11 - 17 April 2002
Issue No.581
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 April 2002 Issue No.581 |
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A journalist's perspective
Khaled Dawoud, back from occupied and devastated Ramallah, recalls the horror
This is the first-hand account of a journalist who personally experienced Israel's latest reoccupation of nearly the entire West Bank. Fellow American and European journalists and I faced death there several times.
All of us reported on my personal friend and former colleague, Boston Globe Middle East correspondent Anthony Shedid, who was shot in his shoulder by an Israeli sniper while walking back to his hotel. He was returning after a visit to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's besieged, and now almost totally destroyed, headquarters.
Shedid's jacket was clearly marked with the letters "TV," but he was shot regardless.
In my opinion, it happened because he looks like an Arab. He is an American citizen, born in the United States to a Christian Lebanese family. Yet, for the Israeli snipers placed on top of main buildings in Ramallah and
other West Bank cities, Shedid's Arab features were good enough reason to feel confident that they could get away with their crime -- like they have with the scores of innocent Palestinian civilians killed since of the beginning of the Intifada.
In my case, I am an Arab -- not just by nationality or outlook, but also in terms of my belonging and strong support for what I consider to be a just Palestinian cause. During my two- week stay in Ramallah, I constantly felt that trigger-happy Israeli soldiers threatened my life at every moment.
That feeling started when, on the first day of the Israeli invasion, I saw pictures of a Palestinian cameraman, Karlos Hanzal, getting shot by Israeli snipers. He was driving in a car, also clearly marked "TV," and his colleague was screaming desperately: "Please God. An ambulance."
A few days later, I was with an AP photographer who was trying to take photos of tanks going back and forth in front of our hotel to make sure that we were locked in. While he was taking a picture, the window above our head suddenly cracked. We realised that an Israeli sniper's bullet had narrowly missed his head.
I also had a strangely familiar feeling when I personally witnessed a 57-year-old Palestinian woman being shot and killed by an Israeli sniper, minutes after walking out of Ramallah's hospital, where she had received treatment. Then I realised why: she looked exactly like my mother.
An Israeli tank, standing 10 metres from the hospital, prevented a Palestinian ambulance from rescuing the woman, who was bleeding to death. Suddenly, courageous European peace activists, from Italy and France, used their bodies as shields and walked in front of the ambulance car to pick up the dead woman.
An Israeli soldier drives away cameramen in a street in Bethlehem, a few metres from the Church of the Nativity (photo: AP)
These activists knew that while Israeli soldiers could easily shoot-to- kill at all doctors and paramedics in the Palestinian-run ambulance, they would never dare to shoot white Europeans whose lives are "sacred." They left wounded Palestinians, mainly civilians, bleeding to death, and prevented ambulances from reaching them -- facts that became mere background information in the daily reports I sent to Al-Ahram.
Later that same day, I once again reported about a Palestinian man on a wheelchair who was shot dead by Israeli snipers. The man probably made a mistake and thought that his disability would make him an exception to Israel's curfew on the nearly 250,000 residents of Ramallah and the surrounding towns and villages.
I saw dead bodies of Palestinian men and women piled up at the only morgue in Ramallah because Israeli occupation troops would not allow their burial. When the curfew was unofficially lifted for two hours, these people -- most of whom had been civilians -- were quickly buried in a shallow hole dug in the hospital's car park. The majority of their relatives did not even get the chance to have a last glimpse, or perform the traditional prayers for the dead.
I saw Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) destroying nearly all the roads in Ramallah and using tanks and rockets to shell civilian buildings. Traffic lights, street lamps, water tanks, power generators and telephone lines -- nothing was spared from Israel's insane attack.
After the invasion started and over the next 10 days, I was constantly left wondering whether the things Israel did could ever be aimed at "uprooting terrorists" or, in fact, at creating new ones.
I felt the same way even before the invasion started, when I personally had to get through the Kalandia checkpoint which thousands of Palestinians attempt to cross every day in order to reach Jerusalem and other West Bank towns. Palestinians call this checkpoint "Kalandahar," a reference to Taliban's headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
At the checkpoint, all Palestinians aged between 15 and 50 are forced to take off their jackets and shirts. This happens every day. Whenever the crowd, which often includes many women and children, start expressing anger at their plight and get closer to the fortified checkpoint, the heavily-armed soldiers immediately start shooting.
So the possibility of facing death became a daily experience for the thousands of Palestinians who tried to move in the occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip.
Burying the dead has become another right that is denied to the people of Nablus. Sabriya Assalli stands next to the bodies of her son and her husband at the family home. The men were killed at the start of the Israeli incursion
(photo: AFP)
At Ramallah's sister town of Al-Bireh, I saw Israeli jeeps touring the narrow streets telling all men aged between 15 and 45 to gather in front of the town's main mosque. They were forcibly seated on the ground for hours, until Israeli army soldiers checked their identities and made sure they had no links to "terrorists." Each man was first ordered to take off his clothes, and then his personal belongings were confiscated. If a man needed to go to the toilet, he had to raise his hand and seek permission from the occupation troops.
In another incident, while out with a group of reporters in Manara, we were all asked to get out of our car, take off our bullet-proof vests and our shirts. When my Palestinian photographer Atta Eweisat's turn came, the soldiers asked him to kneel on the ground and bend his head down until it almost reached the ground -- but without quite touching it, because that would be likely to make him feel more comfortable. He was blindfolded, handcuffed and finally taken away and ordered to kneel again next to several ambulance workers, also arrested by the occupation troops. Eweisat's press card had expired, and he could not get a new one because Israel had stopped granting new press passes to Palestinians and had confiscated many others.
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