[Washington POst - 4/11/02] RAMALLAH, West Bank, April 11--The most recent Palestinian killed by Israeli soldiers in Ramallah was Manal Sofran. She was a housewife shot in the head on Wednesday, neighbors said, while calling her husband Sami and their four children to come in from the garden of her three-story apartment building near Chicken Street.
She leaned out from the glass-enclosed sun-room, a common feature of Palestinian houses from the 1950s and 60s. She spied five soldiers by a nearby wall, the neighbors recalled, and feared that they might shoot at moving objects.
"She was right," said Tom Kay, one of the neighbors. "But she was the object, and it was clear the soldiers could see her."
Her last words were 'Oh, Sami,' said grieving relatives who received visitors at a wake today.
The death toll in Ramallah has climbed slowly but surely since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent the army into the West Bank and Gaza Strip on March 29 to uproot what he called a Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. In the first week, about 27 Palestinians died, among them at least seven civilians. The toll has climbed to 37 in the past week. At least two of those recently added to the count were decomposed bodies of victims shot in the first hours of combat. One was a cook at Arafat's besieged headquarters building, doctors at Ramallah Hospital said.
Ramallah's toll is not of the level of carnage in Nablus or Jenin, Palestinian cities farther north in the West Bank where armor and helicopter assaults battered residential areas defended by armed militias. But it is striking nonetheless because it is continuing to climb. Combat is over, but shooting, death and destruction persist. Israeli soldiers strictly enforce a curfew, to the point where people who stick their head out a window risk losing it.
Israeli patrols appear to still be pursuing armed stragglers, although there have been no recent reports of roundups of militia members or other Palestinians whom the army labels as terrorists. In neighborhoods near the blackened and scarred headquarters of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, house-to-house searches have been frequent. On the other hand, large areas of Ramallah have been free of searches.
The duration of Israel's operation here raises the question of when--or whether--Sharon's government will be able to declare the city cleansed of terrorist infrastructure. Every so often, troop carriers and tanks still scurry about Ramallah's winding streets on noisy manhunts. Sometimes, they shoot up vacant buildings.
Sofran's death and incidents like it raise a different question. How abundantly has this operation fed a lust for revenge--not merely among armed fighters' relatives and associates, but also among Palestinians related to civilian victims? In Ramallah, civilians speak most heatedly not about militia losses but about such killings: targeting a woman in her home on a clear, quiet day, and hitting the mark with two bullets.
Palestinians complain that the United States has written off Palestinian civilian casualties as incidental, even in the early days of the uprising when Palestinians were shot down by the dozens while throwing stones at Israeli troops. "You foreigners make much of Israeli civilian deaths," said Bashir Abu Walid, a neighbor of the dead woman. "Every Israeli death is a big event. But we are just statistics. Because a soldier does it, it is not terrorism. Why not?"
There are three examples this week of the kind of attacks Ramallah residents believe exemplify wanton killing of civilians. Three men were shot the other day during an easing of the curfew, which the Israelis lift every three days for periods up to four hours. One died in a taxi after delivering a woman relative to Ramallah Hospital to give birth. Soldiers shot another in the chest as he stood in front of his home. A third was killed trying to drive relatives out of Ramallah to their home villages.
To the Palestinians, some killings become parables, stories repeated and repeated like fragments of an epic poem. News the other day of the wounding of a paraplegic in a wheelchair spread like wildfire through the city. Tuesday, a mentally retarded young man named Atef Moussa Kandil was shot near Manara Square. Kandil survived and is hospitalized with a chest wound.
"He was a fixture around Manara. People knew him. You know, Palestinians towns are like villages really, and he was a fixture, like the traditional village idiot. Anyway, he wandered out during curfew and panicked. He ran, and the Israelis shot him," said Mohammed Batrawi, a physician at Ramallah Hospital.
The curfew means that Ramallah residents are unable to begin repairs or open businesses. Hospitals and their ambulances, which have to run gauntlets of bullets, and garbage collection, which races into operation during curfew-free hours, are the only functioning municipal services.
Inspections of government buildings have begun to reveal how much of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat's ruling bureaucracy, has been gutted. The other day, Deputy Education Minister Naim Abu Hanous inspected the ransacked offices of his ministry and tried to figure out what the Israeli soldiers had carried off. Numerous computer hard disks were ripped out, files scattered about, and documents looted. He said that high school graduation test results dating from the 1950s were taken.
"They were kept up to date When Jordan ruled here, when the Israelis occupied here and with the Palestinian Authority," said Abu Hanous. "Now they are gone."
About $10,000 was stolen from a safe in the ministry's finance department, he added.
Ramallah city hall was ransacked and its second floor burned. Deeds, tax receipts, building permits and other documents important to governing a city disappeared. The possibility that deeds were destroyed is particularly important in an area where successive Israeli governments have historically confiscated property on the grounds that the owner possesses no documents.
"We can't tell you yet what has been destroyed or taken," said mayor Ayoub Rabah. "We will first have to put things in order first and figure it out later."
With the curfew lifted for four hours, Palestinian women gathered today at Ramallah's central Manara Square. Standing there in a group, they chanted curses at Israeli troops who have reoccupied the city. The soldiers stood in their own group, behind barbed wire on a street radiating from the roundabout. Later, Palestinian boys threw stones and the soldiers shot tear gas back at them.
The little confrontation was mild by the standards of the last two weeks. But it provided another reminder that the West Bank campaign has done little to tame anti-Israeli passions that have fueled the Palestinian uprising and sent people out to blow themselves up in suicide bombings aimed at Israeli civilians and soldiers alike.
The protesters gathered at the square under a billboard-sized portrait of Arafat that the Israeli soldiers had defaced with a Swastika. Sometimes in groups, sometimes individually, they shouted long denunciations of Israel's 35-year occupation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, of "massacres," of robbery of Palestinian land. They vowed to bring such treatment to an end despite the offensive that has devastated six main West Bank cities, several refugee camps and numerous hamlets.
"You will have to kill every one of us," shouted Umm Khaled Yahya, an old woman in a scarf who shouted at the soldiers for 10 minutes without letup.
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[posted 4/11/02]
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