Death Of Rafah
By Chris McGreal
The
Guardian
28 October, 2003
The
moment al-Brazil plunged into darkness, Amjad Alweda knew what was coming.
He grabbed his wife and three young children and bundled them down a
pitch-black stairwell to a room at the back of their small block of
flats. And then he stopped and listened.
The sound of the
tanks echoes along the streets around here so it seems they are coming
from every direction at once and you never know which way to run,"
says the 32-year-old Palestinian man.
Minutes later an
engine roared and tons of steel - he didn't wait to discover whether
it was a tank or a bulldozer - came crashing into the front of Alweda's
computer shop. He squeezed his children through a back window and told
them to run as the clanking monster tore at his livelihood.
"The soldiers
were calling over the megaphones for everybody to leave their houses
but there was no chance for people to get out before they started shooting
from the tanks. It was completely dark and there were bullets flying
around," he says. "Usually, we try and stay in the house when
the fighting starts but we knew the army had been everywhere else so
it must be our turn."
For two weeks now,
the Israeli army has been grinding its way through Rafah refugee camp
in the southern tip of the Gaza strip. "Operation Root Canal"
is ostensibly aimed at destroying some of the dozens of tunnels the
military says are used for smuggling weapons under the border with Egypt.
As about 65 tanks,
armoured vehicles and mammoth armour-plated bulldozers rolled into Rafah,
the Israeli army said it had intelligence that surface-to-air missiles
were being hauled through the tunnels. But there was no sign of them
as dozens of Palestinians attempted to exact some kind of price for
the attack with pistols, AK-47s and homemade hand grenades. By the time
the Israelis withdrew to the fringes of the camp where the tanks and
bulldozers are perpetually at work, 18 Palestinians were dead, including
three children under 15 years old, and more than 120 were wounded.
Just three tunnels
were found, and no weapons. But in the process, the military crushed
or rocketed nearly 200 homes, throwing about 1,700 people onto the street.
The army claimed it never happened, that just 10 homes were wrecked,
and then sent back the bulldozers to grind the evidence that the houses
ever existed into the dirt.
The raid was one
of the largest of the past three years of intifada, rivalling the notorious
levelling of the heart of Jenin refugee camp last year in the scale
of destruction, if not loss of life. Yet there was barely a peep of
protest from Britain or other European countries over the attack, and
President George Bush defended the Israeli assault as a necessary part
of the war on terrorism.
There is no such
thing as a quiet night in Rafah. The shooting usually begins around
dusk, punching the darkness with rapid machinegun fire and tracer bullets
for minutes at a time. Most of the Palestinian fire is aimed at the
concrete pillboxes and lookout posts planted every 50 metres between
the edge of Rafah and the Egyptian border where Israel retains control
of a narrow strip of land along the frontier known as the Philadelphi
road.
The border is a
tangle of wire, broken buildings and mud, bearing a resemblance to a
first world war battlefield. Not far beyond are the Egyptian lookout
towers, a tantalising reminder to Rafah's 145,000 residents that there
is world outside the occupation.
Palestinian bullets
rarely reach their intended target. Israeli fire is more effective.
The results can be seen peppered over the front of the houses that face
the border, and in the death statistics.
Palestinians in
Rafah have killed three soldiers and one Jewish settler during the intifada.
The Israelis have killed about 280 people in Rafah over the past three
years, accounting for about one in nine Palestinian deaths during the
uprising and making the refugee camp and neighbouring small town one
of the most dangerous places in the occupied territories. One in five
of the dead are children or teenagers.
The Israeli military
has designated Rafah a war zone. In doing so, the military exempts itself
from many of its own restraints and provides a ready justification for
the "collateral damage" of civilian deaths.
The government's
view is summed up by a declaration signed by several cabinet ministers
at an international summit in Jerusalem earlier this month that states
"the war on radical Islam is a righteous cause. The state of Israel
is, symbolically and operationally, on the frontline of the battle to
defend civilisation."
The latest battle
was fought in al-Brazil, a civilian neighbourhood of Rafah refugee camp.
The tanks moved in after dark, and the bulldozers tore down power lines.
Among those fleeing as the tanks blasted away at Palestinian fighters
was Naja Abu Neima, a 55-year-old grandmother. When she returned three
days later, there was nothing left of her home. Today she is camped
on an island of broken bricks and concrete under a makeshift shelter
with a carpet on top and twisted metal sheeting against two sides.
"This tent
represents all that is left of my house. All of our furniture, clothes,
fridge, everything is destroyed," she says. "They killed my
son a few months ago, and now they have destroyed my house. The Israelis
claim we are terrorists. What do you see with your own eyes?"
Most of the casualties
ended up at Rafah's only hospital. The director, Dr Ali Mousa, is resigned
to the parade of corpses but he was unprepared for those of a couple
of young children. "Their bodies arrived here without any heads.
Can you imagine how two children - 12 and 15 years old - come to be
without heads? They were hit by a tank shell. What could they have done
to tanks?" he says.
"This is the
worst attack of the past three years because they closed Rafah from
all sides. The attacks on the refugee camps on the border are taking
more and more time. It used to be they came in for a few hours at a
time, but now it's for days."
Dr Mousa faced a
daily battle to get the wounded out of the battle zone and to move the
serious casualties on to better facilities elsewhere in the Gaza Strip.
One of his medics was shot in the chest as he helped move a man with
a gunshot wound to his head.
"Many people
tell us about pregnant women trying to get to hospital by moving from
house to house, trying not to get shot," says Dr Mousa.
After smashing in
the front of Alweda's store, the army decided that his home, two floors
above the shop, would make a good sniper's nest. The flat has a view
across the open ground in front of the buildings and up each of the
approaching side streets. The snipers broke up the floor tiles in the
hallway and packed the fragments into sandbags. The military also destroyed
much of the furniture and Alweda's small computer store where dozens
of machines lay among the rubble. "I work as a teacher in a refugee
school. We are not highly paid. I earn $630 (£370) a month. It
cost me $5,000 to set up my shop," he says.
The soldiers stayed
in al-Brazil three days and demolished a couple of dozen homes without
finding any tunnels. Their final victim of the raid was 15-year-old
Shadi Abu Elwan who went to help a friend recover furniture from under
the rubble.
"There was
gunfire and Shadi's friends found him lying on the floor bleeding from
his head," says the dead boy's distraught father, Nabil Abu Elwan.
"His head was completely broken by a bullet. He lived for a few
minutes more, but then he died.
"When his friends
looked they saw a tank parked close by, on the same side where the Palestinian
homes were destroyed. My son was no threat to the tank, he was just
helping his friends. I believe the Israeli soldiers in the tank like
to kill people because they don't think of the Palestinians as people,
they think of us as animals. Even the women and children are animals
to them. It's sport, hunting. What can one boy to do them in their tanks?
What threat was he?"
The army's claim
that tunnels exist is not in doubt. Some of those uncovered are quite
sophisticated, with wooden panelling, lighting and even phone lines
linking the two ends. The tunnelling began back in the early 1980s under
the domination of two Bedouin families who made a small fortune charging
fixed fees to smuggle people, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol into Rafah.
Even today, a packet of cigarettes is noticeably cheaper in Rafah than
in Gaza city.
But the military
says their main use of the tunnels today is to shift weapons. "This
operation is the inevitable cost that the people of Rafah are paying
for the tunnel industry. The trouble is that when no one else is practising
law and order, we have to do it ourselves," says an army spokeswoman,
Major Sharon Feingold.
The newly homeless
in Rafah question what the destruction of their houses has to do with
unearthing the tunnels. "Any house used to shoot at the (Israeli)
force immediately lost its immunity and was destroyed," says Feingold.
"This was partly the reason for so many houses being destroyed.
There was a lot of resistance at the beginning of the operation."
When Israeli troops
go in to Rafah, they rarely have an easy time of it. "Our main
duty is to block any attack using all kinds of local made weapons we
have," says one of the fighters in the camp, who goes by the nom
de guerre of Abu Abed. "There is no balance between the force we
have and the occupation army. We know our simple weapons can't affect
their forces, but we want them to know there is a price to pay when
they come."
Abu Abed waves a
pistol and one of his comrades fiddles with the pin on a hand grenade
until he is asked to stop. "I think this resistance is one of the
reasons the Israelis don't try and reoccupy all of Gaza like they have
done with Jenin and Nablus and those other places," he says.
But "the resistance"
is not always welcome. Few want to talk about it, although Alweda was
unusually frank: "Sometimes we kick the resisters out of our areas.
We don't want to get stuck in the crossfire," he says. Abu Abed
admits as much. "We face lots of trouble with the Palestinian civilian
population and it happened several times that we clashed with them because
they don't want us. When we face a problem, we call our leaders and
they usually order us to withdraw," he says.
For the governor
of Rafah, Majid Ghal, the claims about tunnels and resistance are all
nonsense. He says the demolitions are yet another grab for Palestinian
land. "What they are doing is to carve out a buffer zone between
Rafah and the border. The Israelis have always said they do not want
Palestine to control its borders or to have borders with other countries.
They are trying to drive people out," he says.
The army denies
any such motive. But a clue to Israeli intent can be found in comments
made on Israel radio a year ago by the then head of the military's southern
command, which has responsibility for Gaza. Colonel Yom Tov Samya said
house demolition was a policy and an end in itself, not a by-product
of a search for tunnels. "The IDF (Israeli Defence Force) has to
knock down all the houses along a strip of 300 to 400 metres. It doesn't
matter what the future settlement will be, this will be the border with
Egypt," he said. "Arafat has to be punished, and after every
terrorist attack another two or three rows or houses on the Palestinian
side of the border have to be knocked down ... This is a long-term policy.
We simply have to take a very extreme step. It is do-able and I am happy
it is being done, but it's being carried out in doses that are too small,
I regret to say. It has to be done in one big operation."
Last Tuesday, nine
young Rafah men in ill-fitting, rented shiny black suits had other ideas.
All were to be married later that day, and all came from families whose
homes were bulldozed a few days earlier. But first there was a bus tour
under a banner with mangled English spelling but a clear enough sentiment:
"Wedding among destuton despit the pans".
The nine grooms
placed flowers stuck in makeshift vases fashioned from discarded Israeli
shell casings on the remnants of their homes. "It's to send a message
to our enemies that we will go back to our homes," says Younees
Abu Jazaar, a fresh faced 20 year old who married a cousin. "We
feel the pain but life can't stop. We are kind of happy to be getting
married but kind of sad because we no longer have homes. But why should
we allow them to wreck everything for us?"
Next stop was Gaza
International Airport, a monument to Yasser Arafat's vanity, but also
a source of some pride to the residents of neighbouring Rafah. The Israelis
put the airport out of business at the beginning of the intifada by
bulldozing craters into the runway, but the staff still turn up for
work.
The bridegrooms
posed beneath posters of "martyrs" - suicide bombers, fighters
and innocent Palestinian civilians killed - before moving on to the
arrivals hall for photographs next to the luggage carousel.
"We are very
proud of our airport," says Abu Jazaar. "Look at how beautiful
it is. This is our hope, that all life can be as beautiful as this airport.
Except the runway. Right now our life is like the runway."
A few hours later,
the nine were married in Rafah stadium where most of their parents are
once again living in tents half a century after their families were
driven to Gaza by Israeli independence.