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Twilight Zone / A Sound Sleep
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By Gideon Levy, Haaretz.com
Israel
September 9, 2004
Now they sleep with the light on, crowding into one room below, on the ground floor. It's the room of Rasmiya, the mother of the family, an elderly woman of 70, whose eyes have grown dim and whose body is half-paralyzed. But she, too, underwent the horrors of that night with them. The terror of that night, between Monday and Tuesday of last week, will be with them for a long time to come.
Basal, a six-year-old boy from Nazareth, goes from room to room in his grandmother's house, touching the jagged holes in the walls that were made by the missiles and the bullets, and muttering to himself, "Get out, get out," in Hebrew, as he heard the soldiers shouting at him at the end of that night of horrors, when the troops ordered them to leave their shelter, behind the concrete pillar in the corner of the living room. For three full hours they had crouched on the floor behind the pillar, as they came under relentless fire from every direction, the small children crying and wetting themselves, the parents helpless.
It's hard to believe that no one was hurt in this battlefield. There isn't a room that wasn't blasted, not a wall that wasn't perforated, not a window that wasn't shattered, not a cupboard that wasn't smashed. The missiles made gaping holes in the ceiling and the water tanks on the roof were blow apart and flooded the house - but no one was hurt.
For the residents of Jenin an unquiet night under fire is almost routine. This time, though, there were guests in the house: Inthisar Abudi, an Israeli woman from Nazareth, who had come to visit her husband's family, and Adib, a son who lives in Saudi Arabia and had come home after not visiting for the past four years. For them the shock was even greater. They're not used to it. They went to sleep late that night. It was a particularly pleasant summer evening, and the guests from Israel and from Saudi Arabia sat with the family in the living room under the glass chandelier, eating vegetables and drinking tea.
"We were content," says the brother, Ahmed, in whose apartment we are sitting, with his whole family, as on that night. Ahmed and his wife have three children, aged five to 14; Mohammed and his wife have a seven-year-old daughter; Khaled is single; Adib came alone from Saudi Arabia; and Abdullah and Inthisar came from Nazareth with their two children and the grandmother. Rasmiya, who can barely walk, has to be supported by her sons.
At midnight last Monday they all went to bed. The son from Saudi Arabia slept downstairs, by his mother's bed, the guests from Israel were on the middle floor and the others elsewhere in the three-story structure. At about 3 A.M. Inthisar woke up. She heard the noise of gunfire outside, along with the sounds of explosions and the flashes of light that looked like lightning. Frightened, she woke up her husband and the children.
"I was afraid, I was very afraid," she says in Hebrew. Since marrying Abdullah, her life has been split between Nazareth and Jenin. During vacations they are here, in Jenin, in the family home of Abdullah, which is located on a high hill in the southwestern part of the city, at the exit in the direction of Nablus. During the rest of the year, they are in Nazareth, her home town. The children attend an Israeli school, in Nazareth. Inthisar shouted in Hebrew from the bedroom to the soldiers outside: "Excuse me, soldier, we have small children in the house." Her shout, she says - and this was confirmed later by neighbors - could be heard all across the neighborhood.
Adib, the guest from Saudi Arabia, also woke up from the gunfire and saw Jeeps and soldiers outside. He dragged his mother into the next room, the bedroom of his brother Mohammed and his wife and daughter. Rasmiya has been paralyzed for three years, and her eyesight faded three months ago. Adib says that he was confused, thinking at first that maybe someone was firing at the neighbors, until bullets started to whistle through the room they were in. They moved from one corner of the room to another, not knowing what to do. The shooting came from all directions. From above he heard his brother Abdullah shouting, "The house is falling on us!" A missile, apparently fired from a helicopter, slammed into the roof and made a large hole in the ceiling.
Another deafening explosion was heard from the direction of the roof. Dust began to cover everything, and a pungent smell of gunpowder spread through the house. Windows were shattered one after the other. On the floor above Adib and his mother, Inthisar and Abdullah and their children sat on the floor of the bedroom, protecting their heads with their hands, as they show us now. Despite the gunfire, Inthisar decided to try to get to the barred window of the bedroom and make eye contact with the soldiers outside, to tell them about the children and beg them to let them leave the inferno in which they found themselves. She got up and started to walk toward the window, but her husband leaped at her, grabbed her dress and pulled her back to the floor. Abdullah was certain that if she approached the window the soldiers would shoot her, and he was probably right. (That is how Prof. Khaled Salah was killed a month and a half ago in Nablus, along with his 16-year-old son, Mohammed, when he moved toward a window in order to tell the soldiers that the door was stuck and he couldn't open it to let them enter the house.)
Inthisar and Abdullah, despairing of trying to shout to the soldiers, decided to improve their position. They crawled to the concrete pillar in a corner of the room, and used it as a shelter. They pulled the children through the dark room until they were all huddled behind the pillar. The children cried and urinated, wetting the floor around them. One floor below, the elderly grandmother nestled up to her son. Anuar was crying, but her brother Basal told her to stop making noise.
It went on like that for two hours, from 3 to 5 A.M. During that whole time, they say, the soldiers did not address them, either to warn them or order them out. They also say that they heard no gunfire from the direction of the house at the soldiers. At about 5 A.M., Inthisar turned on the light in the hall and signaled to the soldiers that they wanted to go downstairs, to a safer place. With hands raised the Abudi family ran toward the stairs leading to the grandmother's room below, and the shooting in fact stopped for a few minutes. But in short order, it resumed and became even more intense. "Why didn't they let us leave the house?" Abdullah asks now.
At first light, about 6 A.M., the soldiers, using bullhorns, ordered the occupants of the house to come out. Again they were wracked with fear, not knowing where to go out and deathly afraid of the soldiers. "It was the first time I ever saw anything like that and I didn't know what we were supposed to do," Inthisar says. They called the Red Crescent emergency service and tried to summon help. Maybe there are people who are dead or wounded in the house, they thought. Inthisar emerged first, shouting to the soldiers that there was a sick old woman in the house and small children, too. Then the children and the men came out, their shirts rolled up at as per the soldiers' order. They pulled out the grandmother slowly, supporting her so she wouldn't fall, finally placing her by the side of a Jeep.
They came out barefoot, in pajamas. Inthisar told the soldiers that there might be wounded people inside. The soldiers ordered Adib to go back inside and make sure there was no one there. The Israel Defense Forces used to call this the "neighbor procedure" and then changed the name of the pernicious practice to "early warning," after the High Court of Justice prohibited the "neighbor procedure." This week the president of the Supreme Court, Justice Aharon Barak, called on the army to stop using the "early warning" procedure as well. But last Tuesday, Adib Abudi entered the house on a mission of the IDF, to mop it up, with or without an "early warning."
The five brothers were handcuffed and blindfolded. The marks left by the plastic handcuffs were still clearly visible this week. They asked the soldiers to loosen the handcuffs a bit, but the soldiers told them to be quiet. Soldiers and dogs entered the house for a search and added to the disorder and destruction inside. At 8:30 A.M. the men were taken to an IDF facility next to Araba, leaving the women and children behind. They were questioned about whether they had hidden wanted individuals in the house, and denied it. The interrogators told them that there had been wanted men in the house and that those men had opened fire from it at the soldiers. The brothers said they had heard and seen nothing.
"Maybe they shot from the hills above the house," Ahmed says, "or maybe from the roof. We heard nothing. Our house is clean, clean. From the start of the intifada not one wanted individual has entered and the IDF didn't enter and we have never been in prison. The interrogators said there were wanted people. There is a mountain here. People pass by here, but I am not responsible for those who do. There were never firearms in our house, nor wanted people; and you won't even find a flag there."
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit: "In the course of activity to make arrests in Jenin, an IDF force came to a house where wanted people were suspected of hiding. Massive fire was directed at the force from the direction of the house and the surroundings, and the force returned fire at the sources of the shooting. The soldiers called to the occupants of the house to come out, and to the wanted people to surrender. When the residents of the house came out, four Palestinians were arrested and taken for interrogation by the security forces. Afterward the force combed the house and the surroundings to locate the wanted individuals, and after finding none, left the place."
The brothers were held in custody until 3 P.M. and then released. The soldiers dropped them off at a remote site, near Mevo Dotan, a settlement that Palestinian drivers are afraid to approach. They were barefoot and the asphalt burned the soles of their feet; they sat down by the roadside, and waited. Finally a Palestinian taxi passed by, and took them home. They arrived at 4 P.M., about 11 hours after it all began. They didn't sleep a wink all night.
Rasmiya enters the room supported by her sons. After that night she was hospitalized for a few hours and then released. She hasn't stopped crying since. Silent tears. "What happened to us never happened to anyone. I keep remembering the small children, their fear, I hear the voice of my son Abdullah, afraid that something happened to him." Her body moves from side to side, heaving, refusing to be at rest.
Her daughter-in-law, Inthisar, also breaks into tears. One of the granddaughters, Ula, is holding a pair of bullet-ridden black pants, desperate to show them off.
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