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Qalqilya report

Today is Thursday 26 December 2002. We’re sitting having dinner at the appartment of Mahmoud, a local palestinian who lives in Qalqilya. Such an eventful and confusing morning, I really don’t know where to begin the story. This mail really is ‘off the cuff’, I haven’t made any notes and I’m just writing events as I remember them, before beginning tonight’s ambulance shift. Please accept my apologies in advance and bear with me, it’s been an interesting day.

This morning it was pouring with rain and the skies were so grey, it seemed almost as if dawn had not yet broken open the night. Ruba, Lisa, Marie and myself had planned to go to Jayoush to support farmers who wanted to collect their crops from confiscated land. As we set off in the taxi, it became apparent that the town was not functioning normally. The curfew in Qalqilya is not usually strictly enforced and taxis can usually take passengers to the checkpoint unhindered. However, today the taxi was taking detours to get through. Every two minutes, the taxi driver would get a phone call telling him which streets it was safe to drive on, and he switched directions several times. Finally, he left us at a site from where we could cross over ‘illegally’ by foot, making our way through damp and slodgy mudded hillocks. Marie had already decided to go back to watch over the schools, she was worried about children who were going to school regardless of the bizarre goings on in the town.

At the roadside, having made our way across the border terrain of the town, Ruba, Lisa and I turned to look back at Qalqilya. It was clear that israeli military activity was strangely heightened in the area. I spotted an APC making its way rapidly down a street. Ruba and Lisa decided to ring Radhika (the ISM coordinator) and subsequently decided to return to Qalqilya instead of going ahead to join the farmers. They both had a feeling that the ‘atmosphere’ in Qalqilya was tense and sinister. I was not convinced but I shrugged my shoulders and turned back to go with them. It turned out to be a good decision.

On arriving in Qalqilya, a local ISM coordinator by the name of Osama joined us. He was out of breath and had a video camera with him. Israeli soldiers had surrounded a building in the town. We got in another taxi and made our way as quickly as possible to the scene. This was to be our first experience of peaceful combat with israeli forces.

Soldiers were dotted all around the area. There was an israeli jeep with two soldiers standing beside it. About 40m further down the street, there was huge israeli tank with it’s gun pointing at a palestinian house. I walked up to the two soldiers with Osama and Ruba, holding out our passports to show that we were foreign nationals. The soldiers told us to stop, of course, and turn back. We had no business being there. Ruba was amazing: "We are human rights observers, we are here to see what is going on. It is our right to be here". I don’t know how she felt inside, but I do know that this was her first experience of such an encounter. Osama was more experienced and totally fearless although he was in more danger, being a local palestinian. The consensus is that if he remains in palestine, he will be killed one day.

We decided to wait for the other volunteers. In the meantime, palestinian boys had gathered and started throwing stones at the israeli soldiers. The soldiers responded by driving in a jeep into the crowd of children to disperse them. Later, they would fire a sound bomb, four canisters of tear gas, and rubber bullets.

Eventually, Simon, Marie and Marlin arrived. This is where everything became confused. I can only tell my perspective.

From the beginning, it was clear that our priorities were twofold. On the one hand, we wanted to observe what the soldiers were doing ahead in the houses they had surrounded. On the other hand, we were worried about the very young palestinian boys behind us. Initially, some of us decided to push ahead. I myself engaged in an interesting historical, philosophical and political discussion with one israeli soldier named Iftakh. He seemed quite reasonable. Somehow we distracted them, and I suddenly saw Marlin and Lisa up ahead, quite near the tank. And the israeli forces totally didn’t know how to deal with Marie, a canadian professor of sociology of mature age. They just were not accustomed to encounter grey-haired respectable canadian ladies in a conflict situation. My intellectual conversation with Iftakh was cut short by another israeli soldier who told me to "Shut the fuck up". Some of us were also trying to telephone various press offices within israel to make them aware of the situation. At one point, we spotted six or seven israeli soldiers running behind a building toward the palestinian boys, and Simon, Ruba and Lisa made their way back to make sure they didn’t hurt the children. Simon actually stood amongst the children and Ruba stepped out in front of an israeli soldier firing on the children but nevertheless, two young boys were injured by rubber bullets. They were taken by ambulance to the local hospital and released after receiving stitches to their heads. Later, we saw israeli soldiers taking a palestinian into a truck ahead of us, but he was too far away for us to see what happened to him.

It’s so difficult to say exactly what happened during the next hour. Somehow Osama, Simon, Ruba and Lisa got round to the other side of the houses surrounded by israeli forces. Marlin pretended she didn’t speak english and she somehow managed to bully her way right up the house which the tank was pointing at, I following in her tracks so that we were standing in front of an israeli military bulldozer. Marie had disappeared (we found out later she had been tear gassed, and taken in by a palestinian ambulance, but it wasn’t too serious). Two french female human rights observers had also appeared on the scene. At this point, we were worried about the house in front of us, apparently being targetted by the israeli tank, because there were twelve children and four women on the first floor.

So we were totally astonished and in shock at the massive explosion which sounded from the houses directly behind us.

The israeli soldiers withdrew very quickly. They had done their job.

As we made our way through the house where the explosives had detonated, the story of the days events gradually unfolded. We saw a young boy crying. His father had been taken away by the palestinian authority. One other man was also taken. They were both members of Hamas and suspected of terrorist attacks. However, both men had been taken by the PA at 4am, so it was unclear why the explosives had been detonated in the early afternoon by israeli soldiers. Were the explosives left there by the Hamas men, or was it an israeli reprisal to punish the family which had housed them? And if the explosives were left there by Hamas men, why should the israeli soldiers detonate them? And why so much military activity several hours after the suspects had been taken away by the PA? And why the bulldozer? We have heard stories of the israeli military bulldozing houses of the families of suspected terrorists... was this their purpose? Would they have knocked down the houses if international observers had not been present?

These are the events as we witnessed them, the truth behind those events will probably never be known to us. What we can say is that the whole house was ransacked in a way that was not disciplined. For instance, the food from the fridge belonging to the mother of one of the Hamas men had been thrown to the floor. There were accounts of israeli soldiers beating children. One woman told how israeli soldiers had stolen 1300 dinars she had saved up to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. And we found a disabled woman in the room next to the detonation, who had been kept there by soldiers and mistreated by them. We were not present when these events happened. We cannot prove them. But either these people were professional actors who had rehearsed their lines for weeks, or they were simply telling the truth.

After going from house to house, listening to the story of these people whos houses and lives had been turned upside-down indiscriminately, regardless of their guilt or innocence, we helpless internationals just returned to our appartment and collapsed onto makeshift beds on the floor of the living room. We really felt a little shell-shocked by the whole experience. Did we make any positive contribution to the situation today? In small ways, I think we did. There is now more goodwill amongst the palestinian inhabitants of this town towards us. We learned more about ourselves and about the way that the israeli armyh operates. I personally think that Iftakh, the israeli soldier I spoke with, will be lying in bed tonight and thinking about what he is doing. We know that the israelis had brought a tank and bulldozer, neither of which they used. Perhaps we had something to do with this. And if Simon had not been standing amongst the palestinian children, perhaps more would have been injured by rubber bullets. Again, we really have to sit back and evaluate our actions, after we have had time to digest the day’s events. Maybe if we had been more aggressive and entered the houses, then the military would not have detonated the explosives. Or maybe they would just have called in the border police to arrest us and we would now be sitting in jail.

I never liked ‘would have’, ‘could have’, or ‘should have’. We just did what we did.

Moosa Qureshi
Qalqilya
26 Dec 2002