Gideon Levy : Before firing at a Palestinian, the Israeli sniper asked: Where do you want to be shot? -
Four
rounds of sniper fire hit Mohammed Amassi, a young Palestinian baker
standing on the roof of his home in the Al-Fawwar refugee camp. As he
tries now…
haaretz.com
Why waste words when the
video from the Palestinian news agency Ma’an shows pretty much
everything? Israeli soldiers are on the roof of the next-door apartment
building: One is on the lower roof, two on the balcony of the apartment
above the roof, and two more are looking out from the apartment window. A
few teenage girls and children are looking at them from the neighboring
roof. Total silence. Suddenly, the two soldiers on the balcony raise
their hands, as though giving a signal, and one of them, the sniper,
aims and starts shooting. On the roof of the building, Mohammed Amassi
is hit. He falls to the ground and starts crawling for his life, bent on
getting off the roof. Finally, a medical team gets him down via a
ladder. The only thing Amassi is holding is his cell phone. Nothing
about him could have seemed threatening to the soldiers on the roof
opposite, about 80 meters (260 feet) away. The sniper took aim and
fired, hitting him with round after round. The palm of one hand is
covered with blood; he is writhing in pain, stunned.
A
few weeks later, Amassi, 22, is in his living room, lying on a new
adjustable bed that has been loaned to him by a Palestinian charity.
He’s a good-looking young man, smiling and quiet. His family’s home is
well kept, compared to others in Al-Fawwar — a hardscrabble refugee
camp, the most southerly in the West Bank and the one that most closely
resembles the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip, which isn’t all that far
from here.
On
August 16, a huge Israel Defense Forces raiding party, consisting of
hundreds of soldiers, swooped into Al-Fawwar in the dead of night. In
less than 24 hours, they killed one person and wounded dozens more.
Their haul: two old pistols. (Amira Hass wrote about this unbelievable
operation, “One killed and dozens wounded at a Palestinian refugee camp, all for two pistols,”
in Haaretz, August 21.) The local residents are convinced the raid was
nothing more than a training exercise carried out at their expense.
We
arrived at Al-Fawwar on the eve of Id al-Adha (the feast of the
sacrifice). In the butcher shop, a cow was being sliced up for the
holiday. Those who can afford meat congregated around the animal,
waiting for their portion. The IDF rarely carries out raids in this
crowded camp, where about 10,000 people live in an area of one square
kilometer. The troops haven’t returned since the raid.
Amassi
is the son of the camp’s baker, Ibrahim Amassi, and the eldest of six
siblings. Their family bakery was the first in Al-Fawwar, dating from
the foundation of the refugee camp in the early 1950s. In recent years,
it’s produced mainly pretzels, cookies and special doughs for
traditional dishes. Mohammed studied interior design, but afterward
became a baker to help provide for the family. He works two shifts a
day, morning and afternoon, seven days a week. He has never been
arrested or even been interrogated by Israeli authorities. Above the
living room in which he is now recovering, another apartment is being
built: he will live there when he marries and has a family of his own.
His
hand is bandaged, and both legs are marked with wounds and scars from
the shooting and subsequent surgery. Bedridden, Amassi continues to
suffer from intense pain. It’s not clear whether he will be able either
to walk again or to use his hand. At the moment, he can only hobble
around with the aid of crutches. On the day of the big raid last month,
his younger siblings woke him at 6:30 A.M., three hours after the
soldiers entered the camp. The troops were scouring the alleys and
seizing control of buildings. At first, the camp’s inhabitants thought
the soldiers had come to demolish the home of Mohammed al-Shobaki, who
stabbed an IDF soldier last November and was killed afterward. However,
it soon became apparent that the troops had other intentions, though it
was not clear what they were.
Watching the show
The
whole camp was up on rooftops, watching the show, and Amassi was no
exception. His house has two roofs: one, with a low rail, where people
sit on hot summer nights; and above it an unfenced roof, for the water
tank and satellite dish. Amassi climbed onto the upper roof to get a
better view. It’s dangerous there: Without the fence, there’s no place
to take cover. Teams from Ma’an and the television channel Palestine
Today were positioned on the roof of the adjacent building, which offers
better protection from the soldiers. Clashes were taking place between
soldiers and stone throwers on the camp’s main street, but quiet
prevailed here, on the high hill where this neighborhood stands.
The
troops seized quite a few houses — about 30, according to Musa Abu
Hashhash, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization
B’Tselem — and carried out searches in about 200 homes, smashing holes
in some walls for snipers. At about 9 A.M., Amassi was talking to the
reporters on the next-door roof. Suddenly he heard a soldier who was
deployed on the balcony of the building below his call to him in Arabic:
“Where do you want to get it?” Amassi was petrified. He knew what this
meant: In which part of your body do you want to be shot?
According
to Amassi, there was nothing to account for the soldier’s chilling
question. The street was quiet, and Mohammed had done nothing that could
be construed as a threat to the troops, who were 80 meters away as the
crow flies. His father, Ibrahim, believes the soldiers shot his son in
order to demonstrate their power to the camera crews on the roof next
door.
“What
did the soldier say to you?” Amassi’s friend, Ismail Najar, asked from
the neighboring roof. But before Amassi could answer, he saw the soldier
take aim and start shooting at him. Three bullets struck him in rapid
succession. The first slammed into his left leg next to the knee, the
second hit him between his hip and his left thigh, the third smashed
into his right leg. When he raised his hands and called out to the
soldier, “Enough, enough,” the sniper fired one more round, perhaps as
an encore. The final bullet hit him in the palm of his hand. They were
0.22-inch Ruger, or Toto, bullets and didn’t kill him
Amassi
then tried to find shelter on an exposed roof that has no shelter. He
could have fallen off. In the edited Ma’an video, he’s seen crawling
desperately. A flimsy, makeshift iron ladder — which I was afraid to
climb — is the only way to gain access the upper roof. Somehow, the
paramedics got him down. They carried him by foot for about 150 meters
up the narrow alley to their ambulance, which took a soldier-bypass
route to get him to Al-Ahli Hospital in nearby Hebron. Amassi was
semiconscious. Damage had been done to blood vessels. To avoid having to
amputate his leg, he was moved to Hebron’s other hospital, Alia. But
they, too, did not have the necessary specialist. That evening, he was
transferred to the Ramallah Government Hospital, where he underwent
surgery.
In
reply to a query from Haaretz, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit stated this
week: “On August 16, a military operation was conducted in Al-Fawwar
refugee camp, with the aim of thwarting and striking at the terrorist
infrastructures that exist throughout the camp. The operation included
extensive searches to seize combat means and also the arrest of five
wanted individuals. During the operation, army forces came under live
fire and violent disturbances developed, which included the throwing of
stones and cinder blocks, and dozens of explosive devices and Molotov
cocktails, to which the forces responded with crowd dispersal means and
shooting. The video mentioned is edited tendentiously and does not
reflect the violent situation that developed in the refugee camp.”
Amassi
spent 10 days in the Ramallah hospital. One bullet remains lodged deep
inside, somewhere between his waist and hip and left thigh, and the
physicians aren’t sure they will be able to remove it. If not, he will
probably have to undergo additional surgery in Jordan. Next to his bed
is a plastic jar containing the two bullet fragments that were
successfully extracted from his body. He’s taking five different types
of painkillers to try to relieve the suffering.
We
leave him and go up to the roof. There are tangled iron rods where he
fell. A few hours after he was shot, troops killed Mohammed Abu
Hashhash, 19, who was shot the instant he stepped out of his house, a
few hundred meters away, on another street. The soldiers opened fire
through a breach they made in the wall of a neighboring house. That
breach, together with a painting of the dead teenager on the wall,
constitute a monument to a young man whose killing was probably as
unnecessary as the shooting of the young baker in Al-Fawwar.
Commenti
Posta un commento