
Ramallah they could arrest the wanted Palestinian
fighters and leaders. But it found no one and gained
nothing. The only thing the army achieved was revenge.'
And it was inflicted largely on the innocent. For
three days the hospital's 80 patients and 100 staff
were under a lethal military siege. Water, electricity
and telephone lines to the hospital were cut after
army bulldozers ripped out trenches in the roads. Fuel
stocks
ran dangerously low.
Ambulances could only move with the express
permission of the army and even then were
targeted. On Tuesday the International Committee
for the Red Cross (ICRC) suspended all operations
in Ramallah for 18 hours after Israeli soldiers fired
on a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance, escorted
by a clearly marked ICRC car.
'The wounded were not even allowed to walk to the
hospital,' says Hanania. 'On one occasion our staff had
to go to an Israeli checkpoint and forcibly release two
injured Palestinians from the soldiers. Otherwise they
would have bled to death.'
Fourteen Palestinians were killed in Ramallah and 40
wounded, many critically. But the figures are deceptive,
says Hanania.
'How do you classify the death of Nezha Attqa Mansour?
She suffered a diabetic attack at 9pm on Tuesday. The
army refused our ambulances permission to reach her.
She died at 10pm. She was 67 years old. She could have
been saved.'
Nor were all the victims Palestinian. One Israeli soldier
was killed in Ramallah and, on Wednesday, an Italian
press photographer, Raffeale Ciriello, was hit by six bullets
in the chest fired from a tank less than a kilometre from
the hospital. Barred access by army checkpoints, Palestinian
residents took him to a clinic in the centre of
town, but he was dead on arrival.
The same bloody attrition was played out at Amari, with
8,000 Palestinians the largest refugee camp in Ramallah.
Tanks and army snipers penetrated the camp on Tuesday,
slipping through every chink in its defences, including a clinic
belonging to UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for the
welfare of Palestinian refugees.
'The army used the place as a barracks,' says a staff
member. 'This meant we couldn't use it to service the
camp or supply medicines. It is a violation of every tenet
of international
humanitarian law.'
On Wednesday the local leadership declared a 'tactical
retreat' and the soldiers swept into Amari, burrowing
through the internal walls of people's homes in a futile
hunt for fighters they knew had fled. Only the old, very
young and women were left. This was the worst moment
of all, says Abu Rish, a refugee from Amari.
'It wasn't just the destruction they caused inside people's
homes. It was the way the soldiers treated the people.
They forced whole families into single rooms while they
tore down the walls. They beat women and children.'
A funeral procession wends its way through the camp.
It is one of six funerals on Friday. They all converge on
Ramallah's main square, decked with the flags of all the
Palestinian factions.
Away from the centre, the UNRWA Basic Boys' school
rests on a hill overlooking Amari. The army used it as
a detention centre. An army bulldozer has flattened its
new blue metal gate. Tank shells have punched through
a wall of children's murals.
Two hundred Palestinian men - aged 16 to 45 - were
gathered here. By Friday, all but seven had been
released. 'They didn't arrest a single fighter,' says a
local, who won't give his name. But he does translate
the Hebrew written on the blackboards of the classrooms.
One says: 'We'll meet again.' Another: 'No Arabs equals
no terrorists.' A third doesn't need translating. It is written
in English. It expresses the probable effect of Israel's
three-day stay in Ramallah: 'Kill peace.'
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