Below is a more detailed version of what happened Saturday night.  I went to bed wired from writing the release and various twitters.  I set  my alarm for 6:00 in order to get to Jerusalem for church by 9:00 the next morning (the journey used to take a half hour before the restrictions of travel.  A friend called at 4:38 a.m. telling me that settlers were stoning his house, and could I please call the police.  I went downstairs to the office and tried all the police numbers, none of which got me through to a human being.  I called my friend back to apologize and he said that the police had arrived in the 15 minute interim.   I didn't really sleep after that.  So after church, I went to a friend's house in Jerusalem and slept, on and off, for the next 18 hours.

What happened in the market may not seem like big deal. No one died--it's just another small humiliation; but it's these accrued humiliations--a rock through a window, soldiers urinating in a family's water tank--that sometimes stick with you most.

We heard the first explosion shortly after dinner.  I went up to the roof of our apartment building in Hebron to look for after-effects: smoke, soldiers barking orders, shouting from people in the streets.  When I saw nothing untoward, I came downstairs.  After the second explosion, we got a call from a local shop owner, saying a man had been injured by a sound bomb.  These devices, which look like grenades, are used for crowd control in demonstrations.  They emit a sound so painfully loud that people cannot help moving back.  However, in the Hebron market the last merchants were closing up their shops and people were returning to their homes, there were no demonstrations or even gatherings of any kind.

 When we got to the scene, a man was lying among embroideries and rugs in one of the shops, eyes rolled back; semiconscious from receiving a direct blow to the head of the bomb.  I saw the remains of the sound bomb on the ground and covered it with a piece of cardboard, so that soldiers and police would not confiscate and lose the evidence.  As people in the market urged me to go in a different direction, a sound bomb, tossed from the roof above fell about six feet away from me and about two feet away from a young woman in a pink head scarf.  The shopkeeper told me to come back to her shop and it was a few minutes before I noticed that the young woman was crouched against a wall, hands over her ears, temporarily deafened and in shock. 

 At that point I assumed the people throwing the bombs were settlers.  Because of the Lag Baomer holiday, a lot of young Israeli settlers were in town, and throwing garbage and bricks into the market is something settlers often do, so I called up to a soldier on the rooftop, “People are getting hurt down here from whoever is throwing these.”  More sound bombs exploded at different parts of the market.  Soldiers walking by on patrol ordered an angry woman and her wailing children to shut up.

 A man ran past me, with his young daughter in his arms, who was sobbing, “Baba, Baba” (“Daddy, Daddy”).  A sound bomb had been thrown at her when she was playing in the street and she could not stand up.

 By that time at least two eyewitnesses told me that the people throwing the bombs were soldiers, out of some type of malicious sense of humor.  After the father tenderly laid his daughter on a chair to wait for the ambulance, he began yelling at a soldier on the rooftop.  Although I could not understand all of the Arabic, I understood from his gestures he was saying something along the lines of, “Are you proud of yourselves? Do you think it’s fun to do this to a little girl?”

 I put the remnants of two sound bombs—the one that had knocked the man unconscious and the one that had fallen in front of me--in a bag and took them back to our apartment.  I called the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, to say they were available for evidence.  I repeated the offer to some TIPH monitors I saw patrolling and they suggested I send them to my own organization.  I talked to a friend who works for a Palestinian Human Rights organization who also told me that it would not find the items useful.  They were just souvenirs

 I thought, maybe the adrenaline is making me overreact, maybe it’s really not such a big deal that no one wanted the sound bombs to ascertain who was responsible for throwing them.  But then I thought, “What if this had happened in Brighton—the approximately 36,000 person suburb of Rochester, New York, where I live.  What if soldiers had thrown sound bombs in Brighton’s Twelve Corners shopping plaza?  The Brighton Police would have collected these as evidence; they would have dusted for fingerprints, noted the serial numbers and gone to the soldiers’ commander, asking him/her to interrogate soldiers responsible or make them available for police interrogation.  Headlines in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle the next day would read “Soldiers throw sound grenades at people in Brighton, injuring several, including six year old girl.”  The U.S. military and Brighton police might argue whether the soldiers should be tried in civil or military courts.

 But none of that will happen here.  Nothing will happen to these soldiers.

 My eardrums still hurt a little.