In Old Hebron, Home is No Refuge from Political Violence
Pacific News Service, Chris Smith, Posted: Aug 10, 2001
As headlines from Israel recount weekly deaths and destruction, the view from porches and living rooms in the ancient town of Hebron show violence is literally at residents' front doors. PNS correspondent Chris Smith reports rights groups and Palestinian families say Israeli settlers are increasing attacks on neighbors.
HEBRON -- A white Chevy van winds its way up the main street toward a hilltop neighborhood, stops, and a family emerges. The father holds a child's arm in one hand and in the other, an M-16.
Jarring scenes like this are a fact of life in this divided West Bank city.
Rima Abu Eisheh, a Palestinian, lives across the street from the Israeli settlement of Admot Yishai. Red iron grating covers the front of her house. Settlers regularly try to pry the grate loose, and recently threw pots of boiling oil through the grate and onto the door, said Rima, 33, whose family has lived in the house for 18 years.
But on July 14th, settlers broke through the 10-foot fence into the backyard and caught Rima's husband, Taysir Mohammed Hamed, slipping out the side door, which the family often uses to avoid them. "They started choking and kicking him," Rima said. "The settlers were never friendly. They always hated us. But it's much worse now." Taysir was injured in the neck, head and back.
Human rights groups charge that Hebron district settlers have stepped up attacks against Palestinians in recent weeks, rampaging through Arab neighborhoods, smashing windows, beating residents and breaking into homes.
Kathy Kamphoefner, a member of the Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT), an independent observer group in Hebron, confirmed the recent escalation. "The vast majority of violence in the area is instigated by settlers," she added. CPT has documented settler harassment of the Abu Eishehs since 1997.
Between June 12-25, at least 46 Palestinians were injured and three killed in settler attacks in Hebron district alone, according to the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, a prominent East Jerusalem rights group.
David Wilder, spokesman for Hebron's settler community, disputed the charges. "[The Palestinians] are very good at lying," he said. "Most of this is not true. It has been turned all around. For the last 10 months we've been under attack." Settlers were defending themselves against Palestinian agression, he said. "When you're shot at day-in and day-out, people will react. I have five bullet holes in my apartment."
Of the 129 Israelis killed since the beginning of the Intifada last September, more than 80 have been settlers. At least 579 Palestinians have been killed. The Palestinians are calling for the removal of all Israeli settlements, deemed illegal under international law, from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The conflict is most acute in Hebron, where 450 Orthodox Jewish settlers, seen as extremists by some Israelis, live in four settlements in the heart of the old city amid 120,000 Palestinians. Under a 1997 interim peace agreement, the city was divided into areas of Palestinian (H1) and Israeli (H2) control, a move that has only exacerbated tensions. Now, soldiers and settlers exchange fire with Palestinian gunmen in H1 almost every night.
In the old city's empty market streets, soldiers recently patrolled alleyways in silence past shuttered Arab storefronts which settlers had covered in anti-Arab graffiti. H2's Palestinians were under a 10-day, round-the-clock curfew, a measure frequently imposed by authorities to separate the sides. Palestinians complain the curfew just makes them easy targets.
Fatin Al Bach Husseini, 22, lives with her family on the second floor of a stone house in H2. Every Saturday for the past month, she said, mobs of settlers have surged through the old city, carrying guns and tire irons. On July 14th, they attacked her home, she said. "They throw stones and shoot into our windows. Even the small ones have guns." A clock hung crookedly on the wall, its glass smashed and its hands stopped at 10:26.
Afef Abdel Aziz Al Bach, Fatin's mother, said when the settlers appear the family calls the Israeli police, who have civil responsibility for the Palestinian residents of H2.
"They try to help, but they can't do anything," she said. "The soldiers protect the settlers."
Residents and rights groups assert that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) tolerates and sometimes even cooperates with settlers' actions.
"Settlers have physically attacked many Palestinian homes in the old city, often directly under the eyes of IDF soldiers present nearby, who did nothing to stop them," concluded an April report on Hebron by the international Human Rights Watch.
An IDF spokesman emphasized that the police have overall responsibility for the actions of Israeli citizens in the Occupied Territories, and that the army is limited in its policing functions. "If soldiers are at a specific position, for example, and they see something happen, they might not be able to leave (the position). They'd have to call for reinforcements," he said. "[But] in principle they do react if they see scuffles."
Back in her hilltop neighborhood, across the street from the Jewish settlement, Rima Abu Eisheh sat on the floor baking wide pieces of pita bread, one at a time, on a small portable cooking pot. Behind her, three brightly-colored birds twittered away in cages. A child piloted a bike through the narrow corridors of the house.
"These kids can never play outside," she said. "It is too dangerous."
Smith (Smithca77@aol.com) is a free-lance writer currently on assignment in the region for Pacific News Service.
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