Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Soldiers on the roof

By Graham Usher

We met Taysir Zahleh outside a clinic in what used to be Hebron's bustling town square. Today it was a litter of smouldering tyres, upturned rubbish containers and a ragged carpet of stones and rocks, the aftermath of the day before and the weapons of the clashes to come. A Palestinian woman with a shopping bag and washed-out eyes waited for a signal from the Israeli army so she can enter her house that it has commandeered as a military camp. If she moves before the signal, she could be shot. She has been waiting 20 minutes, she says.

The square marks the partition between Palestinian-controlled Hebron (H1) and Israeli-controlled Hebron (H2), as decided by the PLO and the Israeli government in Oslo's 1995 interim agreement. But for the last two weeks it has become a lethal and deserted no man's land, courtesy of a new army machine gun post that commands the square and has taken more than its fair share of the 20 or so Palestinian Hebronites killed in the recent revolt.

The post squats on a roof perched high on a hill. It has a freshly minted concrete wall, supported by sandbags, with three loopholes, behind which you can see the silhouettes of soldiers and 800mm machine guns. "That's my hospital," says Taysir cheerfully. "That's where we're going."

To run the gauntlet between H1 and H2, you scamper up a hill, cross a school courtyard, climb an ancient and crumbling stone wall and press through a thicket of wire and fence. You move quickly because you are clearly in the sights of the machine guns and, perhaps, of Palestinian snipers behind you. Finally, you reach the thick foliage and relative sanctuary -- of the lemon, pomegranate and almond trees of Taysir's garden. He calls his wife on a cell phone to assure her that it is he and nobody else who has the entered the garden.

This is what life has been like for Taysir and his family since 29 September, when Israeli Border Police shot dead seven Palestinians on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and the army slapped a curfew on the 40,000 Palestinians who live in H2. And the army, for the second time in as many years, decided that Taysir's roof was a prime strategic location in the "war against terrorism" and a perfect salient for pumping gunfire into the 100,000 Palestinians who live in H1.

The Israeli troops have certainly made their presence felt, and not only in terms of the body count. Taysir's beautifully tended garden has become a garbage dump of fast food containers, coke tins and other detritus of soldiers at post. One whole wall of his house is streaked with a long brown stain, the effect of buckets of excrement slopped over the roof. And everywhere you go there is the acrid stench of urine, including from the house's main water tanks. "The soldiers piss in our water," says Taysir's six-year old son, Yahyia.

But the material damage the army has inflicted is nothing compared to the psychological terror it has unleashed on the four adults and 12 children who live within its walls.

"The nights are worse," says Taysir. That's when the four soldiers who staff the roof during the day are replaced by 12 more at night and the gearing into action of the 800mm machine guns, "sometimes for six hours at a stretch." The children of Taysir and his brother, Amjad, are then marshalled into a single room or onto mattresses in a corridor, away from all doors and windows. "We tell them the truth, that this is a war and that we all have to take care, but they all cry incessantly," says Amjad.

This is especially so for Taysir's four-month-old baby daughter. "My wife suffers from hypertension during the firing and so yields bad milk for the baby. The baby cannot digest properly and so develops cramps. Then my wife cries and produces more bad milk. It's unbearable." The other children oscillate wildly between bouts of hyperactivity and docility caused by being restricted to their home and garden for most of their waking hours. "If a single Jewish family suffered what we suffer, Ehud Barak would flatten every Arab house in Hebron".

There are other, equally human wounds. Taysir is a gynaecologist. He studied for 14 years in Italy, worked for the next 10 in Hebron's main hospital and, in 1994, finally opened his own maternity hospital in the upper two floors of his home. "It wasn't much. We could only manage 40 deliveries a month and I knew I could earn much more if I returned to Italy. But I felt good about it. But now everything is useless."

He takes us upstairs muddied by soldiers' boots and showered with glass from broken windows. Mercifully, the army has not yet "commandeered" the hospital. But the small ward and operating theatre has a stale, unused feel. Magazines are strewn over the desk, medicines are expired and instruments are so long without sterilisation as to be defunct. "This stuff cost me $10,000. I could barely get $1,500 for it now".

But he won't leave his home in H2. "No, that is what the Israelis want. The moment I leave my home and my hospital it will be taken over for good by the soldiers and the settlers." He slumps into a gloomy reverie. "It would mean the end of my life's work. I'm 47 years old. I have to leave something behind for my children. So it's not just political. It's personal."

And so he and his brother stay, trying to eke out ordinary routines in what are extraordinary circumstances. They drink Arabic coffee from spotless china cups under the shade of a black canvas awning. One son, Moataz, gathers up the discarded shells of live bullets that we make into geometric shapes. Two of Amjad's sons build castles from split army sandbags. There are even jokes. Taysir holds aloft the casing of an 800mm bullet, about 10 centimetres high and one wide, and banned under international law in all circumstances other than war. "We're thinking of using it as a vase for flowers."

And, all the while, beneath us, there is the crackle of machine gun and roar of an outraged people taking to the streets for the funeral of one of their nation who was shot dead while standing on his roof. And, above us, there is the shuffle of feet of about a dozen men -- white-shirted, black kippered and armed to the teeth. There are about 235 settlers in H2 and they are the only people allowed to move during curfew, protected, of course, by 3,000 soldiers permanently stationed there to protect them. Any trouble from them?

"Nothing out of the ordinary," says Taysir, sipping his coffee. The "ordinary" -- every day and every night -- consists of Taysir's windows being broken, Palestinian cars being torched and Palestinian students, who snake through his garden to reach their homes, being shot at.

How do people endure such an existence and such injustice? "Faith," says Amjad simply. As for Taysir, he maintains a touching belief in concepts like law and rights. When the army first occupied his house in 1998, he wrote to Israel's Supreme Court. It didn't reply. He then contacted the Italian government, which protested the army's action to Israel's then Defence Minister Yitzak Mordechai. Mordechai promised the soldiers would be removed immediately. They stayed for 11 months.

And during this latest incursion, Taysir asked the Temporary International Presence in Hebron -- called in to the town in 1994 following the massacre of 29 Palestinians at Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque by settler Baruch Goldstein -- to get the army out of his home. They told him they could not intervene in a "war situation." But they would certainly file a report.

Even the summit on 17 October at Sharm Al-Sheikh between Yasser Arafat, President Hosni Mubarak, Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak had his pulses racing. He hopes an international commission of inquiry will be formed, and that it will soon visit Hebron. Then it would have to recommend the only conclusion an "objective" investigation could draw. And that is what the Palestinians need in Hebron and everywhere else in the occupied territories -- neither the renewal of negotiations nor another "security" agreement. What they need is the one thing the world continually refuses to grant them. "International protection," says Taysir.

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Related stories:
Intifada in focus
States of emergency
Producing the body (count)
Tempered anger at the summit
Composing the consensus
The electronic Intifada
Horror in your sitting room
Variations on a theme
The big freeze
Solidarity days
'A valid fear'
Meet the press
The earth speaks Arabic
Also see Focus on Intifada 19 - 25 October 2000

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