CPTnet
October 27, 2003
HEBRON: Crime and Punishment

by Mary Lawrence

Last Wednesday afternoon a Palestinian shot and wounded two Israeli settlers
in the Hebron settlement of Tel Rumeida. The army killed the gunman. Then
soldiers began to go from house to house ordering Palestinians to leave
their homes. By the early evening great numbers of settlers began throwing
stones at and trying to open the gates to various Palestinian homes. The
family who lives across from the settlement asked if CPTers would spend the
night with them.

By now it was dark. As Diane Janzen, our translator and I walked down into
the neighborhood, we could see women gathered at the bottom of the hill. We
could also see Israeli army jeeps and soldiers. We knew that they would not
allow us to pass.

We stopped to talk to the women and watched as a procession of young men and
boys came past us carrying furniture. One little boy carried a small coffee
table on his head. He was followed by other children carrying bags of beans,
pots and pans, and toys. The women crowded around us and began to tell us
what had happened.

In the afternoon they had heard shooting. Some of them had cautiously looked
through a window. One woman said that she saw the gunman lying in the road.
"They kept on shooting into him even after he was dead," she said. "Then
they came and pulled off his clothes and dragged his body, naked, to the
ambulance and threw him in. The soldiers came and told us all to get out of
our houses. The soldiers
went into our houses and began shooting everywhere. They made us stay
outside all this time, almost six hours. They demolished the kitchen, here
with a bulldozer." She pointed to the remains; the rubble had been cleared
away and dumped across the road in a hollow.

The young men and the children continued to remove things from the house
along the street, carrying them to another home further up the hill. "Why
are they emptying the house?" we asked. "The soldiers told them to take
everything out," said the woman.

We thought that they might demolish the house, but we learned later, from
the father of the young man who lived there, that the eviction might be for
just a few weeks.

The young man's father asked us to come and see the damage that the soldiers
had done when they searched his house that afternoon. We saw bullet holes in
everything, including the bath.

That night we slept at the home of a neighboring family. In the morning, we
discovered that the soldiers had welded shut the doors of the evicted
family's house, as well as the doors of two other homes.

As we walked down the hill, I wondered how the Israeli army believed it had
achieved any kind of justice, here. A young Palestinian from another
neighborhood had shot and wounded Israeli settlers, and these Palestinians,
total strangers, had been punished for it.