Levy: We proceed from house to house through the holes made by soldiers in the walls of the rooms

October 5, 2007 8:10 am henrymunsonjr Gideon Levy

Gideon Levi [Levy], Twilight Zone / Black holes - Haaretz, October 4, 2007

A visit to Ein Beit-Ilma refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus. We proceed from house to house through the holes made by soldiers in the walls of the rooms. From the home of the Yunes family, our hosts, we make our way to the Rajab family through the hole in the stairwell. From the Rajabs we go on to the Namruttis, this time through the hole in the bedroom wall. From there to the Taha family, now through the living room. “Let’s go back to the street,” says Dr. Ghassan Hamdan, director of Palestinian Medical Relief Services in Nablus, after we have passed dustily through half a dozen homes without having emerged into the street. “We are not soldiers,” he says.

The neighborly relations in this shabby camp are now more open: You can ask a neighbor for salt without having to leave the house. Whole streets can now be traversed indoors, through the walls, one gaping hole after another. The Israel Defense Forces banged its head against the wall, so to speak, until its soldiers found the terrorist who planned to commit suicide, as well as his squad, which had already sent the explosive belt to Tel Aviv.

Along the way, the IDF killed a disabled man, half of whose body was paralyzed, though the IDF claimed he was armed with an M-16 rifle; demolished a five-story building, leaving five families homeless; damaged dozens of other houses around the demolished building; and made the many holes in the walls. One soldier was killed here, Staff Sergeant Ben-Zion Henman, from Moshav Nov, in the Golan Heights, and we are now standing at the spot where he fell.

The IDF was here for three days and four nights in mid-September. Hundreds of soldiers went from house to house, leaving destruction and terror in their wake, arresting many dozens of camp residents, before leaving in the early morning hours of September 21. A large-scale terrorist attack was prevented, and the refugee camp is licking its wounds and calculating the damage.

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