Tales from a Hornets' Nest

by Katharine Maycock

From: Bullet Points

There is an Arabic proverb that says: 'the one who counts the beatings, is not the same as the one being beaten.'

The longer I stay here the more I realise I am in the position of the one watching the beating going on. However empathetic with suffering, I remain free and able to walk away at any time and am not subject to the same mesh of lies, confusion and emotional turmoil that a conflict brings.

International presence here is usually welcomed, but plenty of Palestinians remark quite rightly that nothing much changes because of it.

A few days ago I was in the Old City of Nablus, the biblical city of Shechem and an ancient Palestinian town with labyrinths of secret alleyways, and timeworn stone stairways leading round corners to houses. Like the Old City in Jerusalem, this Old City has come to house the poorest people and those with money have long since built houses outside.

Nablus

Also believed to be a hive of 'terrorists' or 'Palestinian militants', Nablus residents are regularly terrorised by the Israeli army who make raids day and night into the city. A few days before I sat in their crumbling house, Inas and Majdi (names changed) and their children experienced one such raid which has left their lives in peril. At 2am they heard noises and found that Israeli soldiers with tracker dogs were on the roof and surrounding their stone house. Using a lazer torch, they beamed a light at the house. Inas tried to tell them that her children were sleeping. But to no avail. So she took the children into the street and went to the neighbours.

Then there was a noise and trembling. "I thought it was an earthquake" she said. She came back to find that the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) had blown up two of her rooms - the kitchen and a bedroom. The explosion had also destroyed part of a neighbours house below theirs. The fridge with a door hanging off could still be seen amongst other furnishings.

Rania, their two year old daughter said that the soliders who killed Fadi, a local young 'martyr' from Nablus whose poster is prominent, had 'killed her fridge' too. When asked why they had done this, the IDF who had brought in their own journalists to document the action, claimed that their house was a centre for Palestinian resistance and explosives. That's the first Inas knew of it. Apparently the house used to be an old jewelry shop. Could it be that some remnants of the jewelry shop had been thought to be explosives? Whatever the reason, the family are now all sleeping and living in one room. The walls have serious cracks running throught hem. The local Palestinian Municipality has said the house is unsafe and advises the family to leave but offers no material help. Inas is the breadwinner in her family because her husband who said nothing whilst I was there is asthmatic and has heart problems. She works as a cook for old people. Elegantly dressed in black, attractive, unveiled and young she asked me "Where do we go to? Everyone comes and photos us but no one helps."

Similar tales of often young Palestinian men living in Nablus beaten up as a result of mistaken or unproved identities abound. I met a woman with sick unemployable husband and twelve children. One of her sons was shot in his left elbow one night in the alleyway outside his house. He was told to stop and thought his friends were teasing him. IDF soldiers beat him up and shot him and imprisioned him for 4 months, probably on the basis that his brother is already in prison in an Israeli jail. Though just 18, he is now the breadwinner of the family. Young and kindly looking, his left arm pinned up underneath his t-shirt, he was in a lot of pain and cannot afford any drugs. The operation he needs to put his arm right cannot be done in the Territories. On the same night he was attacked, the IDF had entered their house by blowing a hole in the end wall of their tiny cave-type house off an alleyway. Much of the interior facing had been ripped away, and the house was damp. The family have survived economically because people help them. Asked about their future, his mother says: '"it will be worse than what has gone before