HEBRON REFLECTION:  They left their mark everywhere

Her dropped head, her clasped hands, her sad face continue to haunt me.  I ask myself how anyone could endure this kind of pain, especially a mother.

I sat in a stupefied silence as the fifty-six-year-old woman told us about the invasion of her home last October.  Soldiers had awakened the family and their relatives next door by banging on the door at 12:00 a.m.  They then ordered the families out of their homes, locked the women and young children in the shop next door, handcuffed and blindfolded the men and adolescent boys, and told them stand in front of a shop.  

In the next twelve hours, the Israeli military shot and killed two Palestinian men accused of killing four settlers.  Afterwards soldiers entered the same house, although neighbors said the family had no connection to the killings, shot randomly into the bed, through the blankets, under the bed, into the windows, doors, and table.  I wept within when the mother pointed out a beautiful blanket meant to be a wedding gift for one of the sons and his wife, now riddled with bullet holes.

The aggression did not end there.  While forty to fifty military vehicles blocked the streets outside, two bulldozers demolished the part of the house where a newly married son lived with his wife.   They then destroyed another part of the complex prepared for another son soon to be married.  Furniture and remains of furniture now hung from the skeletal frameworks, where once a multi-family building stood.

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