Palestinians Leave Besieged Church
Fri May 10, 6:12 AM ET
By GREG MYRE, Associated Press Writer

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) - A standoff between Israeli troops and
Palestinian gunmen at the Church of the Nativity ended after 39 days
Friday, with 13 suspected militants flown into foreign exile and 26
released into the Gaza Strip.

One by one, the gunmen walked through the low-slung Gate of Humility,
the basilica's main door, into the hazy sunlight of Manger Square.
Some waved or flashed victory signs, and one man briefly dropped to
the ground, kneeling in a Muslim prayer pose. Two men were carried
out on stretchers.

Friday's deal ended a week of cliffhanger negotiations and set the
stage for an Israeli troop withdrawal from biblical Bethlehem, where
residents had been kept under round-the-clock curfews for more than
five weeks.

The Israeli army briefly questioned the gunmen at a nearby military
base. Thirteen were then driven to Israel's international airport
near Tel Aviv and flown to Cyprus, where they were expected to stay
for a few days before being sent to various European countries.
Another 26 were driven in two buses to the Gaza Strip, escorted by
U.S. officials.

Eighty-four Palestinian civilians and policemen not wanted by Israel
were released.

The Israeli troop pullout from Bethlehem was delayed when 10 foreign
activists who sneaked into the church in solidarity with the
Palestinians last week, refused to leave the compound, officials
said. The activists apparently wanted a lawyer present when they left
the church. Israel has said it would detain and deport the 10.

"The priests are pleading with them to come out. The priests are
trying to bring this to an end," said Israeli army spokesman Capt.
Jacob Dallal.

Israeli army officials said Israel would only leave Bethlehem once
the church, built over Jesus' traditional birthplace, was emptied and
the weapons inside collected by U.S. security officials.

At noon Friday, with the 10 foreigners still in the compound, U.S.
personnel could be seen removing weapons from the church as Israeli
soldiers guarded the main door and clergy looked on. The Americans
put rods down the barrels to check for ammunition, tagged the weapons
and placed them in American vehicles.

The standoff began on April 2, as more than 200 Palestinians,
including wanted militants, policemen and civilians, ran into the
church fleeing advancing Israeli troops. At the time, Israel entered
Bethlehem as part of a large-scale military operation in the West
Bank aimed at rooting out militants suspected of involvement in a
wave of suicide attacks that claimed the lives of dozens of Israelis.

Among the 13 deportees were nine members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs
Brigade, a militia linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah
movement, and three members of the Islamic militant Hamas group. The
13th was Abdullah Daoud, the Palestinian intelligence chief in
Bethlehem.

Arafat came under scathing criticism from Fatah and Hamas for
approving the deportations — a first in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Israel has expelled hundreds of Palestinian activists since
the 1967 Mideast war, but always unilaterally.

Arafat's senior adviser, Nabil Abu Rdeneh, defended the Palestinian
leader against the accusations Friday, saying he had made the best
possible deal. "President Arafat personally stressed that no
Palestinian was to be turned over the Israeli government ... and this
is what happened," Abu Rdeneh said.

Israeli officials have also come under fire at home for allowing the
gunmen to slip away. Raanan Gissin, an adviser to Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, insisted that justice had been served. "I think we
achieved all our goals and the innocent people, the clergy and the
priests who were held there were released intact," Gissin said.

As he arrived in the Gaza Strip with the 26 others, Mazen Hussein, a
29-year-old who served in the Palestinian police force in Bethlehem,
was welcomed by fellow officers.

"It's hard for us to leave Bethlehem, but we sacrificed ourselves to
spare more than 140,000 people in Bethlehem from living under
continued Israeli occupation," he said.

The Palestinians began emerging from the church shortly before 7 a.m.
Friday. The first was Daoud, the intelligence chief and the most
senior in the group.

Daoud had to take off his jacket before being cleared through two
metal detectors set up on Manger Square. Wearing a black-and-white
checkered Arab scarf around his neck and accompanied by two priests,
he approached two Israeli soldiers, who briefly questioned him before
escorting him to a nearby bus.

Another deportee, militiaman Jihad Jaara, was carried out on a
stretcher, with a bandage on his right leg. He was taken to an
ambulance.

Some of the men waved to Palestinian civilians watching the scene
from nearby rooftops. Several women shouted to them.

A small group of Jewish settlers living near the military base where
the Palestinians were questioned tried to block the buses by sitting
in the middle of the road. After soldiers dragged them away, one
woman protester tried to hurl herself at one of the buses, but she
was not hurt.

The deportees were driven to Ben Gurion International Airport and
from there flown to Cyprus. Cypriot officials said the men would be
kept under guard at a hotel in Larnaca.

From Cyprus, they would continue on Italy, Spain, Austria, Greece,
Ireland, Luxembourg and possibly Canada, according to EU officials.

There was no indication that the Palestinians would face confinement
in the host countries. An Italian official, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said the details of the exile would be worked out at a
meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.

The United States, the Vatican and EU officials were heavily involved
in negotiations to end the standoff.

The main sticking point in recent days had been finding a host
country for the 13 top wanted men. Italy balked at taking in all of
the men, but a breakthrough came when Cypriot Foreign Minister
Yiannakis Cassoulides said his country would temporarily accept them
until they were flown to final destinations.

Palestinian websites knocked offline

By Alfred Hermida

BBC News Online
May 7, 2002

Israel's military action in the Palestinian territories has
disrupted the region's computer networks.

Many Palestinian websites run from the region have been knocked
offline for weeks, including most government sites.

Since the Israeli withdrawal from certain areas, Palestinians
technicians have been working to restore the telecoms network.

For their part, computer security experts say Israeli websites have
been the target of hackers, although most government websites have
remained readily available.

Equipment destroyed

The disruption to Palestinian websites started at the beginning of
April, when Israeli troops hit the Nablus headquarters of the
Palestinian telecoms network, PalTel.

Set up in 1996 at a cost of $65m cost, PalTel provided the
communication infrastructure for the territories.

Sabri Saidam worked on the Palestinian network, BBC Saidam: Dreams
dashed As a result, many sites were set up to temporarily redirect
visitors to a holding page at the US-based ElectronicIntifada site.

"During the time of incursion, most of the servers were affected,"
said Sabri Saidam, a technology consultant who worked on the
Palestinian Authority's web projects.

"The rampage targeted Palestinian institutions, as well as internet
service providers and private groups," he told the BBC programme, Go
Digital.

In some cases, computer equipment was destroyed, offices badly
damaged and electricity supplies cut.

An eyewitness who visited the offices of the Health, Development,
Information and Policy Institute in Ramallah described a scene of
devastation there.

"All the computers in the office have been thrown into one big pile
at the entrance; desks and chairs are broken and scattered on top of
each other," wrote Patricia Smith in a report for a Palestinian NGO.

"The computer hard-drives have been taken out and the server is
gone, together with all the printers and fax machines."

'Extremely painful'

Rebuilding the computer network is going to take time and money.
Many of the fledgling websites of the Palestinian Authority had been
funded by international donors.

The EU, US and even China had helped to pay for the equipment and
facilities destroyed in the recent violence.

"There were hopes of building on the peace that existed in the last
seven years," said Dr Saidam.

"Sadly, all this seems to have collapsed. All these dreams seem to
have been dashed.

"It has been extremely painful to see everything you have worked on
being demolished before your own eyes," he said.

For activists, the damage has been done to limit the ability of
Palestinians to use the net to spread information about events on
the ground.

"These days much of the Palestinian advocacy takes place on the
internet. This relies not so much on websites but on e-mail from the
ground," said Nigel Parry of the US-based ElectronicIntifada.

Dear Friends,
Thank you for keeping in touch with us and for your encouragement via
telephone and email.  It is a tremendous boost to our spirits in these
difficult times.

Yesterday, we went to Bethlehem to deliver some salaries for a local
ministry.  There was a curfew lift for the Christian community (only
for part of the day) in order to allow the Christians to participate
in religious services related to Good Friday, etc. (the Eastern rite
traditions).  Most likely the Christian community will also be
allowed to attend Easter Sunday services, unlike the Catholic
community and other denominational churches who had difficulty
celebrating on Easter Sunday, March 31st, at the beginning of the
Israeli incursion.

As we drove our car through Beit Jala, there was a little life and
activity.  However, as we came into the Bethlehem area (population
35,000) the streets were desolate as though all of life had been
snuffed out. A lot of trash and destruction could be seen on the way.
Most shops and businesses were closed as the curfew lift was
permitted only to enable worshippers to attend services.  Soldiers in
tanks drove by periodically, calling out in Arabic, "No walking in
the streets".  Continuing our journey to our destination
of Beit Sahour, there was again the emergence of some life activity,
though in no way normal. A few people chose to ignore this as we
noted enroute or else they had not received the message. Our hearts
were very saddened to see this punishment inflicted on our friends,
neighbors and loved ones.

Some of our brothers and sisters in the Bethlehem area are seeking a
permit from the military liaison offices in order to join us and
other churches in Jerusalem for a combined service at the Garden
Tomb.  This is something we have been doing for the last five years.
This was a decision made several years ago by a local Pastors
Council.  The idea was to celebrate Christmas on the Western rite
holiday and Easter on the Eastern rite holiday, thus increasing unity
among the body of Christian believers. The Military Liaison office
has still not given their permission as of 5:35 pm Saturday, May
5th.  They are planning to give us an answer in an hour or so, we
hope.  The application was given 10 days ago.

Wishing you every blessing in Christ,

Alex & Brenda

Bethlehem Church Food Deal Collapses, No New Talks
Fri May 3,11:32 AM ET
By Michael Georgy

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters) - Efforts to restart talks to end the
standoff at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity collapsed Friday after
a deal to deliver food to the people holed up inside fell through,
Palestinian negotiators said.

Dozens of civilians, clergy and Palestinian security men have been
stuck in the church since April 2 when Palestinian militants rushed
in to evade Israeli forces reoccupying Bethlehem in their West Bank
offensive.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Salah Taamari said Israeli officials
told his team when it arrived to supervise the delivery that no food
would be let in and that Palestinian negotiators could not go into
the shrine unless they promised to bring out a list naming everyone
inside.

"We cannot go on negotiating with people who do not honor what we
agree upon," Taamari told reporters, speaking on the Orthodox
Christian Good Friday, the day on which many Christians believe Jesus
was crucified.

"They had informed us that the food was ready, and even that the food
was hot," Taamari said.

Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment.

Food is scarce inside the 1,400-year-old building, revered by
Christians as standing on the spot where Jesus was born. Some people
who have left the church in recent days said they were living on
lemon peel and grass.

Kristen Schurr, a peace activist from New York, said she was inside
the church and told Reuters by telephone she thought there were still
about 180 people inside, with damaged pictures on the walls and a
pockmarked statue of the Virgin Mary.

"Some people are not feeling well because they have been eating
leaves from lemon trees," she said. "People are just passing time,
but they have a routine every day. Right now they are mopping up the
floor."

Four more people, said by Palestinians to require medical treatment,
left the church Friday. One of the men was carried out on a
stretcher.

Israel says the people remaining inside are hostages of the
Palestinian militants, some of them wanted by Israel, but
Palestinians say they are staying of their own will.

JAIL DEAL PROPOSED

Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nasser said Palestinians proposed the men
wanted by Israel be sent to Jericho, where U.S. and British personnel
are supervising the incarceration of six militants taken from
President Yasser Arafat's compound Wednesday.

Israel lifted its month-long siege of Arafat's Ramallah headquarters
after the men arrived at the Jericho prison under a deal brokered by
President Bush.

Israel wants the gunmen in the church, whom it blames for organizing
suicide bombings and shootings, to stand trial in Israel or be
exiled. The Palestinians say that is out of the question.

Diplomatic sources said negotiations are difficult because Arafat
remains unwilling to accept that any of the Palestinians should be
exiled from Palestinian areas, even temporarily.

The sources said a handful of the Palestinians in the compound feel
they have nothing to lose and will not compromise.

One man who said he was a militant inside the church told Reuters by
telephone he was prepared for anything and could hang on for as long
as it took. "We are ready to defend ourselves if the Israelis raid
the church," he told Reuters by telephone.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said in a statement on Friday
it was the first time in the Holy Land's history that armed people
had gone into a church to seek shelter, "against everything that is
holy and commonly accepted."

"They should not have gone in there with force and if they had not,
there would not be a problem now," he said.

Tension remains high at the church, where soldiers killed one member
of the Palestinian security forces and wounded at least two Thursday.

1 Palestinian killed, 3 injured in Nativity Church clashes

By Ha'aretz Service and agencies

One Palestinian man was killed and three were wounded Thursday during
gun clashes between IDF troops and armed gunmen holed up inside
Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.

Israel Radio reported that soldiers fired at five armed men in the
church courtyard, hitting four of them, after the Palestinian gunmen
had opened fire on an IDF post near the church.

The army and witnesses said one of the wounded men later
died of his wounds.

Palestinian negotiators called earlier Thursday for more talks with
Israel on ending the month-long standoff at the church, after a new
eruption of fighting.

They made their appeal shortly after IDF troops ended their one-month
siege of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's headquarters
in the West Bank city of Ramallah under a U.S.-brokered agreement.

"We told the coordinator [of talks] to set up a meeting today with
the Israelis but there has been no answer from the Israelis so far,"
said Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nasser.

A Vatican envoy, French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, is also trying to
help end the standoff at the church, built on the site revered by
Christians as Jesus's birthplace.

He met President Moshe Katsav in Jerusalem a day after arriving in
the region, and said he also planned to meet Arafat. He gave no
immediate details.

Fighting broke out for an hour overnight Wednesday between IDF troops
surrounding the shrine and the Palestinian gunmen who have been holed
up inside for the past month.

A fire broke out inside the church compound, in a building adjacent
to the church itself, but was quickly put out.

IDF troops have besieged the church since April 2, after 30 gunmen
burst in to hide from soldiers during a crackdown on terrorists in
the West Bank.

Arafat received word of the fire just shortly after IDF troops left
his compound. Pounding his fist angrily on the table, Arafat called
Israelis "terrorists, Nazis and racists" and accused them of
willfully damaging the shrine.

Lack of progress
The Palestinians have been demanding that IDF soldiers allow food
into the sanctuary. Nasser said there had been no progress on the
matter.

Twenty-six people left the church Tuesday, the largest group to leave
since the start of the standoff.

Their exodus marked some progress between the Israeli and Palestinian
negotiators, but sharp differences remain on other issues.

Israel wants the men to surrender and face trial or exile. The
Palestinians have said that is out of the question, and demand safe
passage for the militants to the Gaza Strip.

Nasser said the United States and European countries were directly
involved in efforts to end the deadlock.

Asked whether a solution could be reached similar to the one in
Ramallah, he said: "In principle, yes, but the circumstances here are
different. We don't know who the wanted men are, it's a different
situation."

Four men convicted by an ad hoc Palestinian military court of killing
tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi were transferred from Arafat's
offices to a Palestinian prison in Jericho on Wednesday, where they
are to be held under international supervision.

Two more men who were not tried, but were accused by Israel of
offences against Israel, were also handed over to U.S. and British
officials and taken from the compound to the Jericho prison.

Massive explosion and fire at Bethlehem church
May 1, 2002 Posted: 11:52 PM EDT (0352 GMT)

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (CNN) -- A massive explosion rocked Manger
Square and a fire broke out near the Church of the Nativity after a
firefight between Israeli troops and Palestinians inside.

The church has been the site of a standoff between Israeli forces
ringing the church and Palestinians holed up inside. Israeli forces
said they were fired upon by Palestinians inside the church and
responded with gunfire.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said he had spoken with
Palestinians inside the church, who said the fighting and fire broke
out when Israeli forces tried to storm the church.

Dore Gold, a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
denied Erakat's claim.

"The fire broke out as a result of an intentional act of arson by
Tanzim fighters, the terrorists who have been in the Church of the
Nativity," Gold told CNN. "Israel respects the holy sites of
Christendom and has demonstrated that respect all along in this
crisis."

The church is built on the site where tradition says Jesus was born.

Alon Pinkas, Israel's consul general in New York, said on CNN's
Crossfire Wednesday night that "in fact we have not changed our
policy of not initiating, I repeat, not initiating any military
activity, any direct or indirect military activity, any direct or
indirect military operation near or in the immediate vicinity of the
church for fear that one stone will be scathed in that holy
compound."

An Israeli Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, said the
Palestinians inside the church complex ignited fires in three places.
He said Israel had proposed that Palestinian firemen be sent to put
out the blaze, but that Palestinians inside refused, and were
apparently then able to extinguish the blaze themselves.

Rafowicz said Palestinians in the church then opened fire on the
nearby "peace center," where negotiations to end the standoff have
been under way for several days. Israeli forces then fired into the
air, but not at the church, Rafowicz said.

The flames were extinguished fairly quickly and church bells rang
out. The gunfire virtually ceased around the same time, about an hour-
and-a-half after it began.

There were no immediate reports of casualties on either side.

Negotiations have been under way for several days to end a standoff
at the church.

Wednesday morning, a group of women marched into Manger Square near
the church to protest the standoff which began April 3 after Israeli
troops and tanks rolled into Bethlehem and the Palestinians took
refuge in the church.

Earlier in the day, an Israel Defense Forces sniper shot and
critically wounded a Palestinian gunman near the Church of the
Nativity, the IDF said in a statement.

"Our troops spotted a gunman in the courtyard of the Latin compound
and fired in his direction," the IDF said. "He suffered a shoulder
wound from bullet fragments. He and another man ... then
surrendered."

Rafowicz said between 180 and 200 Palestinians were still inside the
Church of the Nativity, including armed men and up to 40 "senior
terrorists" on Israel's most-wanted list.

On Tuesday, 26 Palestinians came out of the church. Rafowicz said, to
his knowledge, none was wanted by Israel and, if that proved to be
the case, they would be freed.

Haaretz: April 30, 2002

IDF admits `ugly vandalism' against Palestinian property
By Amos Harel

    Israel Defense Forces sources have admitted that Palestinian
claims of the systematic destruction of property, particularly
computers, during the recent military operations in Ramallah are, for
the most part, true. "There were indeed wide-scale, ugly phenomena of
vandalism," a senior military sources told Ha'aretz yesterday.

    And while another military source said that the army had yet to
undertake a full investigation into the matter, there are already
many individual cases that are being prosecuted through the military
justice system.

    Within the context of Operation Defensive Shield, an intelligence
unit specialized in systematically going through public institutions
of the Palestinian Authority and collecting hard disks from computers
in offices, for the purposes of examining them based on the
assumption that some would contain information on terrorist activity.

     The IDF sources explained that because various PA institutions,
including civil authorities, were involved in terror, some of the
computers had indeed included valuable intelligence.

    However, the sources admitted that in many cases the searches had
turned into systematic vandalism, without any justification.

    "It was not an order from above," said a senior source, "but that's
how it was understood in the field. The infantry, both the
conscripts and the reservists who accompanied the intelligence teams,
understood that they were allowed - or indeed expected - to destroy
the property in the offices."

    "The result," the source continued, "was damage running into
hundreds of thousands of dollars. Soldiers smashed computer monitors
and destroyed keyboards. There were places in which bank branches
were destroyed and automatic tellers were raided. In some cases,
theft accompanied the vandalism. It was significant damage,
widespread and totally illogical."

    The source said that while the extent of the damage was clear, the
IDF had yet to undertake a serious investigation into what had taken
place.

    A reserve officer who played a senior role in the Ramallah area
said that he believed most of the damage had been done during hunts
for wanted men and munitions. "We found weapons and sabotage
equipment in what were seemingly civil institutions," the officer
said. "There were instances in which soldiers broke open doors
because nobody wasinside. Clearly there was looting, but most of the
damage was done during the hunt for people and weapons. This was war,
not a lab operation."

    A veteran intelligence officer said the explanation for the IDF's
behavior was to be found in the difference between the fighting in
the territories and previous wars in Lebanon and the Sinai. "Those
were clear-cut enemy territories; and it was clear to the
intelligence units that they would take everything because everything
was military equipment. In the Palestinian Authority, everything was
mixed up - civilian, security, terrorist. It is very difficult to
make the distinction. Some of the damage was done by the unit, and
some by other soldiers, at their own initiative."

    Reservists who served in the Ramallah and Bethlehem areas said
they had witnessed many instances of deliberate damage caused by
soldiers to Palestinian property. Some also spoke of cases of looting.

    "The extent of the looting is much greater than could have been
expected in advance," a senior legal source told Ha'aretz. "This
is an ugly and serious phenomenon."

    Some cases involved two or three soldiers who had worked together,
the source said, noting that reservists as well as conscripts had
been involved. Some of the suspects were combat troops, the source
added; and in certain cases, military defenders had reservations
about representing suspects due to the nature of the crimes.

    Most of the incidents are expected to end in plea bargains, with
the convicted serving prison sentences. The majority of the looting
took place in Ramallah, though there were reports of instances in
Bethlehem as well. Most of the cases are in Central Command's JAG
unit.

No solution in sight for Bethlehem church siege

The Jordan Times -- Monday - April 29, 2002

BETHLEHEM (Agencies) — As the priest in charge of the Church of
Nativity briefly left the besieged compound Sunday for the first time
in a month to celebrate Mass at a nearby church, a Palestinian
negotiator said there had been no breakthrough in talks with Israel
to end the church siege.

Meanwhile, 22 peace activists who tried to deliver food to
Palestinians trapped by the occupation army inside the church were
stopped by soldiers, they said.

The foreign activists jumped barbed wire at Manger Square and reached
the doors of the church, which Christians believe marks Jesus
Christ's birthplace, Georgina Reeves, a British pacifist who led the
action, told AFP.

The demonstrators carried food and medical supplies but the Israeli
soldiers seized the supplies and stopped them from entering the
building, she said. The army pushed them back and hurled smoke bombs.

No-one was arrested, said Reeves, a member of the pacifist
International Solidarity Movement.

The Palestinian negotiators demanded that food be taken into the
church before the resumption of the negotiations, which made no
breakthrough.

"So far we have reached no solution," legislator Salah Taamari told
reporters after the talks, the fifth round so far.

"The easy thing for us to do as negotiators is to withdraw but since
there is a ray of hope we will persevere," he said, adding the
Palestinians were disappointed the international community had not
intervened to end the crisis.

Taamari was speaking after more than four hours of talks at a Peace
Centre in Bethlehem's Manger Square.

Palestinian negotiators had said earlier the talks would collapse if
there was no breakthrough on Sunday.

An army spokesman dismissed talk of a crisis. "Several new ideas have
been raised in the course of today's negotiations. The two sides
adjourned for consultations," he said.

The Israelis have been trying to force activists trapped in the
shrine to surrender for trial in Israel or exile. The Palestinians
say the men should be sent to Gaza to face Palestinian justice if
they are suspected of any crimes.

"They (the Israelis) still adhere to their stand," said Taamari,
adding the Palestinians were seeking a compromise.

A second negotiator, Imad Al Natsheh, said both sides wanted a
peaceful end to the impasse. "The Palestinian team is saying: `No to
exile, no to arrest and no to interrogation'," he said.

The 25-day-old siege has captured especially intense worldwide
attention because it is unfolding at one of Christianity's holiest
places, revered as the site of Jesus's birth.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch
of the Holy Land, issued an appeal to "all political decision-makers"
to "establish peace in this sacred country and restore holiness to
the Church of the Nativity".

Throughout the talks in Bethlehem, gun battles, explosions and stun
grenades have periodically rattled the city.

Sabbah said Bethlehem's 100,000 residents were suffering under an
Israeli army curfew. "The Israeli people have to realise that this
will not bring security for them," he said.

Meanwhile, Father Ibrahim Faltas and another monk from inside the
church were escorted by Palestinian and Israeli vehicles to St.
Anthony's Church, about two kilometres from the Church of Nativity.
They returned a few hours later.

Up to now, Faltas had refused to leave the compound while the siege
continued and has been unable to hold services in the historic
church, built on the traditional site of Jesus's birth.

However, on Sunday, Faltas arranged with the Israeli and Palestinian
authorities to be allowed to lead the service at St. Anthony's
Church. The service was held for the clergy who live on the church
ground, but about 25 people from the neighborhood defied the curfew
to attend the mass.

"It is the first time in history the Church of the Nativity has been
shut down and the people haven't been able to reach it," Faltas said
afterward. He also rejected Israel's claim that the clerics inside
the church are hostages of the armed Palestinians.

"How can we be hostages and be free to go out and then return to the
church?" he said. "We agreed to stay in the church for the sake of
peace."

Faltas said monks faced the same conditions inside the church as the
rest of the people inside: little food or electricity and a lack of
water. Still, he said there was hope the crisis would be end soon.

"The people inside the church still have the hope to return home
safely," he said. "These people, who took the church as a shelter to
protect their lives, have to leave safely and peacefully."

Operation Destroy the Data

By Amira Hass

It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian
offices taken over by IDF troops for a few hours or days in the West
Bank: smashed, burned and broken computer terminals heaped in piles
and thrown into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks
and diskettes scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or
missing, laptops gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were
vandalized, and paper files burned, torn, scattered, or defaced - if
not taken. And it's all in rooms full of smashed furniture, torn
curtains, broken windows, smashed-in doors, walls full of holes,
filthy floors and soiled bathrooms. Here and there, the soldiers left
obscene graffiti or letters full of hatred, but compared to the data
that was destroyed or taken, the insults read like poetry. Even the
overflowing toilets look more like human weakness compared to the
organized vandalism reflected in the piles of smashed computers.

It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has to be replaced.
The loss is immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of information
built into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people
working to build their civil society and their future or trying to
build a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability
to their country.

These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority
institutions like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education
Ministry and the Health Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-
governmental organizations and research institutes devoted to
developing a modern health system, modern agricultural, environmental
protection and water conservation. These are the data banks of human
rights organizations, banks and private commercial enterprises,
infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly the targets for
destruction in the military operation called Defensive Shield.

The Israeli public has been spared the sights of the destruction.
Here and there, a photo of some demolished office sneaks into the TV
news shows. But Israeli TV news doesn't find a few seconds to report
on a Palestinian woman or a child of nine who was shot dead from a
distance, inside their homes, by an anonymous Israeli soldier, so how
can it find time or reason to report on the crazed destruction
perpetrated by a unit of soldiers in one office.

The IDF has given up denying that some soldiers looted - money,
jewels and video cameras - private homes. That can be explained by
officers too weak to impose discipline on their soldiers and by
soldiers too weak to fight material temptation. But the systematic
destruction of the data banks was not a matter of personal weakness
by either officers or soldiers.

Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and
destroy the terrorist infrastructure. If the forces breaking into
every hard disk of every bank and clinic, commercial consultant's
office or PA ministry, thought that a list of weapons or wanted men
was inside the disk, all they had to do was copy the information and
pass it on to the Shin Bet. If they thought incriminating evidence
was hidden in the Education Ministry and the International Bank of
Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers would
have examined document after document, and not thrown the files on
the floor without opening them.

This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or that unit, nor a
personal vandalistic urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't dare stop
him. There was a decision made to vandalize the civic,
administrative, cultural infrastructure developed by Palestinian
society. Was it an explicit order or one given with a wink? Was it an
order or was it the result of permission given to soldiers to do what
they want? Did the order - or wink - come down from the battalion
commander or from the brigadier? Was it from the headquarters of IDF
forces in the West Bank or from IDF Operations? Did it come from the
general in command of the Central Command or from general
headquarters?

Either way, the scenes of systematic destruction show how the IDF
translated into the field the instructions inherent in the political
echelon's policies: Israel must destroy Palestinian civil
institutions, sabotaging for years to come the Palestinian goal for
independence, sending all of Palestinian society backward. It's so
easy and comforting to think of the entire Palestinian society as
primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists, after the raw material and
product of their intellectual, cultural, social and economic activity
has been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public can continue to be
deceived into believing that terror is a genetic problem and not a
sociological and political mutation, horrific as it may be, derived
from the horrors of the occupation.

Palestinian Sites Knocked Offline By Mideast Conflict

By Brian McWilliams, Newsbytes
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A.,
18 Apr 2002, 12:04 PM CST

Contrary to recent reports, Israeli Web sites have not born the brunt
of the escalating violence in the Middle East, security experts said
today.

Indeed, the pace of attacks on Israeli Web sites has slowed sharply
this year, even as numerous Palestinian government sites have been
unreachable due to the conflict in the region.

According to statistics maintained by defacement archive Alldas.org,
electronic vandals hit less than half as many Israeli Web sites in
the first quarter of 2002 than were altered in the last three months
of 2001.

Eighteen Web sites with addresses ending in "dot-il" were attacked in
the first quarter of 2002, while 38 Israeli sites were defaced at the
close of 2001, according to Alldas records.

In a press release Monday, London-based Mi2G said Israeli sites have
been subjected to "asymmetric warfare" and that the country has
been "the biggest victim of Web defacement" in the Mideast, suffering
548 defacement since July 1999.

Yet while all of Israel's primary government sites were readily
accessible today, more than two dozen Palestinian government sites
have been unreachable for days.

Attempts to access the official site of the Palestinian National
Authority, located at http://www.pna.net/ and hosted by Jerusalem-
based Palnet Communications, were redirected today to a server
operated by ElectronicIntifada.net in Chicago.

ElectronicIntifada spokesman Ali Abunimah said Webmasters of many
Palestine-based sites have been disrupted by the Israeli invasion of
Palestinian towns and have configured their domain name servers (DNS)
temporarily to redirect visitors to the U.S.-based
ElectronicIntifada.net site.

Meanwhile, the Israel Government Gateway, located at
http://www.info.gov.il/ , was accessible today, as was
the Web home of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, at
http://www.knesset.gov.il/ , and the official site of Israel's
Prime Minister at http://www.pmo.gov.il/ .

Attempts to reach 29 Web sites with Internet addresses ending in
Gov.ps, were unsuccessful today. The unreachable sites included the
Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs at http://www.mopa.gov.ps/ , and the
Government Computer Center at http://www.gcc.gov.ps/ .

A message at the ElectronicIntifada site today said operators of
Palestinian sites "are dealing with shoot-to-kill curfews, no
electricity thanks to Israeli military cut-offs of the power, and
other severe obstacles."

Alldas has recorded no defacements of sites in Palestine's "dot-ps"
top-level domain.

Web-site defacements are a poor measure of the impact of the Middle
East conflict on Internet sites in the region, according to Brian
Martin, a security engineer with Virginia-based CACI International.

"The only value in tallying and publicizing such statistics based on
questionable research is in creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt,"
said Martin, one of the operators of the Attrition.org security
information site.

A spokesman for Mi2G declined to comment on the slowdown in anti-
Israel defacements suggested by the Alldas data. He said Web
defacements provide "the only publicly visible, overt attacks over
time."

Abunimah said he believes defacements of Israeli sites are
perpetrated by "a very small number" of people and such attacks are
not condoned by ElectronicIntifada.

"These attacks are not something that is celebrated, advocated or
even widely discussed by people who are concerned about the
Palestinian cause. We are much more concerned with getting
information out than in trying to block Israeli sites," he said.

Alldas's list of defaced .IL sites is at
http://defaced.alldas.org/?tld=il .

Mi2G is on the Web at http://www.mi2g.com/ .

The ElectronicIntifada is at http://www.electronicintifada.net/ .

Reported by Newsbytes, http://www.newsbytes.com/ .

12:04 CST
Reposted 12:28 CST

(20020418 /WIRES ONLINE, LEGAL, PC, BUSINESS/NETWAR/PHOTO)

                                 © 2001 The Washington Post Company

April 24, 2002

New York Times:
Israeli Snipers Playing Cat to Palestinians' Mouse
By JOEL GREENBERG

BETHLEHEM, West Bank, April 23
At an upper-story window of an unfinished building here today, Sgt.
Stephane Doré peered through the telescopic sight of his sniper
rifle
at the Church of the Nativity.

A sharpshooter in the Israeli Army reserves, Sergeant Doré was
waiting to pick off any armed Palestinian who might emerge in or
around the church compound. He said he had shot two during the three-
week standoff at the church.

"I saw them fall the minute we fired at them, and I saw their friends
drag them away," he recalled, his finger poised near the trigger.

Snipers like Sergeant Doré are a crucial part of the Israeli
Army's
siege of the church, where more than 200 Palestinians, dozens of them
armed, have been holed up since April 2, when Israeli forces
reoccupied Bethlehem.

Aside from brief breaks when residents are allowed out to buy food,
Israeli troops in tanks and armored personnel carriers are enforcing
a round-the-clock curfew on the city of 100,000 until the stalemate
at the church is resolved.

Israel wants to bring suspected militants in the church compound to
trial, but they have so far refused to surrender and leave the
building revered by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus.

As the first negotiations to end the standoff took place today, a
white blimp carrying a camera floated overheard, sending pictures to
a screen watched by border policemen one floor under Sergeant
Doré.

Occasionally, one of the officers moved a joystick on a control
console to scan the church complex or zoom in on a particular
building, checking if any Palestinians had gone outside.

"They're testing us," the reservist sniper said of the Palestinian
movements. Behind him, peering through powerful binoculars, stood
Olivier Bettan, the post commander.

A shot rang out, followed a little later by a short burst of gunfire.
Sergeant Doré began scanning the area through his sniper scope,
searching for the shooters. A short while later, a group of men were
spotted in the church compound, and the reservist told a fellow
sniper to get ready.

A voice crackled over the radio set: "Five men in the inner courtyard
behind the building. Do you see it over there?" The commander
replied, "Negative," and the snipers held fire.

"This can happen every half hour," the post commander said. "It's a
game of cat and mouse. They're under pressure now. It's been a month
and they don't have anything to eat."

Sometimes, Sergeant Doré said, he sees small groups of people dash
out of the compound to pick fruit from trees on a terrace below
before hurrying back in. "I don't know what they're subsisting on,"
he said. "I heard that we let in some food," he added, echoing
official army statements.

Sergeant Doré's rifle has a range of about 900 yards, and it fires
7.62-millimeter ammunition.

The rules of engagement are clear, he said. When an armed Palestinian
is positively identified, the two snipers at the windows can fire on
the orders of the post commander. Unarmed men may not be shot, nor
people who emerge from the compound with their hands up. But anyone
who flees and ignores warnings to stop "will get a bullet, because
anyone can run out with an explosive belt, and we're not taking any
chances," Sergeant Doré said.

He added that shots fired at fleeing people are aimed only at the
legs. "We've been doing this for 10 years. We're all trained
reservists with good judgment. We're not trigger-happy."

A short time later, the curfew on Bethlehem was lifted for two hours.
The deserted streets came to life as thousands of people cooped up in
their homes stepped out for fresh air and went to buy food.

At the downtown market, eggs, vegetables and chickens were offered at
makeshift outdoor stands. People packed the streets, quickening their
steps when Israeli soldiers near an armored vehicle fired warning
shots to keep them away.

The alleys were strewn with piles of smoldering garbage and the
carcasses of cars blown up by soldiers or crushed by armored
vehicles. Some shopfronts were burned, or bent in, and an unexploded
missile was embedded in a wall, its fins poking out. Residents rushed
to finish their errands before the curfew was reimposed.

"It's dangerous outside, because we're afraid of shooting by
soldiers," Fadia Saleh said as she stood near her family's
drugstore. "At home we just sit and watch the television reports,
waiting to see what will happen in the Nativity Church."

Madness of war traumatises patients

The Israeli siege of Bethlehem, now in its fourth week, is depriving
a psychiatric hospital of vital drugs

Ewen MacAskill in Bethlehem
Monday April 22, 2002
The Guardian

Bethlehem mental hospital is hidden from the world by a high, yellow
stone wall and heavy iron doors painted blue. It is usually a
peaceful sanctuary, where in-patients can wander around a tree-filled
garden, cut off from 19-month-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But
the madness of war enveloped even the hospital this month.

The Israeli siege of Bethlehem, now in its fourth week, has meant
that the hospital is suffering severe shortages of everything: staff,
food and, most important of all as far as the remaining doctors are
concerned, the drugs needed to calm patients.

The hospital, a 19th century Arab building with long airy corridors,
serves the entire Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza.
It has about 200 patients.

In the pharmacy, Dr Tawiq Salman, a psychiatrist, waved his hands at
empty shelves. The hospital would normally dispense tens of thousands
of pills a week, but the Israeli army army has been blocking supplies
and none has been received since the invasion, he said.

Of nine essential drugs, only one type was left, and that was in
short supply. "We are giving the patients half a tablet today and the
other half tomorrow," he said. "Better to have half today than none
tomorrow."

Dr Salman, 32, said the Red Crescent and the International Committee
of the Red Cross had been negotiating with the Israelis to try to get
supplies through, but without success.

The Israeli army continued its partial withdrawal from the West Bank
yesterday, but kept up its siege of the Church of Nativity in
Bethlehem.

The hospital is only 200 metres from the church, and the sound of
gunfire and explosions can easily be heard, to the agitation of the
patients. Most of them are schizophrenic or are suffering from manic
depression, and range in age from 20 to 95. They are in the main
poorly dressed, unshaved, carrying worry beads. A constant request is
for cigarettes, which are also in short supply.

They hear the guns and tanks during the day and are regularly woken
at night by the sound of gunfire. "No one can sleep. Sometimes it
goes on all night. Sometimes half an hour. No one knows," Dr Salman
said.

"Many of them do not know what is happening. They just want to sleep,
eat and have quiet." Some look on in wonderment at the flares and
reconnaissance balloons and puzzle over the significance of the
explosions and gunfire.

The hospital has been hit by bullets several times. One nurse was hit
in the shoulder by shrapnel, but no patients have been injured.

Dr Salman said that in his five years at the hospital he had not seen
the patients as traumatised as they have been in the past three
weeks. Levels of aggression have risen because of the fighting
outside and because they have no drugs to calm them. Nurses have been
attacked and patients have tried to escape.

He said that last Friday the patients and the Israeli army came face-
to-face for the first time. There was shooting and then part of the
hospital wall collapsed, destroyed by either an Israeli tank or
bulldozer, and then there was no further shooting, he said.

Through the gap in the wall, the patients and soldiers peered
uncertainly at one another. "The soldiers tried to speak to them. The
patients said 'we are mental'." The soldiers did not react.

Dr Salman rushed out: "I tried to explain to one soldier it was a
mental hospital. He refused to speak to me and told me, in a bad
manner, to go back inside." The soldiers stayed until nightfall.

Even when the Israelis finally withdraw, the impact on the patients
will be longterm, Dr Salman said. "It will take years to undo."

A strict Israeli curfew means movement within Bethlehem is difficult,
and the streets are eerily empty. Anyone caught outside risks being
shot. Because of this, there are only two doctors in the hospital out
of the regular 10. The hospital's director, Ibrahim Murad, who lives
in Jerusalem, has been unable to come to work since the invasion.

Reflecting on the confrontation with the Israelis, Dr Salman
reflected bitterly on which side of the wall sanity lay: "One of the
patients said, 'Can I have your mobile phone, I want to call CNN and
tell Ariel Sharon he can come here and be treated for free'."

Yesterday, the hospital was still waiting for the Israelis to allow
the drugs through.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

April 21, 2002

America Can Persuade Israel to Make a Just Peace

By JIMMY CARTER

ATLANTA — In January 1996, with full support from Israel and
responding to the invitation of the Palestinian Liberation
Organization, the Carter Center helped to monitor a democratic
election in the West Bank and Gaza, which was well organized, open
and fair. In that election, 88 members were elected to the
Palestinian National Authority, with Yasir Arafat as president.
Legally and practically, the Palestinian people were encouraged to
form their own government, with the expectation that they would soon
have full sovereignty as a state.

When the election was over, I made a strong effort to persuade the
leaders of Hamas to accept the election results, with Mr. Arafat as
their leader. I relayed a message offering them full participation in
the process of developing a permanent constitutional framework for
the new political entity, but they refused to accept this proposal.
Despite this rejection, it was a time of peace and hope, and there
was no threat of violence or even peaceful demonstrations. The legal
status of the Palestinian people has not changed since then, but
their plight has grown desperate.

Ariel Sharon is a strong and forceful man and has never equivocated
in his public declarations nor deviated from his ultimate purpose.
His rejection of all peace agreements that included Israeli
withdrawal from Arab lands, his invasion of Lebanon, his provocative
visit to the Temple Mount, the destruction of villages and homes, the
arrests of thousands of Palestinians and his open defiance of
President George W. Bush's demand that he comply with international
law have all been orchestrated to accomplish his ultimate goals: to
establish Israeli settlements as widely as possible throughout
occupied territories and to deny Palestinians a cohesive political
existence.

There is adequate blame on the other side. Even when he was free and
enjoying the full trappings of political power, Yasir Arafat never
exerted control over Hamas and other radical Palestinians who reject
the concept of a peaceful Israeli existence and adopt any means to
accomplish their goal. Mr. Arafat's all-too-rare denunciations of
violence have been spasmodic, often expressed only in English and
likely insincere. He may well see the suicide attacks as one of the
few ways to retaliate against his tormentors, to dramatize the
suffering of his people, or as a means for him, vicariously, to be a
martyr.

Tragically, the policies of Mr. Sharon have greatly strengthened
these criminal elements, enhanced their popular support, and
encouraged misguided young men and women to sacrifice their own lives
in attacking innocent Israeli citizens. The abhorrent suicide
bombings are also counterproductive in that they discredit the
Palestinian cause, help perpetuate the military occupation and
destruction of villages, and obstruct efforts toward peace and
justice.

The situation is not hopeless. There is an ultimate avenue to peace
in the implementation of United Nations resolutions, including
Resolution 242, expressed most recently in the highly publicized
proposal of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah. The basic premises
of these resolutions are withdrawal of Israelis from Palestinian
lands in exchange for full acceptance of Israel and Israel's right to
live in peace. This is a reasonable solution for many Israelis,
having been accepted in 1978 by Prime Minister Menachem Begin and
ratified by the Israeli Knesset. Egypt, offering the greatest threat
to Israel, responded by establishing full diplomatic relations and
honoring Israeli rights, including unimpeded use of the Suez canal.
This set a pattern for what can and must be done by all other Arab
nations. Through constructive negotiations, both sides can consider
some modifications of the 1967 boundary lines.

East Jerusalem can be jointly administered with unimpeded access to
holy places, and the right of return can be addressed by permitting a
limited number of displaced Palestinians to return to their homeland
with fair compensation to others. It will be a good investment for
the international community to pay this cost.

With the ready and potentially unanimous backing of the international
community, the United States government can bring about such a
solution to the existing imbroglio. Demands on both sides should be
so patently fair and balanced that at least a majority of citizens in
the affected area will respond with approval, and an international
force can monitor compliance with agreed peace terms, as was approved
for the Sinai region in 1979 following Israel's withdrawal from
Egyptian territory.

There are two existing factors that offer success to United States
persuasion. One is the legal requirement that American weapons are to
be used by Israel only for defensive purposes, a premise certainly
being violated in the recent destruction of Jenin and other villages.
Richard Nixon imposed this requirement to stop Ariel Sharon and
Israel's military advance into Egypt in the 1973 war, and I used the
same demand to deter Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 1979. (A full
invasion was launched by Ariel Sharon after I left office). The other
persuasive factor is approximately $10 million daily in American aid
to Israel. President George Bush Sr. threatened this assistance in
1992 to prevent the building of Israeli settlements between Jerusalem
and Bethlehem.

I understand the extreme political sensitivity in America of using
persuasion on the Israelis, but it is important to remember that none
of the actions toward peace would involve an encroachment on the
sovereign territory of Israel. They all involve lands of the
Egyptians, Lebanese and Palestinians, as recognized by international
law.

The existing situation is tragic and likely to get worse. Normal
diplomatic efforts have failed. It is time for the United States, as
the sole recognized intermediary, to consider more forceful action
for peace. The rest of the world will welcome this leadership.


Jimmy Carter, the former president, is chairman of the Carter Center,
which works worldwide to advance peace and human health.

w w w . h a a r e t z d a i l y . c o m

The Bethlehem standoff as a metaphor

Israel is trying to use its brains in Bethlehem. But a first
journalisitic glance allowed at the battle of wits the IDF is
conducting with the people inside the Church of the Nativity shows
that even intelligence won't help in this destructive campaign into
the West Bank cities.

Saturday morning, the general headquarters' negotiation team gathered
to pass another day, the 18th, of seemingly sophisticated efforts to
get the armed Palestinians, some veterans of terror attacks, out of
the church. With a certain degree of justification, Col. Marcel Aviv,
head of the negotiating team, can be proud of the effort to win with
psychology instead of fire. But Israel will fail there unless it has
the sense to withdraw. In that sense, the battle of the church is a
symbol of the entire conflict: a mixture of determination, a pinch of
good will, and an awful lot of folly.

Bethlehem is perhaps the best place to show what the two dangerous
leaders of the desperate conflict, Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat,
have wrought. Jesus' birthplace, according to the Christian
tradition, looks like Kosovo in its day - shuttered, the streets
littered with rubble and abandoned cars, shops closed. Even Chic
Parisienne, a perfumerie in what was one of the West Bank's most
charming towns, is in ruins.

Opposite the Church of the Nativity, one of the holiest sites of
Christianity, the Jewish state has set up the headquarters of a
hopeless campaign against a handful of armed Palestinians, 30
priests, four nuns, residents who just happened to be there, and
several dozen youths aged 15-20 who are being held against their
will - altogether about 200 people. The army is determined to
overcome this gang, one that only a conflict in the holy land could
have brought together.

On the way to the headquarters on Saturday, a convoy of armored cars
passed through a crushed ghost town. Christians all over the world
will yet want to settle accounts with us for what we have made of it.
This symbolic arm wrestling will make Bethlehem the last of the West
Bank towns the IDF leaves. Media-wise French philosopher Bernard-
Henri Levi was also there, with a special permit. He was given a flak
jacket - nobody could take the chance of an intellectual superstar
being shot by a Palestinian sniper. Cellular phones have been blocked
by the army; the IDF doesn't want cell phones of the 45,000
townspeople, two-third of them Muslim, to work.

But on the headquarters' walls are written the phone numbers of the
Palestinian interlocutors in this strange negotiation. Salah al-
Tamari, Bethlehem's representative in the Palestinian Legislative
Council, Mohammed al-Madani, the district governor (whose cell phone,
with its 059 prefix, like that of all the others, must somehow be
working) and Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nasser, as well as clergymen and
various Palestinian security officials.

Face-to-face meetings were canceled by the besieged gunmen at the
last minute, under orders from Arafat. On the desk are lists of the
wanted men inside the church, with their photos and brief summaries
of their deeds. A TV screen broadcasts directly from a camera poised
above the church in a balloon.

As always, the army has amazingly detailed intelligence, experienced
and well-meaning officers, and soldiers with bleary eyes but bright-
faced. The crux of the matter here - as in the entire conflict - is
that the assumptions behind the Bethlehem operation are very
problematic. They lead to an Israeli failure, just as the entire
occupation cannot last for very long. True, the youths are held
against their will, living on a cookie a day in a dark cellar, not
far from where the manger itself is believed to have stood. Indeed,
it's true Israel only wants "the terrorists" and will free the church
with everyone in it and then extend assistance the way it knows, when
it wants to. And true, it's the armed Palestinians who took the
church hostage.

But the struggle for the wanted men - 20-25 out of the hundreds who
were caught or are still at large after Operation Defensive Shield -
does not justify Israel's stubborn insistence to come out the seeming
winners in a futile battle at one of Christianity's holiest sites.

This Israeli self-righteousness is nourished by moral reasoning. Col.
Rami Tzur, commander of the Jerusalem Brigade which took over
Bethlehem, defacing its buildings in the process, said pleasantly
enough, "This is almost a European city" and the churches should not
be harmed. But his men left it like an Afghan town after the campaign
against the axis of evil. And Jenin was even more damaged.

Indeed, Saturday morning, the negotiating team opposite the church
looked like a scale model of Israeli policy in the entire conflict.
Well-equipped, certain of its cause, and stubbornly patronizing about
the Palestinian stubbornness, convinced that "time is on our side"
against the exhausted men under siege inside. In conversation with
the negotiating team, the visitors soon learn that the plethora of
various considerations does not include an honorable withdrawal -
with an agreement - from this confrontation.

One of the visitors suggests they consider exploiting the condition
of the hungry youths inside: to withdraw under an international
negotiating umbrella, explaining that the end of the incident was a
result of Israeli concern for the fate of the youths, as against the
hard-hearted attitude of the Palestinian Authority. Something like
that - still a bit self-righteous but wise. One of the officers makes
a note of it in his pad. Now, keep on considering the Church of the
Nativity incident as a metaphor of the entire conflict and ponder the
prime minister's reaction when such a proposal is brought to him,
victorious IDF to be humiliated by the terrorists - if it is brought
at all.

By Gideon Samet

Enclosed please find a first-hand report of the scene of Bethlehem on
Thursday, April 17, 2002.  I have seen this with my own eyes--there
is no exaggeration whatsoever.
For those of you who have not been to Bethlehem before, the details
might be irrelevant but i am sure these details would reshape the
image you had of the city.  And for those of you who know the city
well enough, i am sure you can imagine the difference.
Please read, pass on, and whenever possible publish for the world to
see what has happened to the little town of Bethlehem where barbaric
destruction is underway by the Israeli occupying forces of Sharon.

Reagrds

Andre Dabdoub
Temporary Phone: +970 2 274 2107
http://www.dabdoub.com
Alternate emails: andredabdoub@..., a_dabdoub@...



The Other Side of Bethlehem

Any person visiting Bethlehem nowadays would not really believe that
this same city of the nativity had undergone a comprehensive multi-
million dollar facelift some 5 years ago in preparation for the
millennium.  This facelift would have revamped the whole city from a
colonial destruction of over 28 years.

Today, alas, this colonial destruction is restored.  Once more the
Israeli occupying forces have managed to crush the overall
infrastructure of the city best known for its biblical center as the
acclaimed birthplace of Jesus.

Yesterday, Thursday, April 18, was the 17th day of the Israeli
reoccupation of the city since the last incursion. Yesterday was also
the fifth time that the curfew imposed on the city since April 2 has
been lifted.  Yesterday I decided to go around town, more for
sightseeing purposes than for provisioning; and what a sight it
was!!  I wished I had a camera to chronicle and document what I saw.

Because the curfew is usually lifted for 2-3 hours every four to five
days, the streets usually bustle with shoppers at the same time.
These however are not the everyday shoppers that any person leading a
normal life knows; instead they are hungry shoppers who are
practically elbowing their ways through bakeries, groceries, and even
suks (vegetable markets) in an attempt to manage to get that last
loaf of bread, or the last cup of expired yogurt or pierced can of
powdered milk, or even that last wilted small cucumber or tomato.
In one bakery in Beit Jala, people were given a serial number with
the number of bundles they require and waited in line for their
turn.  Latecomers left empty-handed as bread ran out before their
turn came.

Shoppers, I noticed, were either left with some money and were buying
whatever they can provision; or else, they were running short of
money and were bargaining with some opportunist merchants to get the
most with the little they were left with; others yet waited until
they got last of the supplies which were stale and unfit for human
consumption but still paid half or third of the original price to get
them; and there were those by-standers who just stared and watched
and were unable to even collect the remnants of thrown away food.

Obviously, all luxury-item selling shops were closed since people are
only concerned with their daily bread at this crucial economic stage.

On the sides of the roads, garbage containers either lay tank-crushed
or else—if they were still intact—were full to the rim, and high
heaps of garbage stacked around them.  At the main garbage container
at the southern entrance of the Azzeh refugee camp, one lane of the
two-lane street was covered with stacked garbage forcing cars to
drive around them.  In other areas of the city, people have
established garbage collection sites at virtual location, creating a
precedent for future dumping.  From a distance, I could see scattered
clouds of smoke vanishing in the cool spring skies.  These turned out
to be incinerating sights of uncollected garbage.

Further to the south, and along the Jerusalem-Hebron road that runs
alongside the Dheisheh refugee camp, the site of the garbage was even
more horrifying.  The unattended scattered garbage ran for hundreds
of meters with parts of the lane on one side totally blocked.  The
rotten smell of the garbage was mixed agreeably with that of the
running sewers since it seemed to me that the whole drainage system
in that area was totally destroyed.  The tires of my car still carry
this mixture of aroma.

The damages also reached a number of electric poles.  Some of these
poles originally stood silent at the side of the streets carrying
electric current and phone tone to the city; the other poles—centered
in the middle of the main streets and which were recently erected—
played a more interactive role by illuminating the quite streets of
that little town of Bethlehem.  Traffic lights, which were first
introduced to Bethlehem in 1987 at the start of the first Intifada
but were never operational, and were once more reintroduced in 1989,
added an extra light effect to the nights of Bethlehem.

But now, some of these once essential posts were no longer.  Many had
been run down and over by the hundreds of Israeli military vehicles
that have ceaselessly devirginized the city.  Others were hanging
loose from the electric wiring, standing literally in the air.  Still
others that were partially knocked down, and which stand on a thin,
shattered parts of their bases, risk the danger of collapsing causing
possible damage to adjacent buildings, parked cars, or even the
occasional pedestrians.  All these damages caused to the poles have
paralyzed the surrounding area where they are located.  Technicians
from the telephone or the electricity companies cannot restore the
damages because of the curfew.  Many people that I have spoken to
have not had electricity for over thirteen days yesterday.  Our home
phone—and hundreds of others in the city, I am sure—has been damaged
for a similar period.

Driving through the heavily armored streets—armored with Israeli
tanks, personnel carriers and jeeps, all patrolled and surveyed from
the air by American made Israeli Apaches—one cannot help but notice
the massive destruction to buildings and parked cars from the heavy
shelling.  Shattered windows, destroyed walls, pierced water tanks,
and tank-crushed cars are all within eye distance and reach from
every passer-by.  I passed a number of moving cars, of which one was
a Red Crescent ambulance; they all had missing windshields or side
windows.  Even trees that have been planted to add beauty to the city
were not spared.  Broken branches and leaves mixed with the dust and
the flying empty plastic bags in the streets.

Exhausted, many of the familiar faces I saw just had this look of
desperation.  Since the incursion, all businesses—including postal
services and banks—have been closed and people have not gone to work
since then.  Many might not get paid soon, and others might never
return to their jobs.  A number of businesses would most likely shut
down their operations.  The money available with the people would
soon run out and they would have nothing to buy food with.  Passing
in front of two major banks on Manger Street, I noticed they were
open.  I assumed they opened to try to make cash available to and in
the disposition of the very few who are left with money in their
accounts. When I looked inside the bank, they were quasi empty.

People, I realized have started to run out of money.  When I called
in to check on a next-door neighbor, his wife who answered the phone,
beseeched for some food.  She said they do not have money—her husband
and his four brothers have been out of work since the incursion and
they have been left with no money—to feed the whole family of 20
members or so.  So I collected some of the canned food and rice I had
stored at home, and bought some of the available vegetables in the
market and handed them to her.  Thankfully she took the bags from and
insinuated that they had also run out of cooking gas.  So I took one
of the two butane tanks I have at home and delivered it to them.  I
wonder how will they manage next time!!

As the time for the lifting of the curfew drew nearer, I headed
home.  In mind was the image imprinted of the city and the
destruction that has befallen it.  With a quick calculation, I
thought to myself that the city will require one whole year—with
round the clock work—to be restored to the state it was in before the
first incursion back in August of last year, with the assumption that
all necessary material, equipment, vehicles, manpower, and money
needed for the renovation are at the immediate disposal (and with no
shortage whatsoever at any time) of the municipality and the Local
Government and provided that there is 100% efficiency in the
implementation of the restoration process.

Amidst all of this chaos in town and the preoccupation of the
Palestinians in their day-to-day survival, the Israeli government was
quickly and surely going ahead in the continuous confiscation of the
Palestinian land at the northern most borders of Bethlehem with
Jerusalem.  The Israeli army's bulldozers are undergoing a major
facelift to create a highway that connects the two Israeli
settlements founded on the Palestinian lands of Al Malha and Abu
Ghneim (named Gilo and Har Homa by Israel upon confiscation in 1967
and 1992 respectively) and a multi kilometer fence that runs from
west to east separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem.

All of this is happening under the unexplained and unjustified
silence of the international community, the Islamic and Christian
worlds, and the so-called peace-seeking countries.



With all of these thoughts boomeranging through my mind, I realized
that the sounds of vehicles outside was diminishing as people were
rushing to reach home before the curfew is imposed once more.  Only
the sounds of my car's tires rubbing against the marks left by the
Israeli tanks and army vehicles could be heard.  It is such a
disturbing sound and such a useless way for tires to wear and tear.
Maybe the one-year period I was referring to for the restoration of
the city is not enough.  Let's say maybe two years.

By Andre Dabdoub

An Eyewitness in Bethlehem, Palestine
April 19, 2002

15 days in Bethlehem
Two weeks ago, after tanks rolled into Bethlehem, scores of people -
some armed - took refuge in the Church of the Nativity. Surviving on
weeds and stagnant water, and with the Israeli army blasting
deafening screeches from a loudspeaker above, they are caught up in
the most iconic clash of the Israeli offensive. Peter Beaumont
reports

Peter Beaumont
Tuesday April 16, 2002
The Guardian

The white observation balloon spots us as we come down the steps into
the narrows of Star Street in Bethlehem. One of three placed around
the Church of the Nativity by the Israel Defence Forces, it descends
quickly on its cable to check us out. We wave towards its camera and
continue walking carefully towards Manger Square, our hands held high
above our heads.

Today the siege of the church, built on the spot that has long been
commemorated as the birthplace of Christ, enters its 15th day.
Stationed outside the church, tucked out of range of Palestinian
snipers, are countless Israeli soldiers and tanks, their weapons and
cameras trained on the complex.

And inside, entering their third week without medical supplies or
fresh food or water, is an unlikely band of around 200 people; the
determination of many of them not to leave matches that of those who
surround them. The exact mix of clergy, gunmen and civilians inside
is not clear, but the group is believed to include at least 35 armed
militants, along with 26 Franciscan friars, four Franciscan nuns,
four Greek Orthodox priests and two Armenian monks. Six of the
besieged are reported to be children under 14. There are also at
least two corpses.

The Israeli army may have pulled out of some of the West Bank towns
and villages it occupied following the launch of Operation Protective
Wall on April 1; it may have completed its objectives in Nablus and
the refugee camp of Jenin; but the situation in Bethlehem's Manger
Square remains as perilously stalled as it did two weeks ago. This
famous spot, so loaded with meaning, has become the site of the most
iconic clash of the present Israeli offensive against the Palestinian
cities of the West Bank and the 18-month-long intifada, pulling
together all the ironies and tensions of the present violence in the
Holy Land.

It is towards that church that we are heading, calling out the name
of a French-Israeli colonel who we understand is prepared to speak to
us about the siege. A khaki-clad figure emerges from a street next to
the Omar Mosque, behind Manger Square. He hurries us into Najajareh
Street, the last street before the square, and orders us to sprint
across the entrance of a short alley that opens into the square
itself, overlooked, he warns us, by Palestinian snipers in the
church. Suddenly we are there.

The frontline position of the Israeli army outside the church is a
building on the corner of Najajareh Street. Two storeys high, it
houses Bethlehem's chamber of commerce and the offices of Dr Robert J
Tabash MD. These days, the faces that peer from the windows are not
Palestinian businessmen or nervous patients, but the stubbled faces
of Israeli soldiers. And at the very corner of this building, steps
descend into Manger Square, the site of the church itself.

You can see the church as you walk down Star Street past the rubble
and bullet-perforated cars. Viewed from this vantage point, the
church sits at the far corner of the square. An elegant bell-tower,
topped with a cupola of blue-grey lead, rises from one end. To the
left of this tower are the walls that surround the basilica itself,
as solid and crenellated as a castle keep. As besieged fortresses go,
it looks fairly well designed for the job; it is a large complex of
three monasteries, one each for the Franciscan, Armenian Orthodox and
Greek Orthodox churches, each clinging possessively to the ancient
chapel.

What the world wants to know is: what is going on behind those solid
limestone walls?

The Israeli version is articulated by Colonel Olivier Rafowicz as he
stands in Najajareh Street. The balloon cameras, he tells us, have
demonstrated the level of infiltration of the gunmen into all areas
of the church compound.

"With the tapes from the cameras we have been able to see what is
going on," he says. "We can see tens of terrorists, with their
weapons, running all around the church. Others are simply lying with
their weapons at their side." He adds that the entire complex is now
being controlled by Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Fatah factions, and that
the exterior doors have been booby trapped.

"We know that they have Kalashnikovs and grenades inside, and we also
believe they may have some explosive belts. The other people - the
churchmen and civilians - inside the church cannot leave even if they
want to. Their position is somewhere between that of being hostages
and prisoners."

The colonel's words are, of course, contradicted by the Palestinian
version of events, pieced together from snatched conversations on
mobile phones - their batteries fading rapidly - between journalists
and those trapped inside.

On April 2, they say, after Israeli tanks rolled into the Arab
Christian majority town, scores of people fled to the church for
sanctuary, believing that the army would not dare to shell or storm
the sacred spot. Many of those inside, both sides agree, are armed.
The Israelis have named 10 men inside the church who they say are
noted Fatah, Tanzim and Hamas militiamen; they believe the men are
responsible for organising suicide bombings, shootings and other
terrorist operations. But Franciscan church leaders in the city say
many of the others are simply civilians who found themselves cut off
from their homes when the Israeli army rolled in, and sought
sanctuary with the friars and monks inside the complex.

The churches also insist, despite Israeli briefings to the contrary,
that they are not being held hostage inside the complex. At the
weekend, Father David Jaeger, a spokesman for the Franciscan friars
and nuns inside the complex, told an independent Catholic news
service that they had agreed at the weekend to remain inside the
church, arguing that, as traditional custodians of the Christian
sites in the Holy Land, they have a duty to stay and protect the
shrine's sanctity.

But the conditions inside, by anyone's reckoning, are becoming
increasingly desperate. Those inside say they are almost out of water
and are eating plants and weeds growing in the complex's few small
courtyards, and drinking tea brewed from stagnant water collected in
an ancient cistern.

"We can hardly drag ourselves from one place to another," said one of
the men, who identified himself to journalists only as Yaqin. "Even
talk is consuming too much energy. We spend most of our time thinking
about our destiny, whether we're going to walk out of here or if
we're going to be taken out on stretchers. We don't know anything
that's going on outside. It feels like everybody is part of a
conspiracy against us."

On Sunday I speak to Isa Abu Sror. The line is poor. He sounds tired
and distant. "It is very bad in here," he says weakly. "The water is
cut. The electricity is cut. Food and drink is a serious problem.
Sleeping is a problem." Another man inside the church, who will not
give his name, says they are surviving on sips of water and that he
has eaten two meals in 14 days, the last four days ago.

On April 8, according to reports from inside the compound, a
Palestinian man named Khaled was shot dead by Israeli soldiers while
trying to put out a fire that had broken out in part of the compound;
his body was moved into the enormous, ancient transept, a simple but
majestic space lined with pillars and frescoes and still sporting
some remnants of the original chapel built in the fourth century by
St Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, after she converted
to Christianity and made one of the earliest pilgrimages to the Holy
Land. Down a narrow flight of stairs, underneath the high altar, is
the tiny grotto in which Christ is said to have been born; this most
sacred space, says Yaqin, has become the place where the injured are
taken. A Franciscan nun, he says, is caring for four wounded
Palestinians just next to the altar that marks the location of the
manger.

Nearby, probably in one of the network of caves that runs under the
church, Khaled's body and that of another dead Palestinian have been
laid out; on Saturday, according to reports from inside the church,
26-year-old Hassan Mesman was shot in the neck by Israeli snipers
positioned in a hotel on Manger Square. The Franciscans say they
tried to treat him by candlelight but he bled to death.

One of the bitterest ironies of this siege is that it need not be
happening at all, save for one of the Israelis' most misguided
policies during the intifada - the assassination of militant
Palestinian figures, including those in Bethlehem. For among
the "terrorists" that Israel says are inside the church are a number
of gunmen of the Abbayat clan, a family of local toughs whose main
interest, before the present intifada began 18 months ago, was not
politics but crime.

At the beginning of the intifada, Hussein Abbayat, who is involved in
smuggling arms across the Dead Sea, headed a group of about 10 gunmen
loosely associated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, which
regarded him as a loose cannon.

Arafat was not the only one who feared Abbayat's potential influence
in the city. Abbayat's men had been involved in shootings across the
valley towards the Israeli settlement at Gilo. Fearing that his power
was growing with the intifada, Israel decided to remove him from the
scene, firing a missile into his car as he was travelling in Beit
Sahour - the Shepherd's Field - and assuming that, after his death,
his group would simply splinter.

Instead, the reverse happened. Hussein was replaced by his cousin
Atef, who consolidated the group's hold on Bethlehem's militant
Palestinian scene as the violence of the intifada worsened. When
Atef, too, was killed in an Israeli rocket attack in October, a new
heir took over the Abbayat clan, whose dominance over the city's
burgeoning militant groups blossomed.

Now the Abbayats are inside the church. Given the family's experience
of Israeli extrajudicial killings, the Abbayats are not keen to
surrender. But surrender is what they certainly must do - unless they
plan an act of violent immolation. Under growing pressure from the
Vatican, Greek Orthodox and Anglican churches, and international
political figures, Israel has been forced to concede that the
stalemate in Manger Square cannot be ended with a storming of the
church. Now, Israel's most powerful weapon in Manger Square is time.

"We regard this as a military crisis that will be handled by the
army," says Colonel Rafowicz. "But we started from the very beginning
negotiating with the terrorists inside, and we have set up a
negotiating team. We are aware of the special feelings about the
church. We do not want to fight them. We simply want to arrest them."

Rafowicz says that many in the church would have surrendered already
but for the interference of Arafat, who has appointed a mediator to
help to end the siege. The colonel's claim is impossible to check,
but it is vigorously denied by senior Palestinians.

Walking back out of Bethlehem's centre, I run into an Anglican
priest. Tall, and with the burly build of a rugby front-row forward,
he is the Rev Canon Andrew White, the Archbishop of Canterbury's
special envoy to the Middle East. He introduces himself with some
irony as the "new Terry Waite" and says that he is involved in trying
to negotiate a peaceful end to the standoff.

He does not seem optimistic. Both sides, he says, are placing
obstacles in the way of a peaceful end. Neither is interested, yet,
in serious negotiations. "They are negotiations about negotiations,"
he says. The Israelis, he tells us, do not want to negotiate with the
Greek Patriarchiate for the time being. He intimates that there is
also a problem with the Israelis talking to the papal nuncio. "The
Archbishop of Canterbury is desperate about the situation here," he
adds. "We are in daily contact, and Dr [George] Carey has been in
almost daily contact with the foreign secretary and the prime
minister.

"The reports I have been getting from inside have been quite
horrendous. There is no food or water and there are 10 people who are
very seriously ill. Last Wednesday one of the nuns had to sew up a
bullet wound of one of the more serious cases. I thought four days
ago that I had succeeded in persuading the Israelis to let me have
one of the bodies removed. I offered to get the body myself, but the
talks fell down at the last minute." And White is worried that as the
siege drags on, an unpleasant outcome becomes more likely. "The
atmosphere is building into a volcano. It is waiting to erupt."

However critical the situation inside the church, no one is willing
to predict how this standoff can be concluded. On Sunday the Israeli
prime minister, Ariel Sharon, offered the gunmen the choice of
surrendering or being permanently exiled; Mohammed al-Madani, the
Palestinian governor of Bethlehem, who is himself inside the church,
rejected the proposed compromise as he had done several others,
saying that no solution will be acceptable to those inside unless
endorsed by Arafat.

Meanwhile, at the weekend, Israel employed a new tactic to force
those inside to surrender, hoisting a large speaker over the square
through which it has played deafening screeches that can be heard 2km
away. In response, the bells of this ancient and holy site rang out
over the troubled city as they have done for millennia - a small,
pitiful gesture of defiance.
Additional reporting by Esther Addley.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

Pleas for mercy in Bethlehem siege

By Caroline Hawley
BBC correspondent in Bethlehem

It is now the 12th day of the extraordinary standoff at Bethlehem's
Church of the Nativity, and Christian leaders are growing
increasingly concerned about the fate of those trapped inside.

Church leaders in Jerusalem met the US Secretary of State, Colin
Powell, on Saturday and asked him to use his influence to ensure that
food and medicines are allowed into the church.


------------------------------------------------------------------
" A Franciscan priest inside the church spoke of a night of 'psycho-
terror' as Israeli soldiers blasted Manger Square with loud
screeching sounds "


------------------------------------------------------------------

Clerics also want permission to remove the body of a policeman shot
dead in the church by Israeli troops on Monday.

On Friday, the Palestinians in the church issued an urgent appeal for
help from Pope John Paul II and the United Nations, saying they
needed food, medicines and water to save them from what they
called "a slow death".

Soldiers surrounded the church after more than 200 Palestinians took
refuge there, among them a group of armed militants. About 40 nuns,
monks and priests are also inside.

Representatives of 13 Christian denominations told Mr Powell that
those inside the church must be given humanitarian aid.

The clerics said there were many civilians among them, including
women and children.

They proposed a three-day truce in which the Israeli army would
withdraw from the church compound and the Palestinian Authority would
collect the weapons from the armed men inside.

Psychological pressure

But Israel is unlikely to accept the suggestion.

Instead, it is stepping up the psychological pressure on the
Palestinians to surrender.

A Franciscan priest inside the church spoke of a night of "psycho-
terror" as Israeli soldiers blasted Manger Square with loud
screeching sounds.

An Israeli army spokesman has said Israel is now more determined than
ever not to let the militants inside go free.

But it has been heavily criticised for its siege of the church, where
it shot and wounded an Armenian cleric on Thursday.

An army statement said soldiers had thought he was armed.

The fighting has left Bethlehem a battered city

  By Caroline Hawley
  BBC correspondent in Bethlehem

  From the top floor of the Star Hotel, the scene is
  spectacular -
  Bethlehem nestles in sun-dappled hills, its church
  spires set against a
  clear spring sky.


  From the distance, the biblical city looks like a
  place at peace.
  But sporadic gunfire crackles through deserted
  streets, along with
  the occasional burst of tank fire and loudspeaker
  calls by Israeli
  soldiers, demanding that the Palestinians holed up
  inside the Church of
  the Nativity surrender.


  The siege of one of Christianity's most sacred sites
  is now entering
  its second week, with neither side backing down.
  About 200 Palestinians, many of them armed, are
  still refusing to
  leave the Church of the Nativity, where a
  Palestinian policeman died in
  a gun-fight early on Monday. His body remains in the
  church.
  The Israeli army says its soldiers have taken up
  several positions
  in Manger Square, but it is still refusing to pull
  back or to allow
  journalists to reach the area. Warning shots are
  fired at those who try.

  Battle-scarred

  Church leaders have called on Israel to "go in
  peace." But there is no
  sign of that yet.
  The past week has left Bethlehem a battered,
  battle-scarred city,
  its people apprehensive about how the stand-off at
  the Church of the
  Nativity will end.
  The streets leading to Manger Square are littered
  with broken glass
  and spent bullet shells.
  Water spews from broken pipes. The windows of the
  Lutheran Church's
  new art and craft centre have all been shot out, and
  cars crushed by
  Israeli tanks line the road.

  Onslaught Fears

  Even though the Israeli army has repeatedly promised
  not to storm the
  Church of the Nativity, many believe it might.
  "I expect Israeli commandos will go in," says
  Richard Elias, the
  acting manager of the Star hotel.
  "I hope it'll end peacefully but I'm not sure.
  Israel must withdraw.
  Ariel Sharon has made his point - that's enough."
  The Star is the only hotel that has kept its doors
  open throughout
  the 18-month intifada.
  Now, its only inhabitants are journalists, and the
  restaurant window
  bears the bullet-holes of shots fired at a cameraman
  trying to film from
  it last week.
  A convoy of reporters trying to take a sick
  colleague to hospital
  had to turn back when the road in front of them was
  raked by machine gun
  fire on Tuesday afternoon.
  The BBC team in Bethlehem put on flak jackets and
  helmets inside our
  make-shift office after shots were fired just
  outside the hotel.

  Hunt for food

  The round-the-clock curfew was lifted briefly on
  Monday, but is now
  firmly back in place.
  Most residents are cowering in their homes, running
  short of
  supplies. The Red Cross says a food truck it managed
  to bring into
  Bethlehem on Monday was "besieged" by people.
  As we tried to reach Manger Square earlier, we met a
  small group of
  women defying the curfew on a desperate but
  ultimately fruitless hunt
  for medicines, baby milk and nappies.
  "We were afraid at the beginning," said 37-year old
  mother of 10,
  Ibtisam Zabalani. "But now we've stopped being
  scared."
  She said soldiers who searched her house had left
  destruction in
  their wake.


  "They broke the fridge, and the windows, and they
  tipped everything
  over. They beat the kids, even though they did
  nothing."
  Ibtisam said four of her elder sons were among the
  hundreds arrested
  for interrogation, as Israel continued its sweeping
  detentions.
  And she showed me scratch marks on her arms that she
  accused the
  soldiers of causing.


  The only other person we encountered on the street -
  aside from
  fellow journalists - was nine-year-old Hassan Ishaq,
  who was taking
  advantage of a lull in the shooting to play football
  with his sister,
  just outside the Star Hotel.
  "My mum doesn't want me to go outside, but I can't
  stand it inside
  anymore," he told us. "I'm a little bit frightened
  because the Israelis
  kill people, but it's my right to play."

  As he kicks the ball, he adds: "I wish they'd
  leave."

I'm back in Jerusalem -- very tired and concerned for Bethlehem and
the rest of the West Bank.  My webserver is down, so I'm glad I have
this option for sharing news.  Thanks for subscribing.

I called a few friends and they said it is possible to get into
certain parts of Bethlehem, but it is still impossible for me to
return to my home there.

My landlord's family told me that the Israeli soldiers entered our
compound and my building today.  Eight to ten soldiers went into
almost every room.  They grabbed one of the male residents and used
him as a shield to enter each new room.  They also hit him in the
stomach with their gun butts several times.  The soldiers were mainly
looking for guns, but people in our compound do not have any.  That
did not stop the soldiers from throwing a computer against a wall and
breaking down doors.  Fortunately, my apartment was spared -- the
soldiers showed no interest in it -- but most apartments were
searched.

My landlord told me that about 100 neighbors have been put into
trucks and taken away.  Their whereabouts is unknown.

There were many explosions and fires around Manger Square and the
Church of the Nativity today.  Residents told me that they saw thick
plumes of black smoke rising from the area, although they are unsure
what is burning so strongly.

Monk shot and seriously wounded in Bethlehem

By Amos Harel, Ha'aretz Correspondent and Ha'aretz Service

Haaretz (website)
April 10, 2002

A monk was shot and seriously wounded in the Church of the Nativity
compound in Bethlehem, most likely by Israeli fire. He was evacuated
to
Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem.

A senior IDF source confirmed that an Armenian monk in the compound,
where
dozens of Palestinian gunmen have been holed up with a group of monks
since last week, had most likely been hit by IDF fire.

Military sources say that according to an initial investigation
conducted
by the army, it appears that the monk was mistakenly shot by an
Israeli
sniper. The monk was one of four clergymen who wanted to take water
into
the Church of the Nativity, and it appears he was shot when the sniper
tried to hit an armed man standing next to them, but hit the monk
instead.

According to reports on the ground, the monk was shot by Israeli
troops
positioned in the guest wing of the Franciscan monastery. IDF sources
insist that the wing is not part of the monastery but is actually
located
in a nearby hotel, but the Franciscans have disputed this, saying
that the
wing is part of the Nativity Church compound.

Lieberman: use gas to force Palestinians out of Nativity Church
Far-right National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu party chief Avigdor
Lieberman
said Wednesday that Israeli forces should employ gas to force
Palestinian
militants out of the Church of the Nativity.

Lieberman told Army Radio that instead of endangering IDF infantrymen,
Israel should order aerial bombings of militants in refugee camps. He
said

that the United States and NATO had often taken this course in the
past,
adding that "In southern Afghanistan, there were days that the United
States wiped out 400 people a day in aerial bombings."

The former cabinet minister quit the government last month in protest
over
perceived policy concessions by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon over
Yasser
Arafat and his Palestinian Authority.

Repeating a demand that the IDF go after Arafat physically in the
Ramallah
compound to which the PA leader has been confned, Lieberman said he
would
tell the cabinet, were he still a member:

"I demand erasing the mukata (Arafat's compound) from the face of the
earth, with everyone inside. I demand going into every single hole,
carry
out a total mobilization, and clean out the area, but with a
thorough-going cleaning - not an effort here and an effort there, not
a
limited operation, but an full-out war. How long do we have to talk
about
these bandits, these criminals, these terrorists?"

Asked if he also advocated destroying the Church of the Nativity, by
tradition the site of the birth of Jesus and one of the holiest sites
in
Christianity, Lieberman said "We don't need to. We have enough
(other) means.

"We can put gas in there and take them out - they'll simply come
out," Lieberman said. "We have enough techinical means. We need
neither
harm the church nor obliterate it. It all depends on the political
echelon. It must make a decision and give the order to get them out of
there."

Bethlehem Update

You are probably aware that although the Israelıs have started
pullıng out of two West Bank towns (Tulkarem and Qalqiliya), that
Bethlehem ıs stıll occupıed.  Frıends there tell me that
some parts of the town have electrıcıty now, but the curfew
remains.
So the streets remain deserted.  Amid heavy fighting, the Nativity
Church compound had a fire over the weekend.  I'm not sure how much
damage was done, but I think the fire was in the Catholic church
there.  With international activist support, Palestinian Christians
were planning a march to the Church of the Nativity to pray. But just
hours before the march, the Israeli Army went around Bethlehem with
megaphones saying (in Arabic) that they would shoot anyone who
ventured outside.  The threat was taken seriously and the march was
canceled.

It's 10:10pm (Israel time).  I just talked to some friends in
Bethlehem, and they told me that the town is under attack again.  Two
tank shells were just launched into the old market area causing at
least one home to collapse.

The Israeli Army also issued a ultimatum to the people seeking refuge
in the Church of the Nativity.  They were called out on loudspeakers
outside the building.  At this point no one has left the church.

People are prepared for a long night in Bethlehem...

Here is a press release from the Lutheran Church with information about Dr.
Mitri Raheb, the Christmas Lutheran Church, and the International Center of
Bethlehem.
Peace,
Bob

PLEASE NOTE: The short press release made in the evening of April 4 and the
longer story about the invasion of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church
compound are both included in this message.


URGENT PRESS RELEASE

April 4, 2002


At 1:45 pm Thursday afternoon, April 4, 2002, three groups of Israeli Defense
Force (IDF) soldiers entered the compound of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas
Church in Bethlehem. When Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb heard the soldiers entering, he
telephoned the bishop in Jerusalem, alerting him to the impending danger to the
property, to him and to his family. Bishop Dr. Munib Younan immediately began
making telephone calls to the Israeli military and government authorities and
various diplomatic corps, demanding that the soldiers be removed from the
church property and that Rev. Raheb and his family be kept safe. The Christmas
Church is one of six ELCJ congregations. The soldiers went from room to room in
the compound for nearly two hours, breaking into offices and detaining Rev.
Raheb in a corner of his office. When the soldiers heard Rev. Raheb speaking in
Arabic on his telephone, their treatment of him became more rude and rough,
according to the pastor's account of his experience. He was then prevented
from using the telephone. Finally a second commander arrived who ordered the
soldiers out, spoke kindly with Rev. Raheb and assured him that he and his
family would be safe. The commander and some of the soldiers then secured
broken windows and doors facing the street so the property would be protected.
The gift shop could not be secured because two tank shells had wreaked
considerable damage. The soldiers left at about 4:10 pm.

We in the Lutheran church denounce such acts and demand that the international
community and the State of Israel secure the protection and the sanctity of
church compounds and properties.

Noted by Rev. Dr. Mary E. Jensen
Communications Assistant for the ELCJ
For more information, call Rev. Gustaf Odquist at +972 - 2- 67-255733


DETAILED STORY OF CHRISTMAS CHURCH INVASION

April 5, 2002

It is with great relief that we are able to report that Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb
and his family are safe today after a two and one-half hour incursion into the
Lutheran church compound by Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers yesterday,
April 4, 2002.

According to Rev. Dr. Raheb, he heard the soldiers entering the compound at
about 1:45 pm. The compound consists of the pastor's residence, offices, a
guesthouse, a gift shop, an artists' workshop and meeting rooms. Under
construction is a conference center. Much of the compound has been financed by
partner churches. The compound had been damaged on Tuesday, April 2, when the
IDF re-occupied Bethlehem with tanks, bulldozers and troops. Rev. Raheb had
quickly inspected the damage on Wednesday, but was unable to inspect the church
building itself as the danger from snipers was too great. As of Thursday, a
quick look from outside the church showed only one minor stained glass window
broken, but a complete inspection will have to wait until the troops are gone
and the danger is over.

Rev. Raheb telephoned the office of Bishop Dr. Munib Younan as soon as he heard
the soldiers entering which allowed the bishop to begin making phone calls
protesting the incursion. Several short phone conversations with Rev. Raheb as
the incursion continued enabled the bishop and his staff to give up to the
moment reports in phone calls to the Israeli military and the government as
well as to European and American diplomats and heads of churches. Bishop Younan
was demanding that the soldiers be removed from the church property and that
Rev. Raheb and his family be kept safe. By 4:10 pm the ordeal of incursion for
Rev. Raheb and his family was over. A second IDF commander had come and ordered
the soldiers out of the church compound.

Following is a report of the conversation held with Rev. Raheb after the
soldiers left.

Three different groups of Israeli soldiers entered the property, each group
consisting of fifteen men. Rev. Raheb shouted at them from the second
floor, "Get out! This is a church. I want to talk to your commander." The
soldiers were breaking down doors and saying, "This is not a church." Rev.
Raheb continued to speak to them, saying, "I am the pastor of the church. I
want to come down and talk to you. Do not shoot." He was wearing his clergy
garb, easily recognizable as a pastor..

At that point Rev. Raheb did go down to the ground floor and spoke with the
commander, insisting this was church property. The commander said they needed
to inspect a particular house, pointing at it. This house was not a part of the
compound and Rev. Raheb took one group of soldiers out to the street to show
them how the house was not located on the compound. In the meantime, another
group of soldiers was breaking down office doors, searching through the
property.

The IDF deputy commander for the Bethlehem area called Rev. Raheb on mobile
phone, a result of the bishop's insistent phone calls. The commander asked to
speak with the soldiers but they would not take the mobile phone and talk to
him. The breaking of doors and searching continued. Rev. Raheb was continually
asking to speak more with the commander in the compound.

By this time the soldiers were on the second floor, now in Rev. Raheb's office
searching through drawers and files. The pastor's telephone rang, and this
time it was the bishop inquiring about the pastor's situation. Rev. Raheb
later said, "I believe they thought I was an expatriate pastor until they heard
me speaking Arabic and realized I was Palestinian. Then their attitude and
actions toward me changed for the worse." They closed off the telephone, later
taking his mobile phone, too. "Now you are detained," they said, forcing Rev.
Raheb to sit in a corner of his own office. "Don't talk." When Rev. Raheb
continued to speak and one of the soldiers replied, the soldier was reprimanded
by the others. Rev. Raheb reported that the soldiers' language was vulgar and
nasty, cursing Arabs and making threats. This was the most alarming time for
the pastor because this group of soldiers seemed out of control. The search in
the pastor's office continued for about an hour.

At one point the soldiers let Rev. Raheb go to his home to get keys to open an
iron door leading to the construction project. He was able to speak with his
frightened wife and family momentarily before returning to his office with the
keys. Once they had opened the door the pastor was ordered to sit once again
while they searched the construction site. Much of this area had already been
damaged and vandalized on Tuesday, Rev. Raheb reported.

About two hours into the incursion, another IDF commander arrived. His attitude
toward Rev. Raheb was completely different, speaking kindly to him. "You are
not responsible for anything," the commander said. "Don't worry, you are
safe." This commander ordered the soldiers out of the compound, but before they
left the commander and a few soldiers did some repair work on the doors and
windows immediately facing the street. It was at this point that Rev. Raheb was
able to go outdoors and see what damage had been done, noting one minor stained
glass window in the church was broken. The gift shop area in the compound has
sustained the worst damage. Part of the building itself was destroyed and the
door to the gift shop could not be repaired.

While he was outside Rev. Raheb was told by neighbors that mines had been
planted in the streets of the Old City by the soldiers, some of which had
already exploded. The IDF commander confirmed this. Reporters had begun to
gather near the church but the pastor was told not to talk to them, and by the
time the soldiers left the reporters had gone. Rev. Raheb told the commander
that he was concerned the soldiers would return but the officer said that
wouldn't happen, and a mark was made on the building which indicated to
soldiers that this building had been inspected and was safe.

Throughout the experience, Rev. Raheb insisted to the soldiers and the
commanders that the church does not allow armed people to enter the premises.
The church compound was not used for fighting, only for helping people in need.

Although very shaken, Rev. Raheb reported that he and his family were safe. The
damage and destruction done to the church compound, however, were very
extensive. We denounce such attacks and demand from the Israeli government
protection and sanctity of churches and church property.

Noted by Rev. Dr. Mary E. Jensen

For further information, please contact Rev. Gustaf Odquist

Mobile: +972-2-67-255-733

An Update from Bethlehem, 3:30pm Jerusalem time

Things that once were unthinkable are now happening.

Bethlehem remains under attack with most of the activity
concentrated around the Church of the Nativity.  Reports
from inside the church say that Israeli snipers have been
targeting the building all day.  Israeli soldiers have
blown off the door at the rear of the church, but they have
not yet entered.

Last night heavy equipment was very active up and down roads
near Manger Square.  Tanks were firing into the community.

"Do not be reluctant to say prayers"
Zoughbi Zoughbi, Wiam founder

Peace,
Bob

Bethlehem remains under seige.  I talked to a few friends in Bethlehem and
Beit Sahour, and they updated me on the situation.

The situation around Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity is
still really bad.  18 more tanks and APCs rumbled up to the site about an
hour or so ago.  Anywhere from 100 to 300 people are still taking refuge in
Nativity Church.  There have been at least two more killed in Manger Square
and tanks have been running over the bodies.  The shooting has decreased
somewhat, but helicopters are still sporadically firing into the square.
Israeli soldiers have taken up positions in both the Bethlehem Municipality
and homes around the square.  The main Bethlehem Mosque has been burned.
Tanks are parked along the streets leading to Manger Square too.  Two
ambulances have been crushed by the advancing tanks.  Much of the area has lost
electricity.

Soldiers are conducting door-to-door searches in several parts of town.  At
least one home has been demolished.  Soldiers have also entered Bethlehem
University.  About 40 are in the cafeteria.

"Don't be reluctant to say prayers!"
Zoughbi Zoughbi, Wiam Center founder

Bob, in Jerusalem

Bethlehem is under severe Israeli invasion.  Neighbors told me that
tanks ran past my home into Manger Square, there is heavy shelling,
and helicopters are shooting near the Church of the Nativity.

Dr. Mitri Raheb reported that the Christmas Lutheran Church, his
home, and the International Center have been hit by shelling today.
There is heavy fighting along the corridor between Manger Square and
the Christmas Church compound.  He reported that the tanks are on
both sides of the parsonage, so the tank fire is deafening and shakes
all the buildings.  According to the Fourth Geneva Conventions,
places of worship and churches should never be assaulted.

Also, Palestinian TV announced that an Italian priest was killed this
morning while he was in the house of the Nuns of Saint Brigida, in
the center of Bethlehem.  The priest went to the convent last night
to comfort the religious and due to the situation he decided to
remain overnight.  This morning he celebrated holy mass in the small
chapel of the community, where violent fighting broke out.  He was
killed in the chapel.

I was able to update my website a bit this morning.

http://www.bobmay.info

Pray for Peace,
Bob

I'm in Jerusalem now, but I was able to take some photos of the checkpoint in
Bethlehem as I passed this morning...

http://www.bobmay.info/photosbethchkpt.htm

Peace,
Bob

Bethlehem was under helicopter missile attack earlier this morning.
I don't know all the details yet, but the incident was terrible.
I took a few photos of a bit of the damage and posted it on my
website if you are interested.

http://www.bobmay.info

The Israeli army claimed it hit Bethlehem in retaliation for a
suicide bomber attack in Jerusalem that killed 9 on Saturday
evening.  The suicide bomber was in retaliation for the 23+
Palestinian deaths in West Bank refugee camps this week.  The Israeli
invasion into the refugee camps was in retaliation for soldiers
killed at the checkpoint a few days before.  The soldiers killed at
the checkpoint were in retaliation for...and so on, and so on...

The Jerusalem Post is a pro-Israeli newspaper, but two
things reported in last Friday's edition caught my
attention, and I wanted to share them with you.

The first was an article called "We will not continue
to fight..." by Tovah Lazaroff.  It was about Israeli
soldiers who refuse to fight in the Palestinian areas.
  Here are some quotes from the article:

"They (soldiers) say they aren't afraid.  They want to
defend their country.  They simply think Israel's
presence in the territories is wrong."

"...the reservists said that, although they believe in
the state and have often fought for it on the front
lines, they no longer intend to 'take part in the war
for the peace of the settlements.'  'We will not
continue to fight beyond the Green Line in order to
rule, to expel, to destroy, to blockade, to
assassinate, to starve, and to humiliate an entire
people,' they wrote."

A second article entitled "Anywhere but here?" by
Larry Derfner describes the exodus of prominent Jewish
children from Israel.  Here are some passages from
that article:

Ran is a law and political science student at Tel Aviv
University.  He says, "I served on barricades from
1995 to 1998, during the so-called good old days, and
belive me, the humiliation and abuse of Palestinians
that gets reported in the media isn't one percent of
what really goes on," he says.

Ruti Rafael is part of a group aiming to create a
society based on "traditional Zionist values."  But
even she says, "Is this what I raised my son for -- to
shoot children, to stop pregnant women from getting to
the hospital, all to defend some fanatic settlement?"

Just wanted to share these comments with you.  Any
questions?
Bob


=====
Bob May, UM Worker
for my routine life in Palestine, http://www.bobmay.info

79 Nablus Rd, PO Box 19208
Jerusalem, via Israel
mobile:  972-55-578-275

__________________________________________________
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Send FREE Valentine eCards with Yahoo! Greetings!
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The future of any country remains in the hands of the
young people of that country. One of the things that
impresses me about the Palestinian Center of
Rapprochement (PCR) is their commitment to the youth
of Palestine. Volunteers crowd into the Center to take
advantage of the opportunities that Ghassan Andoni and
George Rishmawi provide. The center offers training in
a variety of areas like human rights and advocacy. PCR
also offers English and computer classes.

Men like Mr. Andoni and Mr. Rishmawi are men who make
a difference. In addition to these leaders are other
young men who also make a difference. They are
talented and enthusiastic hard workers. These men are
busy at school, home, and music classes, yet they find
the time to volunteer. They are faithful in their
dedication to improving the state of Palestine. I'll
be sharing some of their names and faces with you
during my stay in Palestine

Despite their busy schedules, they have volunteered to
be email penpals to anyone who is interested. They
would like to tell you about Palestine firsthand. If
you or your friends want to learn about the life of a
young person in the West Bank, just email them. They
will give it to you straight.

(photos are on my website http://www.bobmay.info for
January 12, 2002)

Bisher
Student
Has Twin Brother, Husam
Best Violin Player in the West Bank
bisher_qassis@...

Usama
Student, Bethlehem University
Enjoys Music including Rock and Flamenco
Best Guitar Player in the West Bank
mr_guitar1984@...

Ibrahim
Student
Has Brother, Mohamed (below)
Best Double Bass Player in the West Bank
mr_star2005@...

Mohamed
Student
Has Brother, Ibraheim (above)
Best Clarinet Player in the West Bank
momostar2001@...




=====
Bob May
http://www.bobmay.info
79 Nablus Rd
PO Box 19208
Jerusalem, via Israel
mobile:  972-55-578-275
home:  972-2-275-0180

__________________________________________________
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