Brothers who lived and died together

YAREB - They grew up together, they attended school together, they slept in the same room together, they became partners in the same small village restaurant. On Monday, they were shot dead together.

And yesterday in the small graveyard on the windy hill top above Yareb - a forgotten old stone hamlet, southeast of the West Bank town of Jeanin - Bilal and Hilal Salah were buried together.

Their family say the Palestinian brothers were hit by 50-calibre bullets as they shouted abuse at an Israeli Army unit on the road below their village.

"We took Bilal to the hospital and it was only then that we realised Hilal was missing," said older brother Zuheir. "When we got back, we found him lying just 10m away. He had also been hit in the head. They had died together."

Zuheir insisted that the brothers - Bilal was 21 and Hilal two years younger - were doing no more than shouting at the Israeli soldiers on the road beneath them, although one villager said that stones had been thrown at the Israelis by some of the 17 youths on the embankment.

It was the intifada in microcosm, a lunatic mixture of exaggerated Israeli fear and hopeless sorrow.

In the village, a circle of middle-aged men cried in a room full of framed Korans and red plastic flowers, and the brothers' mother, Sada, sat on the floor and wept beneath a cheap, pink blanket. The two youths were Yareb's first Palestinian "martyrs."

The family had already printed a set of postcard portraits of the dead brothers.

Down on the road, the villagers had lit tyres in protest at the killings but by late afternoon the black smoke had drifted off over the fields, leaving coils of rusting wire on the burned tarmac. All around Yabed were the same pathetic signs of opposition to Israel.

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