'An enduring hell'
The old city is crying for help. Is anybody listening? Khaled Amayreh reports from Nablus
While the world focusses on Iraq, the estimated 200,000 inhabitants of Nablus, the largest town in the West Bank, are crying out for international intervention to protect them from the Israeli army's latest rampage.
On Tuesday, thousands of crack Israeli troops, backed by tanks, armoured personnel carriers (APCs) and huge army bulldozers, continued for the eighth consecutive day to spread terror and fear and wreak utter havoc and destruction on Nablus. The West Bank city is in little position to resist the assault, as it is still recuperating from the Israeli rampage of last summer, which resulted in the killing and maiming of hundreds and the destruction of the bulk of the town's ancient quarter.
This time, the Israeli army seems bent on destroying what it left of the old city last time in its "fight on terror".
"They obviously want to make our life an enduring hell, and they have," said Hanin Al-Masri, a secretary in Al-Najah University, Nablus. "Anytime, anywhere in the city, anybody can get a bullet in his head or chest -- an old man, an old woman, a school child, a mentally disabled person or even an ambulance driver."
Al-Masri was alluding to the dozens of Israeli army snipers who had been posted on rooftops throughout the city, particularly in the downtown area and along the main thoroughfares and key intersections.
Not a day passes without the killing of one, two, or even three civilians by a sniper's bullet or by the often indiscriminate and random gunfire coming from Israeli tanks and APCs.
On Saturday, 22 February, Israeli soldiers shot and killed 43-year-old Sami Halawh, in full view of his wife and children. Manal, a neighbour, who was watching what was happening from inside her third-storey flat, described what happened. "They ordered him and his family to leave so as to search the house. The soldiers kept them huddled in the rain for close to an hour, and when the father moved to comfort one of his children who was crying in fear, a soldier who was standing by just shot him in the chest, killing him instantly. They just slaughtered him in cold blood like you slaughter a sheep," she said.
Shortly afterwards, Israeli soldiers killed Hatem Al-Sardi, a 23-year-old college student. Earlier, a middle-aged man and his grandson were both gunned down in the town's main street while trying to evade an Israeli APC.
Israel classically refused to acknowledge responsibility, reiterating the mundane claim that soldiers had to open fire because somebody hurled stones at them.
Living in constant fear, and terrorised round the clock by an army that observes no limits, the people of the city are counting more and more on a group of international peace activists from Europe and North America, whose mere presence in Nablus, it is hoped, would discourage the soldiers from their indiscriminate wrath.
An activist from Chicago named Sara accused the Israeli army of adopting a policy of deliberate killing of innocent civilians for the purpose of terrorising the Palestinians into submission. "How can we possibly believe them? They say they don't target civilians, but this is a lie. They murder civilians everyday before our eyes, I just don't believe they do it by mistake; when mistakes happen every day, it means there is a policy to shoot and kill. The world must understand this and stop believing Israel's mendacious propaganda," she said.
But the Israeli war machine remains virtually unchallenged. The Palestinians are made to perform as human shields and made to walk before the soldiers as they conduct their house-to-house searches and make their captives stand in front of the buildings as they ransack homes, arrest men, occupy houses and confine their occupants to single rooms or simply throw them out at gun point.
On 22 February, the popular committees in Nablus, which represent the town's main civic groups, issued an SOS appeal to the international community for immediate intervention.
The appeal accused Israel of carrying out a systematic rampage of terror, which in this week alone resulted in the murder of six innocent civilians and the maiming of 45 others as well as the abduction of scores of people. The appeal also spoke of dozens of stores, schools, mosques, plazas and homes bombed, bulldozed and destroyed under Israel's pretext of searching for "wanted persons".
"Our children have been terrorised round the clock; our sick are not allowed medical access and left to face certain death, even our dead are not allowed to be buried. We are demanding an international force to protect our lives, our property and future from Israeli terrorism," read the appeal.
But this is a town that wants to survive and hasn't yet given up. On 21 February hundreds of people gathered at a rally outside the old city in defiance of the Israeli curfew. The following day, the local popular committees coordinated a protest in which people from all over Nablus came out onto their rooftops or leaned out their windows and chanted "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) while banging their pots and pans together.
The symbolic act, say activists, will help foster a collective spirit of defiance. "We have to survive, we are staying here, staying, staying, staying," said Al-Masri, in an embittered but defiant tone.
In the absence of any international endeavour to protect the defenceless Palestinians, there is very little Al-Masri and her townspeople can do other than hanging on and hoping that the world's conscience wakes up.
