Havoc stuns Bethlehem

BETHLEHEM - From the morgue to the refugee camp, talk from Israeli leaders about restoring law and order seems absurd to Palestinians living with the Jewish state's tanks on their streets.

"This is not a war. This is hell," said Ayman Azza, who lives in a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem.

"If someone did something, there are ways to arrest him. But why are they terrorising the rest of us?"

The Israeli Army launched an offensive last week against six Palestinian towns in the West Bank, its broadest assault in more than a year of fighting, after Palestinian radicals killed an Israeli cabinet minister in retaliation for Israel's killing of their leader.

Israel says it has since arrested more than 40 militants it accuses of attacking Israelis and maintains it will pull troops back if the Palestinian Authority reins in violent radicals and hands over the killers of Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi.

But Palestinians find it hard to reconcile the havoc wrought on Bethlehem with what Israel calls its "self-defence".

Some say they sense that what Israel calls the hunt for Zeevi's killers has exceeded its originally stated aim. Some see it as a loose military operation in which it is inevitable that Palestinian gunmen will fight the raiding Israeli soldiers.

"As long as a hospital like ours has been attacked something has gone horribly wrong. It has got out of hand," said Robert Tabash, administration director of the Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem, which Christians revere as the birthplace of Jesus.

He said that an Israeli tank on Thursday turned its gun on the hospital entrance, deep inside Bethlehem, and started shooting. No one inside was hurt, he said.

European Union officials in a diplomatic car who tried to reach the hospital were turned back by a tank.

"Nobody was attacking them from the hospital grounds," Tabash said of the Israeli soldiers in the tank.

The Army said it was checking the reports.

In the refugee camp, evidence of conflict is all around Azza, standing by his home. It is pockmarked by bullets from battles between the gunmen and Israeli tanks positioned next to the Palestinian-owned Paradise Hotel. Israeli troops have taken over the hotel and use positions there to fire into the camp.

"Why don't the Israelis just drop a bomb and kill all of us?" asked Azza.

"Do you know what it means to use a tank against a refugee camp?" he said, gesturing around to the walls of houses perforated by heavy machinegun fire.

"In America when someone commits a crime, do they kill other people for it?"

Palestinians question how the destruction by armoured bulldozers yesterday of 20 shopfronts on Nativity Rd in Palestinian-ruled Bethlehem fits with hunting Zeevi's killers.

"I can't find words to explain it," said Ibrahim al-Atrash, whose tourism office was among the pharmacies, money-exchange offices and salons that were partially demolished.

"They were not 'terrorist' shops. They belonged to Palestinians trying to make a living," said Atrash.

Three Palestinians were killed in the Bethlehem area yesterday, including a member of the military wing of Hamas, which has killed scores of Israelis in bomb attacks, a policeman, and Salama al-Dibs, a 39-year-old with nine children.

Hospital director Peter Kumri said Dibs died from a gunshot in the back of the head while he was sitting in his home in Aida refugee camp.

For the al-Dibs family, the death of their father had no justification as they saw him for the last time - on a morgue table, his head swathed in a heavy gauze bandage, bloody at the edges.

Dibs' sons, flecked with their father's blood and their shirts torn open, sobbed and wailed as they went up to kiss their father's face. His daughters were brought into the morgue one at a time.

His wife had to be supported to the metal table, where she held his face.

"Hold your heads up! Your father died a martyr!" Palestinian neighbours said to the sons, referring to the notion that Palestinians who die in their uprising against Israeli occupation become Muslim martyrs.

- REUTERS

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