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4/14/2002 (12:04) |
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On West Bank, shattered cities and lives
Water, power, homes hit in antiterror drive
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff, Globe Correspondent, 4/14/2002
ENIN, West Bank - Israel's military incursion into the West Bank has left a swath of destruction that could take years to repair.
Ferocious fighting between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen has caused hundreds of casualties and transformed six city centers and at least two refugee camps into moonscapes of shattered buildings, smoldering craters where houses once stood, smashed power pylons, gushing water mains, and vehicles crushed beyond recognition under the treads of onrushing tanks.
Near the Jenin refugee camp Friday, the stench of burning tires, charred mattresses, and fire-eaten furniture hung heavily in the hot air, along with an odor of decomposing flesh.
An elderly woman wearing a head scarf sobbed uncontrollably as she trudged from the ruins near a white truce flag, one of thousands of people made homeless once again in the region's turmoil.
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Israel's military offensive in the West Bank has inflicted major damage on several Palestinian cities.
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Streaks of dried blood ran from her ears down along the curve of her chin. A relative accompanying her, Yusuf Ahmed, said the woman's eardrums had been ruptured by the concussion of a missile fired by Israeli forces.
''She was already a widow. and now she has lost a son'' in the fighting, ''and her grandson is under arrest,'' said Ahmed, a schoolteacher. ''A few days ago, people of Jenin led ordinary lives. Now everything is gone. We have nothing. Palestinians are again dispossessed of all but the clothing on our backs.''
Such scenes are repeated across the West Bank, a 2,000-square-mile territory to the west of the Jordan River where more than 2 million Palestinians live. In a powerful armored thrust that started March 29, Israeli forces occupied the six Palestinian-administered cities - Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Qalqilya, and Tulkarem - as well as refugee camps in Jenin and Balata and dozens of villages and towns.
The aim, Israeli officials say, is to smash what they call a ''terrorist infrastructure'' responsible for a series of suicide attacks that have killed scores of civilians in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other Israeli cities. But a collateral result has been the devastation of urban centers, businesses, and utilities across the West Bank.
With Israeli operations continuing, there is no way to accurately assess the damage. But officials of international relief agencies and the World Bank have said it will take billions of dollars to rebuild basic public infrastructure.
Foreign observers say that in just over two weeks of fighting and occupation, Israel has destroyed public buildings, water and sewage systems, computer networks, and other facilities built over the past decade with billions of dollars in aid from foreign aid agencies and governments.
In centers of combat, thousands of power poles have been toppled. A World Bank official reckoned that 40 percent of the West Bank's power-carrying capacity has been destroyed, along with most cellular phone towers and a recently completed fiber optic network.
''This is obviously not just a war against terrorist infrastructure, but against civilian infrastructure,'' said Peter Holland, a relief official with Oxfam-Quebec. ''When a single water main is cut in one or two places, you can accept that it is accidental battle damage. But some mains have been severed at dozens of points, and that's sabotage of Palestinian quality of life.''
Heritage, too, has been obliterated or damaged: from the old Turkish baths in the ancient casbah of Nablus, flattened by Israeli military bulldozers to clear avenues of advance for tanks and infantry attacking Palestinian fighter positions in the old quarter, to the centuries-old Omar ben al-Khatab Mosque in Bethlehem, scorched by flames and scarred by shrapnel.
''We have lost forever some precious monuments,'' said a historical researcher, Jamal Talab, who lives and works in Ramallah.
Manir Salameh, deputy mayor of Bethlehem, estimated that water and sewage works worth $150 million had been destroyed in the city. In Ramallah, the Israelis tore the hard drives from 100 computers at the Education Ministry and trashed all student files, according to Palestinian authorities.
Some of the destruction has to be pure vandalism: Israeli troops smashed through the door of Mary Jubran of Ramallah, a 75-year-old Palestinian Christian. They found no terrorists, but defaced a portrait of the Virgin Mary, smashed a statuette of the crucified Jesus, and carted off her stock of two bottles of Chivas Regal, according to her nephew, Jamil Rabah.
According to Palestinian officials, Israeli troops yesterday ransacked the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, which holds the office of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and houses some of Palestine's most important artworks and historical documents.
The immense damage inflicted during the Israeli offensive - and the question of who will pay for it - will probably become yet another obstacle to any peace agreement in a conflict already mired in disputes over how to achieve a cease-fire and address demands for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The United Nations Children's Fund said that more than 3,000 people have been displaced by fighting at the Jenin refugee camp. An attempt to bring in a trickle of international aid to Jenin failed yesterday, as Israel refused passage of a convoy of 25 relief vehicles carring baby food, mattresses, and emergency medicine. Military officials cited such security concerns as snipers and booby-trapped explosives.
In the camp, giant D-9 military bulldozers leveled entire blocks of battle-ravaged structures. The occasional crack of a sniper's rifle, followed by short bursts of Israeli counterfire, echoed through narrow lanes. The inhabitants remaining in the camp were without electricy and water and fast running out of food.
Palestinians say that a massacre occurred in Jenin, with hundreds dead, and that dozens of bodies were dumped into mass graves and then covered over by bulldozers. Israeli officials hotly deny the accounts of secret burials, making the macabre countercharge that Palestinan militants still at large in Jenin, where minor skirmishes and mop-up operations continued, are ''hoarding'' bodies of fighters killed in recent action. Israel is doing all it can to avoid civilian casualties, the officials said.
''We expect they plan to dump [the bodies] into the streets for benefit of international news cameras,'' said a military spokesman, Moshe Fogel. ''They need an atrocity for propaganda purposes.''
Israel said the situation in Jenin is still too confused to give an accurate Palestinian body count, but Brigadier General Ron Kitrey said there have been ''hundreds of casualties,'' including some dead and wounded civilians. The Israeli army lost 23 soldiers in the battle and insists that most of the Palestinian dead were fighters.
Israel punched into Jenin and other civilian centers in the West Bank with uncommon ferocity, often relying on reservists with little training in close-quarters combat. During the battles for Jenin and Nablus, troops advanced on militia strongholds by boring through the walls of house after house, creating ''tunnels of approach'' to avoid exposure to gunfire in the streets.
The Palestinian radicals seem to have deliberately chosen densely populated neighborhoods in which to make their bloody last stands, making civilian deaths inevitable.
Although journalists were allowed in Ramallah at the beginning of the Israeli offensive, they are now banned from military operation zones. Still, reporters have slipped past Israeli checkpoints into parts of Jenin, Nablus, and other scenes of the heaviest fighting.
The lightning Israeli advance has created an arc of destruction across the West Bank, with Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tulkarem, and Qalqiya taking the heaviest damage. Those centers are still under siege by Israeli forces, although the pitched battles have ended.
''Jenin will go down as one of the black places of history,'' said Mustafa Barghouthi, an official of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committee.
In Nablus, the ancient casbah, or old quarter, has been pounded into piles of brick slag and torn sheet metal by fusillades of missiles fired from American-made Apache helicopters. Rocket runs by F-16 fighter bombers gutted old soap factories; Nablus has been famous for fine soaps for centuries. Bulldozers used in the assault on the old souk, or market, crushed the antique Merchants Inn, parts of which dated to Roman times.
Hader Masri, manager of a soap factory, pointed to the cracks in the walls and shattered windowpanes of his home. But he was lucky; the home of his next-door neighbor was demolished by withering fire from a hovering gunship. ''We have been living under death,'' Masri said. ''Fire pouring down upon us because the Israelis are so angry.''
In Ramallah and Bethlehem, public archives have been gutted, property records destroyed, and the infrastructure of Palestinian government, from computers to police stations, smashed beyond repair.
''The wheel of the economy has been stopped completely,'' said businessman Walid Najjib, noting that private companies receive no insurance compensation for damage caused by acts of war. ''No factories are working. No one is drawing a paycheck. And reconstruction will cost billions of dollars.''
Israelis insist that not all the damage was done by troops. Palestinian fighters placed explosives in buildings and roads to slow advancing infantry. In Nablus, scores of such pipe bombs, still attached to detonation cords, lie in view.
''Of course, there is damage in a battle, terrible damage,'' said General Dan Halutz. ''And when the fighting is finished, there must be a Marshall Plan for the Palestinians. There must be reconstruction, and Israel will welcome support of the international community.''
Globe correspondent Said Ghazali contributed to this report.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 4/14/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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