Hope No Major Damage Occurred
Last week, I wrote about the first year or so of the intifada; about experiences that took place amidst some residual normalcy and mobility, despite daily violence and - from May 2001 onwards - the introduction of Israeli aerial bombardments. In the first weeks of March 2002, however, the intifada took yet another turn.
The Israeli army had been making incursions into Palestinian towns, including Ramallah, with alarming regularity. With nowhere to go, staying inside our homes was often the only way to stay out of harm’s way - although even that wasn’t guaranteed, as home incursions had become a regular occurrence, and people were sometimes killed at home, too.
Shortly after the intifada ended, Israeli soldier testimonies collected by the newly established group Breaking the Silence shed light on the reason why so many civilians were killed during this period: Israeli soldiers “carried out shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed Palestinians,” including vicious instructions to consider “anyone who appeared on a roof or a balcony” a legitimate target.
We began to stay at home, sometimes for days on end. We kept our shutters closed and stayed away from our enclosed veranda. I looked forward to my father’s return from his shifts at the hospital, as he would always take me with him to buy food and other essentials - increasingly my only opportunity to be outside of our apartment building. Although I was only ten years old, I think my father recognised that my restless nature required as many breaks as possible from home confinement.
Schools had started to close their doors more frequently. At the end of the year, a study by Birzeit University found that 42 per cent of schools in the Ramallah, al-Bireh and Beitunia areas were directly affected by gunfire, that 71 per cent did not have adequate shelter in case of violence, and that 85 per cent reported students facing various difficulties in reaching school. In other words, schools were unsafe spaces, and teachers didn’t have the resources to guarantee our safety.
I remember one incident when, while at school, we suddenly heard helicopters overhead. Palestinians do not have an army, let alone aerial equipment, so what we were hearing could only be the Israeli army. Our teacher opened the classroom door and peeked into the hallway, where other teachers were doing the same. They decided to gather students in the classrooms on the side of the building furthest away from the city centre, as they seemed to think that was where the helicopters were most likely to strike. They let siblings and family members from different grades sit together, so my sister joined my cousin and me in one of the classrooms. After a while with no airstrikes, the coast seemed clear, and we continued with our lesson as usual. It had been a false alarm.
In addition to often missing school, we had become increasingly isolated from our wider family. Palestinian families are generally close and see each other regularly. Our family used to gather every Friday at my grandparent’s home for lunch, the main meal of the day. The women of the family would cook a feast while the men played cards or talked politics. The children would play in the garden, amidst mulberry and apricot trees. The dishes we would eat were my grandmother’s recipes, and through them, we learned to trace our family’s heritage to the coastal diets of Isdud and Khan Younis.
These family gatherings were fuel for the soul; a lifeline; the essence of what it meant to grow up Palestinian. Increasingly, however, the nearby settlement of Psagot had been posing a threat. Throughout the intifada, snipers operated from it sporadically, and in the first week of March, a shell fired from Psagot into Ramallah killed a woman and five children on the road that led to my grandparent’s home. Driving to our grandparents became too dangerous.
There is a decent body of reporting on Operation Defensive Shield, which began at the end of March 2002. Much less spoken of are the weeks before this operation.
On the 12th of March, between 100 and 150 Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles entered Ramallah and nearby refugee camps. It was the largest show of force since the start of the intifada, although it would be eclipsed in magnitude only two weeks later. But that’s a story for next time.
An Israeli army spokesperson said at the time that the military operation intended to form “a wall – figuratively speaking,” between Ramallah and Jerusalem, as the army alleged that most Palestinian attacks in Jerusalem were conducted by people from Ramallah. By the end of the first day of this operation, 40 Palestinians had been killed.
The army’s presence in the city was unsettling, to say the least, and people worried that they might stay for a while. On the first or second day of the incursion, my father came home from work and said that he wanted to go and find us some food - enough to get us through a week or two, just in case. He asked me to join and, of course, I agreed. We drove towards the city centre. It was unsettlingly quiet. Every now and again, we would pass by an Israeli military vehicle, but mercifully we didn’t run into any trouble.
Six roads branch out from Ramallah’s central roundabout, which is known as the Manara. We drove along one of them, and I stared out of the window as more and more shops, closed but familiar, appeared in my view. I still don’t know how I felt exactly, seeing these happy and once-normal locations closed, marks of war across the walls and shutters, broken glass everywhere, and the road full of rubble and bullet casings.
I felt pain, and a lot of it, but there was a strange sense of relief, too. You see, the violence had pushed us indoors, with only the sounds and smells of war penetrating our home, and I had begun to feel like I was living in my imagination, inside a nightmare of sorts. There was almost something comforting about seeing the material reality of what was happening; that I wasn’t losing my mind.
As we approached the Manara, I noticed my father tilt his head forward, looking up. “Samar,” he said, in an unusually stern way, “put your head down and don’t look.”
Airstrike, I thought. I put my head in between my legs and looked down at my shoes. After a few moments, I realised I didn’t hear any planes or helicopters overhead. I told my father.
“Just don’t look out of the window,” he said.
I obviously had to look.
Ahead, on a metal structure in the middle of the Manara’s iconic lion statues, a young man’s lifeless body was hanging upside down. His shirt had been stripped off. His torso was black and red, and his face was covered in blood. I had seen dead men before, but I had never seen one hanging by the ankles.
“I said don’t look!” my father exclaimed.
Something about the scene felt off. It didn’t seem to me that soldiers would care enough about a single Palestinian to display his body like that. Was he someone important?
I asked my father what happened to the man.
“He was a traitor,” my father answered. His voice was abrupt in a way that told me not to ask any further questions. I had heard about the traitors before; Palestinians who collaborated with Israelis. I now know that around 1,500 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians for alleged collaboration with Israel from the start of the First Intifada until the end of the Second Intifada.
On the second day of the operation, Israeli forces blocked access to the two main hospitals in Ramallah for 13 hours; a blockade that was only eased after hospital officials told the army that “they would operate on patients in the streets if the blockade did not stop.”
That same day, the Israeli army shot and killed Italian photographer Raffaele Ciriello; the first of 10 foreign and 18 Palestinian journalists to be killed during the Second Intifada. In response to his death, the Israeli army claimed to have “no information about the presence of journalists in Ramallah” and that “journalists who entered the area were “endangering” themselves” as it was considered a closed military zone.
When my father returned to work after our supply run, he received word that his private clinic - where he worked on some weekday afternoons, after hospital shifts - had been taken as a base of operations by Israeli soldiers. The clinic was located in a tall building in a strategic location at the edge of the city centre.
On the afternoon of the 14th of March, Israel began to withdraw its tanks and armoured vehicles from Ramallah. This is when the following note was written by an Israeli army doctor on a prescription notepad in my father’s clinic.
The note reads:
“Dear Dr. Batrawi,
While staying in this office building with the Israeli military forces, I have used the facilities of your office to examine and treat ill Palestinians and soldiers. I did my best to avoid damaging your office and I hope no major damage occurred.
Yours, Dr. A.W., Israeli Army”
My father found the note on his desk in his examination room, where he kept most of his medical equipment and patient files. On the floor was a broken EKG machine; his stethoscope and sphygmomanometer; scattered medical records belonging to his patients. Half-eaten battle rations were dotted across the office. Medicines were missing, as was my father’s computer.
By now it had become common knowledge among Palestinians that if the army searched your home or office, they were likely to destroy, loot or otherwise leave their mark on your property. One of the more vulgar practices was that of urinating or defecating in people’s homes or businesses - and by that I mean not in the toilet.
This became such a widespread practice that it can be tempting to think that soldiers received orders to do so. Much more likely, however, is that the chaotic command structure, patchy communications and total lack of accountability - married with the fact that most soldiers were young men, some even teenagers - cultivated an environment that encouraged such machoism and vulgarity.
After the army left Ramallah, I tried to convince my father to take me with him to see the clinic, but he refused to let me join until he had gone back alone first. I was devastated. Didn’t I have the right to bear witness to what they had left behind?
My father went back to his clinic alone, to clean. When he returned, he said something about it being a bit of a mess, and that we could help him organise things the next time he went. My sister and I were sent to bed. I heard the echoes of my parents speaking well into the night, but I couldn’t make out any of the words.
A few days later, we all drove to the clinic. My stomach was in knots as I walked up the two flights of stairs to his clinic. The door was scratched where the soldiers had forced it open, but my father had already changed to lock. When he opened the door, the smell of chemicals hit me immediately. It was cold, too; my father had left the windows open. My parents walked to the examination room. I went to the waiting area first, my sister holding my hand.
Individual chairs were organised to form makeshift beds. I couldn’t believe they had slept here. I felt complicit, somehow, being part of this space that had made them feel comfortable enough to rest. The kitchen was messy and dirty, with remnants of food scattered all over and coffee stains on the stove. A few of my father’s mugs lay in the sink, broken. I followed the smell of bleach across the hallway and into the bathroom. This room stood in stark contrast to the kitchen. Clearly, my father had cleaned it thoroughly before bringing us here.
I know now that my father spent his first hours back at his clinic not organising patient records or taking inventory of his medical equipment, but cleaning a bathroom that had been left in an unspeakable state. My father never told me what he encountered, and my mother only hinted at it. It was a level of disgrace that, I suppose, he couldn’t stomach sharing with us, even though it only reflects on the soldiers who caused that mayhem.
Even when Amira Hass - the only Israeli journalist to live in the West Bank and cover the events of the Second Intifada - came to interview my father for an article in Haaretz, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the full extent of what was done to his clinic.
The only time my father has mentioned it since was when he sent me a picture of the note that the army doctor left for him, which he found while going through a pile of old papers a few years ago.
The note itself contains the army doctor’s full name, not just the initials A.W., and it didn’t take me long to find him online. Last I checked, he was married and had two children, and he worked for a start-up. He looked happy in his social media pictures.
A.W. got to move on from what he was part of. He got to build a life that seems to bear no material traces of war. His Palestinian counterparts did not.
I wonder whether A.W. ever thinks of those days in the clinic. I wonder whether he talks to his children about it. I wonder what he was thinking when he left his note.
Apparently, while at my father’s clinic, A.W. examined some of the building’s residents when they felt unwell and “reprimanded the soldiers who threatened them with their rifles, demanding cigarettes.”
I wonder whether what he was part of affects him, emotionally or psychologically. I wonder whether he realises that he is still a part of something sinister. I wonder whether he wonders about that Palestinian doctor whose clinic he slept in.
These are the dark dynamics that began to take root eighteen months into the intifada, when military units armed with heavy machinery placed themselves in the heart of our cities, inside our homes and our offices, barricading our hospitals.
With this, any residual normalcy evaporated, and instead made place for a terrifying realisation: we had, once again, entered a new and more dangerous phase of the intifada.
Although the Israeli army began to leave Ramallah on the 14th of March, they would be back only two weeks later. And, that time around, they stayed for a while.