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on a cane, the man stood on a huge pile of ruins: a jumble of
crushed concrete, twisted iron rods, shreds of mattresses,
electric cables, fragments of ceramic tiles, bits of water pipes
and an orphaned light switch. "This is my home," he
said, "and my son is inside." His name is Abu Rashid;
his son is Jamal, 35, and confined to a wheelchair. The bulldozer
began to gnaw into the house when members of the family were
inside it. And where would they be, if not in the house, seeking -
like all the inhabitants of the refugee camp in Jenin - the safest
place to hide from the firing of the mortars and the rockets and
the machine guns, and waiting for a brief respite?
Abu Rashid and the other members of his family hurried to the
front door, went out with their hands up and tried to yell to the
huge bulldozer, the operator of which was unseen and unheard, that
there were people inside. But the bulldozer did not stop roaring,
retreating a bit and then attacking again, returning and taking a
bite out of the concrete wall, until it collapsed on Jamal before
anyone could save him.
All around Abu Rashid other people were climbing up or down heaps
of rubbish, making their way between piles of cement, sharp iron
wires and fragments of metal, concrete pillars and ceilings that
had collapsed, fragments of sinks. Not all of them were as
introverted as Abu Rashid, who talked to himself more than he
talked to those who stopped to listen to him. There were those who
tried to rescue something from the ruins: a garment, a shoe, a
sack of rice. Nearby, a young girl almost stumbled on a pile of
broken cement blocks, pointed at the ceiling, at her feet, and
wept and wept. Between the wails, she managed to say that this had
been her parents' home and that she does not know who is buried
under it, who had managed to get away, whether anyone was alive
under the ruins, who would get them out, or when.
Among the piles of ruins, and in the midst of some houses that
were still partially standing, the walls that had not collapsed
riddled with numerous bullet holes of all sizes, a broad expanse
had been created. Where, up until two weeks ago, several houses
had stood, some of them three stories high, one or more Israel
Defense Forces bulldozers had gone over the piles of cement
several times, flattened them, ground them to dust, "made a
`Trans-Israel highway,'" as A.S. put it. His home had also
fallen victim to the bulldozers' teeth. Someone indicates a small
opening in one pile of rubble. From it he had heard cries for help
until Sunday night. On Monday morning there were no longer any
sounds coming from it. Someone else points to what had formerly
been a house where two sisters lived. Someone says that they are
crippled. It is still unknown whether they are under the ruins or
whether they got out of the camp in time.
Relative quiet
There are houses that were empty of inhabitants when they were
demolished. In some cases the soldiers ordered people to leave
immediately, so that they would not get killed. One old man,
people say, refused to leave his home. "Fifty years ago you
expelled me from Haifa. Now I have nowhere to go," they
report he had said. The soldiers lifted the stubborn old man
bodily and hauled him out. And there were cases in which they did
not bother to issue a warning - and the bulldozers came. Without
announcing over the bullhorns, without checking whether anyone was
inside. This happened on Sunday, April 14, to the members of the
Abu Bakr family, who live on the thin line between the refugee
camp and the city of Jenin proper.
In both city and camp, a curfew had been imposed; soldiers were
circulating in tanks and armored vehicles and on foot, shooting
from time to time, tossing stun grenades or blowing up suspicious
objects. But relative to the previous week it was quiet: There was
no longer any firing from helicopters, no more exchanges of fire
with a handful of armed Palestinian activists. But all of a
sudden, at four in the afternoon, the members of the Abu Bakr
family heard the sound of a wall being crushed. The father of the
family went outside, waved a white flag and yelled to the
soldiers: "We are in the house; where do you want us to go,
why are you demolishing our home with us inside?" They yelled
at him: "Yallah, yallah, get inside," and stopped the
bull- dozer.
This narrow seamline where the house is located, several meters
wide, has in recent days served as a transit bridge from the city
to the refugee camp. The residents of the city, many of whom come
from the refugee camp, tried to evade the soldiers and bring their
relatives and friends water, food and cigarettes. At the Abu Bakrs'
home they concluded that the soldiers wanted to expand the area
that separates the city from the camp in order to prevent
"smuggling" of one sort or another. In the evening, an
armored vehicle was positioned next to the house and soldiers
combed the surrounding courtyard. Then the armored vehicle left.
M. went to make coffee. He managed to put a teaspoon of sugar into
the narrow-necked, long-handled coffee pot and began to stir the
boiling water when someone or something came quickly in through
the window, broke the glass and set the kitchen on fire. A stun
grenade? A tear-gas grenade? Did the soldiers outside think
someone was firing at them when he lit the gas burner? M. thanks
God that only his hands and face were burned in the flames that
were immediately extinguished, and that other people in the family
weren't hurt, and that the house was not destroyed.
Mohammed al-Sba'a, 70, was not so lucky. On Monday, April 8, the
bulldozers thundered near his home in the Hawashan neighborhood,
in the middle of the camp. He went out of his house to tell the
soldiers that there were people inside - he and his wife, his two
sons, their wives and seven children. He was shot in his doorway,
hit in the head and killed, related one of his sons this week.
Members of his family managed to bring him inside. But then they
were ordered to come out: The men were arrested, and then released
and taken to the village of Rumani, northwest of Jenin. The women
were taken to the Red Crescent building. The father's body
remained in the house. When the men of the family returned from
arrest, they could not find the house.
The destruction of dozens of houses by bulldozers began on
Saturday, April 6, four days after the Israel Defense Forces
attack on Jenin began. It is not yet possible to know how many
people were buried under the ruined houses. The horrible smell of
dead bodies - of which new ones are being discovered every day -
mingles with the stink of the garbage that has not been collected,
the garbage that has been burnt and the surprising smells of
geraniums, roses and the mint that grows near the bougainvillea
that people cultivated in the narrow strips of ground between the
crowded houses. When the time comes, UNRWA and the Red Cross will
make lists of the detained, the wounded and the missing. But the
most urgent mission right now is the distribution of water, food
and medicines. The camp has been defined as a disaster area.
The demolition of the homes by bulldozers was preceded by heavy
shooting and shelling from tanks, from the beginning of the IDF
action on the night of Tuesday, April 2. The tanks surrounded the
camp, took up positions on the hill to the west of it, rumbled
into the main street. Two days later, firing from helicopters
began, people relate: rocket fire and submachine-gun fire. People
took shelter under staircases, on the ground floor, in interior
bathrooms, in storehouses near the inner courtyards. People
crowded into small rooms, feeling each other in the dark,
frightened. They blocked their ears and shut their eyes, cuddled
the small, crying children.
Damage statistics
When the shooting died down, they related, they went out and found
their houses scorched, flames and smoke rising from them, riddled
with holes, their floors shaky, doors and windows ripped out,
windowpanes smashed to bits, huge holes in the front walls. The
turn of the damage statistics will also come, and when it does, UN
teams will tell of how many houses were destroyed by the
bulldozers, how many were damaged by the shooting and whether they
can be repaired or whether it is safer to demolish them
altogether. How many families were in them. How many individuals.
Umm Yasser rescued a year-old baby from the neighbors' house,
which was shelled. The baby's father, Rizk, she related, crawled
out with his two legs injured and his back burned by fire. He came
out with his arm stretched forward, bleeding, she said. The house
was surrounded by soldiers. A military doctor or paramedic came,
cleaned the wounds, bandaged them, and soldiers took him to the
area of the cemetery and left him there. Neighbors who saw him
gathered him up and called a doctor. They managed to get him to a
hospital only a week after he was wounded.
H. and her family were in their house when it was bombarded. They
ran to take shelter in her father's home nearby. H. thinks that
this was on April 8. People find it hard to remember exact dates;
all the days of the attack have become a jumble of fear and blood
and destruction, without nights or days. Y., her husband, was
wounded by the shooting when he went out the door. She dragged him
to her father's house. There they bandaged his leg, prayed that
everything would be all right and managed to get him to a private
hospital only on Sunday, April 14, evading the soldiers who
patrolled the alley on foot.
A.S. was wounded in the course of performing an IDF mission: A
foot patrol took him out of his house to accompany soldiers, walk
ahead of them and open the doors of the neighborhood for them. A.S.
did as he was told, and as he stood by one of the doors, another
unit of soldiers appeared. Perhaps they thought he belonged to the
mukawamin (insurgents, armed activists), because no one else dared
to roam the streets during those first days of the IDF takeover of
the camp. He was shot and wounded. For four days he lay in the
home of neighbors, until his brothers managed to take him to
medical care. Their home, on the second floor of the family's
house on the hillside, was damaged by three to five rockets and
numerous bullets. Soldiers took up positions in a tall house
nearby, and shot.
His mother tells the story at length, leading visitors from one
destroyed room to the next. And then she takes us out to the
garden: he loved to plant things, he loved life, not death, she
said of her son. Her other sons offered the visitors fruit from
the garden: pleasantly tart loquats, refreshingly juicy plums.
Most of the water tanks in the camp had been hit during the first
days of the shooting. The water pipes were burst by the IDF
bulldozers and the tanks. The fresh water supply was cut off
immediately. Therefore, when every drop of water must be saved,
biting into these fruits is a luxury.
Abu Riyad, 51, was also enlisted, like many others, for IDF
missions. For five days he accompanied soldiers: During the day he
walked ahead of them, from door to door, knocked on the doors as
the soldiers concealed themselves behind him, their rifles aimed
at the door and at him. At night he was with them in a house they
had taken over. They handcuffed him and two soldiers guarded him,
he said. At the end of his mission, they told him to stay in a
certain house, alone. All around the bulldozers and the tanks
thundered. One of the tanks rolled onto the house. Abu Riyad
jumped to another house, leaping from one destroyed house to
another until he got to his home, which he also found partially in
ruins, from hits by three rockets. There were 13 people in the
house when the rocket landed on it.
A soldier cleaned the bathroom
S. declared that she had been lucky. Her family's house was only
occupied for a week, like a dozen other houses in the camp that
climbs up the hillside and the cliffs. S. is a widow who lives
with her brother and his family in a house at the western edge of
the camp: four adults, 10 children. Most of the residents had left
the neighborhood before the IDF invasion. On the first and second
nights soldiers took over two or three houses adjacent to the home
of S.'s family. The members of the family took shelter in the
kitchen, which they thought was the most protected room. Suddenly,
in the middle of the night, someone came in through the wall, made
a gaping hole near the floor and came in right over the head of
8-year-old Rabiya. Windowpanes shattered and the room was covered
in dust. The 14 people in the kitchen began to scream. Through the
hole in the wall they heard someone shouting in Arabic: Anyone who
leaves the house will die. They peeked and saw a group of soldiers
in the narrow alley. They tried to negotiate with the soldiers;
perhaps they would go out to the neighbors' house, to a safer
room, but the only answer they heard was: "Whoever leaves the
house will die."
After a short while, the soldiers made a hole in the wall that
leads to the staircase and came in through it. The members of the
family, huddled together in one corner, looked on in astonishment
as more and more soldiers came in, their faces painted black. The
members of the family were put in another room, full of broken
glass and dust. They were held there from the evening until early
Friday morning. The soldiers, related S., did not allow them to
leave the dimly lit room. When they pleaded to go to the bathroom,
the soldiers brought them a pot from the kitchen. S.'s
brother-in-law was arrested, and three women and their children
were left along in a house filled with strange soldiers.
At dawn, S. opened the door and discovered that the soldiers had
been replaced. With hand gestures and body language she signaled
that she wanted to go to the bathroom, to take the children to the
bathroom, to bring food. Someone who looked to her like an officer
said to go ahead. She had to make her way through any number of
soldiers who were lying on the floor of her home, tiptoeing among
them. The filth she found in the bathroom disgusted her. The
officer who was next to her hung his head and she concluded that
he was ashamed of what he saw. He went to a nearby house, where no
one was home, and brought water. And he cleaned the bathroom. When
they leave in about a week the soldiers will leave behind a large
pile of leftovers from their rations.
During that night, when the family was locked into one room, the
soldiers made a search of the house. They emptied drawers and
cupboards, overturned furniture, broke the television, cut the
phone line, took away the telephone and broke another hole in a
wall that leads to another apartment. Along the broken wall is a
picture done in watercolors that was painted by her
brother-in-law's brother when he was 15. He drew a Swiss
landscape: a lake, snowcapped mountains, evergreen trees, a deer,
a house with a red-tiled roof and smoke curling from the chimney.
By the shore of the lake he painted two mustached men dressed as
Palestinians, riding a donkey. The date: May 10, 1995. The
signature: Ashraf Abu al-Haija.
Al-Haija was killed on one of the first days of the IDF attack,
hit by a rocket. On Tuesday of last week his scorched body was
still lying in one of the rooms of the half-destroyed house. Al-Haija
was an activist in Hamas, who together with members of other armed
groups had sworn to defend the camp to the death. J.Z., two of
whose nephews were among the armed men who were killed, estimates
that they numbered no more than 70. "But everyone who helped
them saw himself as active in the resistance: those who signaled
from afar that soldiers were approaching, those who hid them,
those who made tea for them." According to him, no door in
the camp was closed to them when they fled from the soldiers who
were looking for them, the people of the camp, he said, decided
not to abandon him, not to leave the fighters to their own
devices. This was the decision of the majority, taken individually
by each person.
Despite his family and emotional relationship with many of the
armed men, he admits that it is hard for him to describe exactly
how the fighting went in which they were killed and in which
Israeli soldiers were killed. "From reconstructions that we
made together, it appears to us that the army attacked the camp
with tank and machine gun fire from several directions and tried
to get infantry forces in. But because of the resistance by our
fighters, this failed. Then they started to attack all the houses
in the camp with helicopters and tanks, indiscriminately. The
soldiers that took over the houses at the edge of the camp
signaled where to to fire and hit." Gradually, the armed
Palestinians were routed deeper into the camp, to their last
battles.
J.Z. is a construction worker who built his own home and homes of
friends. His house was destroyed by direct hits from several
rockets. He is sleeping at the home of his young friend, A.M. When
darkness envelops the camp, whose electricity has been cut off
since April 3, candlelight shines through only a few of the
windows. There is an illusion that a window through which light
does not shine will not be hit by shooting. IDF fire continues at
intervals, though there are no longer any Palestinians who will
shoot in the direction of the soldiers. From time to time the
silence is shattered by the sound of an explosion.
Anxiety and uncertainty are overcome in a conversation typical of
these days, with A.N.'s mother and his aunt. On Monday evening the
conversation with the guest from Israel began with the enumeration
of those J.Z. knows were killed: Seven of them were armed men
killed in battle. There were 10 civilians, among them three women
and at least two old men. There are scores of people whose fate is
still unknown.
The conversation jumps from memories of the prison installation at
Ketsiot, where J. was imprisoned during the first intifada and
which has now been reopened, for soldiers. One soldier, someone
had told A.M., had left his skullcap in a house he had searched.
Heavy shooting enveloped the neighborhood and the house where he
had forgotten the skullcap. The soldier told a young Palestinian
who had been "recruited" that if he brought him the
skullcap he would be released. Dodging the bullets, the young man
ran to the house, brought the skullcap and was allowed to go home.
J. tells another story that is going around the camp, about
soldiers who were attacked from inside a house they had taken over
earlier, from which they fled, leaving their weapons behind. It is
said in the camp that one of them cried: "Mother, mother,
what kind of war is this?"
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