We left
for Ramallah yesterday morning. In order to enter the city, our
little group had to avoid the Israeli checkpoint by walking (and
sometimes running) through the brush just south of the checkpoint.
Once we were safely inside the military zone, a taxi driver with
whom we had made advance arrangements drove us about a mile into
Ramallah and stopped. He would not go any further for fear of
Israeli snipers who were situated in many of the city's tall buildings.
A Red Crescent ambulance driver offered to take us to the Sheik
Zayed hospital where we had arranged to meet two organizers with
the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), Huwaida Arraf and
her fiancé, Adam Shapiro. We had heard that tanks and troops
surrounding the hospital might block our passage.
Those
of you who have been following the news carefully might remember
the Sheik Zayed hospital as the site of a mass grave dug, several
days earlier, in the parking lot as a temporary burial ground
for 29 Palestinians, including one American citizen. The morgue
at the hospital was full, and there was nowhere else to put the
bodies. Coming down a steep hill about three miles from the hospital,
we spotted a tank and an armored personnel carrier (APC). These
days, in Ramallah, the only vehicles on the streets are tanks,
APCs, and ambulances (I guess you could also count the mangled
cars peppering the roadside that tanks had rolled over during
the invasion). Suddenly a soldier appeared. He crouched on one
knee, aimed his M-16 directly at us, and fixed his eye to his
gun's sight. We stopped. The driver began slowly backing up the
hill and several more soldiers appeared some of them taking aim
and some motioning us to come closer. We all held our passports
up to let them know there were internationals in the car.
Israeli
troops had been harassing, arresting, and even shooting ambulance
drivers since the start of the invasion. We had no idea what to
expect. When we got to the soldiers at the bottom of the hill
we stopped again. Eight M-16s and a tank were aimed at us. The
soldier directly to my right looked tired and scared. That scared
me. Our driver was ordered out of the car and asked a few questions
in Arabic. Then we were ordered out, with all of our bags. We
laid our bags out on the ground and opened them. After a not-so-thorough
search several soldiers asked us a few questions while others
encircled us. The soldier who at first struck me as tired and
scared now just looked cautiously curious.
"Why
are you here?" he asked, not quite meeting our eyes.
"We came to bring medicine and food to people under curfew,"
said one member of our group.
"Don't you know there are terrorists here, it is dangerous,"
he replied, "do you think you can bring peace?"
"We don't know," we said, almost in unison.
Then Kathy, my roommate and co-worker, stepped in, "We are
here because we know that our government pays for much of what
is going on here and we feel a responsibility to intervene nonviolently
in this terrible situation."
"We did not ask for this, it is the Palestinian leadership,
bad leaders, they are responsible for this," replied the
soldier.
"But over half of the people here are children," Kathy
said, "and children can't be bad leaders, they can only be
children!"
"I know there are children here," he replied solemnly,
looking off into the distance, "but there are also terrorists.
You cannot drive to the hospital," said the soldier.
"Then we will walk," replied Greg, another member of
our group, who then began walking towards the tank and APC that
partially blocked our path.
"Stop! You cannot walk either," demanded the soldier,
who then paused and looked around. Directly in front of us was
a soldier on one knee, holding each of us briefly in his cross-hairs,
one person at a time.
"Don't you understand that you make the terrorists happy
when you come here to help them?" the soldier continued.
"We are here to help the innocent people in Ramallah who
are being terrorized and killed every day," replied Kathy.
"We do not kill innocent people."
"We read Ha'aretz [an Israeli paper, printed in Hebrew and
English] every day and we know innocent people are being killed,"
Kathy said.
"Do you think I like this?" the soldier demanded, "I
don't want to be here."
At that moment there was an enormous explosion and sustained machine
gun fire. It was coming from directly behind us, and it was really
loud. Two members of our group stepped away to smoke, and the
others drifted back towards the ambulance. Kathy and I remained
with the soldier.
"Do you know what Arafat wants, he wants murder, why do you
want to help a murderer," he asked.
"Maybe there is another way to look at our presence here,"
I replied, "We are here operating beneath the level of the
leaders who we believe do not want real peace. I think you and
I have more in common than you have with Sharon, or than I have
with Arafat, wouldn't you agree?"
"Yes, I agree."
"So let us go to the hospital," Kathy responded.
Silence. Then the soldier spoke again, "You know, it is not
just the Palestinians who are suffering."
"We want a just peace for both sides," we responded,
"We want an end to *all* of the violence."
"It is too late," insisted the soldier, "there
can be no peace now."
"It is difficult to see a way out, but..."
"Why don't you work on behalf of the Jews, why can't you
be objective?"
At that moment, another soldier came up to us and began speaking
in Hebrew. Then, suddenly, we were told we could get back into
the ambulance and push ahead towards the hospital.
The hospital
is actually two buildings separated by a road. It was in that
road, just yards from the hospital, that an elderly woman with
a walker was shot dead by an Israeli sniper just weeks ago. In
the parking lot we saw the mass grave we had all read about. It
was empty; the killing was less frequent 11 days into the siege,
giving hospital workers the window they needed to dispose of the
bodies properly.
***
For our second day in Ramallah, we agreed to divide our efforts.
Some of us could accompany ambulances making house calls while
the rest would defy the curfew by walking to the office of the
Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC) to assist
in deliveries of food and medicine to families. We had walked
about one block when we spotted an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC)
at the intersection three blocks ahead of us. On top of the APC
were a mounted machine gun and a soldier; another soldier, bearing
an M-16, crouched in front of the APC. Both were aiming at us.
We stopped. A soldier yelled something. Adam yelled out, "I'm
sorry I can't hear you." One of the soldiers fired. "I
hear your bullets," Adam replied, "We're going to deliver
food, we are all foreigners." We waited. There were shots
in the distance. The soldiers ahead of us seemed to be engaged
in some sort of operation that drew them out of the APC. They
were moving around. We were a distraction. We began walking very
slowly, then stopped, and again called out our intent to deliver
food. Adam asked to speak to the commander, with whom he has spoken
before. Then he asked for some signal that we could pass. Nothing.
We resumed our slow march, white flag held high. We heard a dynamite
explosion nearby. The soldiers were blowing their way into a building.
We stopped again and Adam continued, "Soldiers, we wish to
proceed, may we approach to speak to you?". After a long
silence we decided to turn back and try again later. We worried
that the soldiers would do something stupid to deal with their
"distraction." Turning around, we walked back slowly,
in the direction of yesterday's snipers.
While
we were engaged in our sort-of-stand-off, Alexandra had ducked
into a refugee camp and returned with a heart medicine prescription
for a middle-aged woman who couldn't reach the hospital to fill
it because of the snipers and the soldiers. The hospital was one
block away. We returned to the hospital, got the heart medication,
and decided to head back to the refugee camp, which was just in
view of our friends with the APC. We began again, white flag waiving,
and arrived at the entrance to the camp (really indistinguishable
from the rest of the neighborhood) and were pleased to see that
the soldiers had moved on. We
decided to again attempt making our way to the UPMRC offices.
Just as we were getting ready to walk on, a man approached us
to ask if we could get an ambulance to take his feverish son to
the hospital. We decided to escort the boy to the hospital since
it was so close.While we were regrouping in the parking lot, two
ambulances sped into the driveway. Inside one was the body of
28 year old Manel Sami Ibrahim, who was standing near her window
when an Israeli sniper shot her through the heart. Her husband
and three children were in the apartment.
"This,"
as one Palestinian relief worker said to me, "is the occupation."
We started
off again for the UPMRC offices. I felt a small sense of victory
as we passed the location of the soldiers we had confronted just
an hour earlier. We turned left and headed up a hill. The streets
of Ramallah were empty and ruined. Bullet casings of all varieties
littered the streets. The Israelis had shot up banks, internet
cafes, bars, clothing stores, medical relief offices, civil service
organizations, and homes. Tanks had bulldozed power lines, dumpsters,
and street signs. But the houses were full. Every once in awhile,
somebody would lean out of an upper window to say hello or just
look at us, wondering. A woman from Los Angeles came down for
a quick visit. A man planting a tree in his garden showed us the
bullet casings he had collected around his yard. It was surreal.
Occasionally,
an APC would rumble by us on a nearby street, but we didn't encounter
any soldiers until the very end of our walk. It was right out
of a war movie. Two young men in fatigues with a lazy grip on
their M-16s. Clearly bored out of their minds and blasting Bob
Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff," They made us open our
bags and barely even looked into them. Soon we were on our way.
At the
UPRMC offices, workers took us on a tour of the damaged building.
Two family apartments were heavily hit with damage to the ceilings,
walls and floors, which were covered with debris and broken glass.
The clinic's reception room and examining room were similarly
damaged, but had also been ransacked. A ruined copy machine had
crashed to the floor. All of the patient files had been stolen.
And every window was shattered. After seeing the damage, I was
assigned to an ambulance and given a
UPMRC/Red Crescent vest to identify me as a medical relief worker.
Alexandra and I accompanied a doctor and two UPMRC volunteers
on food and medicine deliveries to various homes that had requested
help. The trip through Ramallah neighborhoods was successful and
without incident.
Returning
to the Sheik Zayed Hospital, we learned that IDF soldiers had
shot Arduf Mussa Khandil, a 23 year-old mentally retarded man
whom we had seen on the hospital grounds just hours earlier. Apparently
he had wandered out into a street behind the hospital. Witnesses
saw 11 Israeli soldiers chasing him. They speculated that the
young man ran because he was scared when he saw armed soldiers.
He was unarmed. They shot him dead.
Scott,
a member of our group, visited the morgue to confirm the details
of the day's deaths. A third body was delivered to the morgue
while we were out. It was the body of Mahmoud Farid Bawatma, who
had been dead 7-15 days, his body only recently discovered. He
was shot, but the details of his death are unclear except that
the bullet had entered through his buttocks and exited through
his head. The morgue was full again and the doctors were talking
about a second mass grave. As we were leaving the hospital to
attempt a return to Jerusalem, two APCs rolled up the street and
parked at the intersection nearest the hospital. It was the same
army unit that had stopped us on our way in. Now they were telling
us we couldn't leave. After five minutes of talking and ten minutes
of waiting while they struck war poses, we were allowed to leave.
Now I
am back in Jerusalem, working on getting to Jenin with Kathy and
several others. They say there has been a massacre there.
