This article is from the UK Observer Sunday 20th May 2001

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Grief and defiance as Israel unleashes more air strikes

Hamas and the militias have reached the point of no return, reports Suzanne Goldenberg from the West Bank town of Nablus after 22 people died in 24 hours

Special report: Israel and the Middle East

 Sunday May 20, 2001
The Observer

 The Palestinian police lieutenant was lounging in a dormitory of the main security compound in the West Bank town of Nablus, killing time with his mates, when an Israeli air force F-16 fighter jet brought the world crashing down.

'There was a very loud and terrible sound - even the water tanks exploded. Everything was shaking; it was like an earthquake,' said the lieutenant, wearing the blue camouflage uniform of Yasser Arafat's rapid deployment force. 'I flew through the air and landed on my back.'

By the time Samir - the lieutenant gave only his first name - scrambled to his feet, he realised he was lucky to survive. The Israeli attack on Friday evening reduced the southern portion of the security compound which dominates the main road in Nablus to a 12ft heap of smoking rubble. Ten people were killed and some 60 injured.

Samir immediately began to look for his friends, clawing through the rubble to find corpses and body parts, including a human head.

The reliving of such horrors dominated the day's events in Nablus where tens of thousands of defiant mourners, many bristling with automatic rifles and sidearms, collected yesterday for the policemen's funerals.

It was a bizarre parade of weaponry and anger, with the trucks bearing the corpses of the policemen done up like floats with Palestinian flags and oversized black-and-white chequered keffiyehs, and the procession accompanied by gunfire, the chanting of slogans, and a drum machine provided by the Islamic militant group Hamas. 'We want another operation,' the Hamas men chanted. The organisation carried out Friday morning's suicide bombing of a shopping mall in the coastal town of Netanya, killing five Israelis. It was the deadliest suicide bombing within the borders of the Jewish state since the start of the Palestinian uprising eight months ago, setting the stage for a vicious upswing which would kill 22 people in 24 hours.

'Patience, patience,' the Hamas leaders yelled back over loudspeakers. 'With our hands, we will dig our own graves.' Most people in the crowd saw the air strikes in reprisal for the Netanya bombing - the first time Israel has used its warplanes against the Palestinians in the West Bank since it captured the territory in the 1967 war - as a point of no return.

The gunmen of Yasser Arafat's Fatah militias rode by car, rifles with sniper sights poking out of the back windows of Honda Civics, or strode along in formation, firing into the air with such abandon there was scarcely a street lamp left intact.

But the day belonged to Hamas. The main target of the F-16s on Friday was Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, the suspected mastermind of several suicide bombings and Israel's most wanted man.

Initial reports said Hanoud was wounded in the attack, but escaped. However, Jamal Mansour, the organisation's key figure in the West Bank, said yesterday that Hanoud emerged from the wreckage unscathed and had been taken to a safe destination.

The procession took the crowds past the bombed-out security headquarters and the Nablus Children Happiness Centre, on the other side of the town's main road. As they passed, dozens of people broke away to clamber over the wreckage.

Some had already been there on Friday night, joining desperate efforts to extricate people from the rubble with bulldozers and bare hands.

'When we got here, we could see this whole part of the building had collapsed, and we could hear voices of people calling out from under the ruins,' said Basel Juddeh, a labourer who lives in a block of flats on the opposite hill. 'They kept saying "Help me, help me. I am injured, I am underneath the rubble". Some of them were groaning.'

Most of the dead were in the building, a compound containing the offices of the Nablus governor, a police barracks and a jail.

'The first person I saw, his face was covered with blood. Part of his body was under a big chunk of rubble,' Mr Juddeh said. 'We took the concrete off of him and tried to pull him out.' But the policeman, and the next two people Mr Juddeh dragged from the rubble, were dead.

Yesterday the policeman's corpse was consigned to one of the fleet of ambulances outside the governor's office, each with a notice in Arabic on the windscreen with the name of the dead, and their final destination, their home towns in the West Bank.

Within the hour there was one more dead in Nablus, a stone-thrower killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint which erupted after the funeral.

Meanwhile, Israeli helicopters rocketed Palestinian security installations in two other West Bank towns yesterday afternoon, in a second wave of reprisals for the Netanya bombing.

Eight rockets smashed into a compound of Yasser Arafat's Force 17 security detail at the town of Jenin.

Near Jenin, a Palestinian policeman manning a checkpoint was killed by shots from a car. In Gaza a Palestinian farmer was shot dead by Israeli troops near the Karni crossing with Israel. The latest episodes sharpened international fears that the violence is out of control. In New York the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, condemned the suicide bombing in Netanya, but he said Israel's retaliation with F-16s was 'disproportionate'.

But judging from the satisfied air of the Hamas leaders, there will be no relenting in Hamas's campaign. Friday's was the seventh of 10 suicide bombings Hamas has threatened to carry out within the borders of the Jewish state.

* Suzanne Goldenberg has won the Edgar Wallace Award for Outstanding Reporting at the London Press Club Awards