http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/04/01/MN24232.DTL
Israel 'in War,' Sharon Says
RAMALLAH: Palestinian City Now an Israeli Garrison
John Kifner, New York Times
Monday, April 1, 2002
This once-bustling hillside city -- the commercial, political and intellectual capital of the Palestinian West Bank -- was a ghost town yesterday, still except for Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers.
On the third day of the siege of Yasser Arafat's compound, Israeli soldiers have all but taken over the city. They have sandbagged positions, put snipers on rooftops and intensified their hunt, house to house, building to building, for any Palestinian men they can find, dragging them off, sometimes blindfolded, for questioning.
The Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers have crushed automobiles, knocked over power poles and torn up water mains. In the center of town, hardly anyone dares venture outside and even in remote neighborhoods it is rare to see anyone, or even a face peeping from a window.
Electricity and running water are out in some sections of town. With stores closed, food is running out.
The Israelis have commandeered whole buildings, forcing families into a few rooms and, Palestinians say, smashing and stealing their possessions.
"We used to see scenes like this in refugee camps, and now it's us," said a well-to-do academic who preferred not to give his name.
A decade ago, in the aftermath of the Oslo accords, this had been a place of hope. Although there are squalid refugee camps on its edges, Ramallah has been a largely middle-class city. Its name in Arabic means "hill of God," and in Ottoman and British times it was a cool summer refuge for wealthy Palestinians. It was a place of businessmen and intellectuals from nearby Bir Zeit University.
ONCE-THRIVING CITY
The Quakers came here and built a still-operating Friend's School, and the Roman Catholics, too, built an elegant stone compound. Many people emigrated to America, some married there, and many returned to build flashy mansions, often after their children grew into teenagers and became tempted by modern ways.
A substantial portion of the population is part American. It was possible to run into a young woman shrouded in Islamic black who announced "Chicago Bulls rule" and turned out to be a journalism student from Northwestern, visiting home.
With the dream, finally, of a Palestinian nation, people and money poured back in planning a shopping mall, building a hotel tower with a swimming pool and plenty of marble, even a brewery making Taybeh, an amber beer.
That was before.
SIEGE WILL GO ON
At Ramallah Hospital yesterday, where martyr posters decorate the walls of the wounded, Dr. Munzer Sharif, the Palestinian Authority's Deputy Minister of Health, was in his usual basement office, answering his usual constantly ringing phone as an ambulance screamed in with a wounded man.
Two Palestinians were killed yesterday after they opened fire on Israeli soldiers. Sharif said there were more bodies they could not reach, perhaps seven.
There seemed to be little fighting yesterday, other than a few bursts of gunfire around Arafat's compound, apparently intended to keep him on edge. A top Israeli commander, Maj. Gen Gioria Eiland, said at a military briefing yesterday that the siege of Arafat, holed up in the last two rooms of what was a British Mandate police station, would go on.
"There are still dozens of wanted people inside," Eiland said. "Unless they come out, we will not change our way of treating this building."
ACTIVISTS FORM HUMAN SHIELD
The Israelis were faced with a strange phenomenon yesterday in the form of about 100 European and American peace activists, led by Jose Bove, the French scourge of McDonald's and globalization, who entered the town. About sixty of them managed to rush into the compound yesterday to visit Arafat, and about 40 vowed to stay as human shields.
"Our actions will prevent an attack on the building," said Claude Leostic, one of the group. "We are staying here, and the Israeli army should know that if it opens fire, it will also open fire on Europeans."
An army spokesman said the group ignored orders to halt and "in doing so endangered their lives and the lives of the soldiers." The Israeli military said 13 members of the group were arrested after they left Arafat's office.
Other members of the group joined doctors and other medical workers at Ramallah Hospital in a human wall that eventually swayed an Israeli unit not to raid the hospital to search for weapons or wanted men.
CIVILIANS TREATED HARSHLY
As such skirmishes played themselves out, life continued to unfold harshly for the area's residents.
Jihad Mashal, who lives in a three-story apartment house near the al-Amari refugee camp, said that the four families living there -- 24 people -- had been ordered down into a tiny, two-room basement apartment while soldiers took over the rest of the building.
"We have rice, some cans brought from the apartment upstairs," he said. "We tried to ask them to let the children go out and play, to get some fresh air. We asked permission, but they did not allow."
When Stephanie Koury, an Arab American lawyer, tried to take a picture of her car, which had been crushed by a tank, a soldier pointed a rifle at her and told her to get back inside. "They went house to house, into every house in the neighborhood," she said. "There were 10 soldiers in my house for three hours. They went through my stuff -- closets and drawers. In the kitchen, eating my food, fruit, bananas on the table."
Then they asked her to give one of the soldiers a massage, which she refused. "It was disgusting," she said.
Bahij Abdullah, the 61-year-old owner of a hardware store, said, "It's like a curfew here, nobody's moving. They are shooting at everything that moves. Yesterday someone was killed 10 meters from our house by a sniper."
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Print This Story
E-mail This Story