Dawn, 24 October 2001. An Israeli army detachment was deploying in the village of Beit Rima, northwest of Ramallah. Omar, four, asked his mother: "How did America get here?" Tanks, infantry units and three helicopters had just blown up two Palestinian positions: the police station and national security post (border police). In an hour five Palestinians were killed, and nine people injured, one a civilian.
The Israelis maintain that their army simply responded to shooting. All the eyewitness accounts say at least three of the dead were shot when sleeping, and most of the others soon saw their Kalashnikovs were useless against the army firepower. The army denied the injured access to Palestinian medical teams and the local doctor. Several of the wounded bled for four to five hours until an Israeli military medical team arrived. It's hard to know how many could have been saved had they been treated sooner.
The shooting went on until six. Then the village was put under curfew. By eleven in the morning the army had arrested 42 villagers and taken them, blindfold, with bags over their heads, tied head and foot, to a tent-prison on the land of the neighbouring settlement of Halamich. They were left that way for hours, sitting on the ground, their heads bent, until a Shin Bet officer came to interrogate them. After several hours they were allowed to relax, by leaning back to back. Thirty-one were released after midnight; 11 others were taken away but five later released. The army announced that it had made important arrests in connection with the murder of Israeli minister Rehavam Zeevi. But the two main suspects, both from the village, were not there at the time of the incident.
The army then destroyed the houses of the families of three wanted men: a Hamas member (suspected of involvement in a Jerusalem pizzeria attack) and two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In a few seconds three dozen people were made homeless. The force of the explosion also damaged neighbouring houses. The interior of a fourth house caught fire; the soldiers refused to believe neighbours who told them that its inhabitants were away in Ramallah. They fired smoke and tear gas inside, a fire started and soon there was nothing left but smoke and burned metal. The only thing intact was a glass ashtray.
The next day children collected the debris: hundreds of empty cartridges of different calibres, the biggest from helicopters. During the last year this has became a common sight — Palestinian children souvenir-hunting, collecting empty cartridges, shells, tear gas grenades.
Burnt-out houses, pockmarked with Israeli shells, are now painfully familiar in all Palestinian towns. The main weapons of destruction, especially in the Rafah and Khan Younis refugee camps in Gaza, are bulldozers. The army decided to create buffer zones between camps and Israeli settlements or, in Rafah, between the camp and the Egyptian border. It claimed that by destroying homes on the frontier, it could stop arms filtering in from Egypt. Since the 1980s the Palestinians have dug trenches to the frontier and used them to transport drugs, cheap food, and sometimes people. Now, says the army, they are using them to smuggle in arms for "terrorists".
Behind the destroyed houses there are rows of houses with holes from missiles from the Israeli positions along the frontier and around the settlements. The army keeps on firing and destroying houses, and Palestinians go on laying explosives on the roads used by the army and shooting towards the settlements. Israelis are mostly unhurt; Palestinians get killed or wounded almost every day.
The army claims that its shooting and shelling is just retaliation for Palestinian shooting. Since 29 September 2000, the start of the second intifada, army violence has been far greater than Palestinian attacks. The Palestinians began by demonstrating and throwing stones at military positions close to Palestinian towns; the army responded with live bullets. Ina month they killed more than 100 people who, according to first-hand witnesses, were not threatening soldiers' lives. In many cases the army fired on its own initiative, not in retaliation. It responded with heavy weaponry to homemade mortars and untrained shooting, often in the air. When the Palestinians began to shoot accurately and resumed suicide attacks, and Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed, the army bombed the Palestinians from helicopters, and then planes. Israeli spokesmen claimed these operations were necessary against terrorism.
In October 2000 in Bethlehem, seven or eight youths (not part of Palestinian security) decided that the fight against Israeli occupation needed arms. They were probably behind the murder of three Israeli soldiers the following month; a week later Israel killed their leader, Hussein Abyat. Today, after a year of Israel's targeted killings and escalating military operations, there are now a thousand or more youths in Bethlehem who have arms bought with their own money.
Between 19-28 October this year, when the army brought heavy weaponry into the heart of the city and occupied seven houses, those armed youths tried to oppose it, using home-made bombs, Molotov cocktails, snipers, Kalashnikovs. One young man, who said he belonged to the "al-Aqsa martyrs' brigades", linked to Fatah, told me they knew that, whatever arms they had, they couldn't stop Israeli tanks. But they were proud that no Israeli soldiers dared get out of their armoured cars or show their faces for fear of snipers. In 10 days, 16 Palestinians — 11 civilians — were killed in the street or in homes in Bethlehem. One Israeli soldier was injured. Three other armed Palestinians were killed in an army operation.
At the end of October, an area in northern Ramallah was invaded by Israeli tanks, blocking access to the northern cities of Jenin, Tulkarem and Qalqilya. In Ramallah (home of Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti), armed Fatah militants and men from Palestinian security fired on the Israelis. Four armed Palestinians were killed; no Israeli was hurt. When the shooting stopped, the soldiers got down from their tanks and armoured vehicles. They imposed a 24-hour curfew and forbade access to the town to the 30,000 inhabitants of the neighbouring villages and a refugee camp close by. Each day hundreds of people disregarded army orders and went on foot to the area under curfew, undeterred by machine guns on the armoured vehicles. Sometimes the soldiers threw tear gas and grenades at them, and they hid or fled up the hillsides. This was to get to school, work, market, chemist, or Palestinian Authority offices, through the deserted streets of Ramallah.
"It's all right for you, you can earn a living," someone said to a falafel seller in the centre of town. "No-one's buying falafels any more," he answered: 2m of the 3m Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live below the poverty line according to the Palestinian office of statistics. About 15% of families have lost their source of income, especially in the Gaza Strip, where they cannot fall back on growing their own vegetables as they do in the West Bank.
In a year the Palestinian economy has been paralysed. It is not just the tanks and helicopters. The entrances to all Palestinian villages have been sealed by great blocks of concrete, stopping all traffic. Using the roads reserved for the settlements is generally forbidden. So people have to walk for miles and change taxis three or four times to reach their destination. Journeys that used to take 20 minutes now take two or three hours. Studies, work, building, development, social life, all have been blocked by concrete.
Two villages have suffered exceptionally: Beit Furiq and Beit Dajan, east of Nablus, with 12,000 inhabitants between them. They are on a road that leads to three settlements. At the end of October leaving the villages was forbidden. For about two weeks they were unable to get food or, worse, water. Neither village is connected to Israel's water network (as the settlements are) and rely on rain and wells, but mainly on water brought in by lorry. For eight days soldiers refused lorry drivers leave to resupply the villages. Later, these drivers were held for hours at the dam, preventing them from bringing back enough water for the villages.
The army says that there were threats of attacks and that was the reason lorries were prevented from entering the villages. They admit that, in some cases, "the lorries were delayed for too long". Other villages and regions suffer similar delays, if less severe, in getting water and food. One villager said: "Only a few hundred people, perhaps a few thousand, are affected by shells, bullets and assassinations. Everybody suffers from blocks of concrete."
* Palestine correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and author of Drinking the Sea, Henry Holt, New York, 1999