BY AHMAD NIMER
RAMALLAH — On the night of September 15 at around 4am, I was jolted out of bed by the sound of helicopters hovering over the city. This sound in itself has become rather ubiquitous over the last few months, usually signalling an impending rocket attack or an assassination attempt on an intifada activist.
This time, however, something was clearly different, the sheer number of helicopters and the sound of shouting from nearby houses indicated that something was happening outside of the usual pattern.
My immediate suspicions were soon confirmed. Most residents of Ramallah had been expecting Israeli troops to enter the town, following similar incursions in Jenin, Jericho, Nablus, Qalqilya and Gaza over the previous nights.
Ramallah was considered last on the list due to its centrality and the large presence of foreign organisations and journalists. The day before, the US embassy had informed US citizens that they should leave Ramallah because of an expected invasion.
Over the next four hours a large contingent of Israeli troops, backed by 10 tanks and numerous helicopters, invaded the western parts of Ramallah. Israeli tanks shelled civilian areas causing widespread damage as helicopters fired wildly at any Palestinian in the streets.
Twenty-six year old Ali al-Yassini was killed by a bullet from one of these helicopters as he stood on his roof. A 70-year-old woman suffered a heart attack and died when one of the tanks fired a missile towards her house. Another 24 Palestinians were injured, three of them critically, as a result of Israeli gunfire. Ambulances were prevented from reaching the wounded for hours.
The invasion exposed the ludicrous claim that Palestinians and Israelis are engaged in a war between two armies. In the face of tanks and helicopters, Palestinians armed with little more than light arms fought a stubborn battle with the Israeli troops. While the Israeli army fired US-made missiles at buildings and houses in the area, Palestinians responded by bringing their domestic gas bottles onto the streets in a vain effort to cause some damage to the tanks.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in the US, Israeli strategy towards the year-long Palestinian intifada is following a two-pronged approach — one military and the other diplomatic — in an attempt to impose a forced surrender on the Palestinian people.
This last week has seen the tightest closure in history imposed on Palestinian cities and villages in the occupied territories.
For five days it has been almost impossible to enter or leave Ramallah, with Israeli checkpoints set up at all entrances to the city. Nearby Bir Zeit University has been forced to cancel the start of the new semester because students and staff are unable to reach the campus. A checkpoint set up on the main road to Jerusalem just outside Qalandia Refugee Camp is surrounded everyday by thousands of people trying to leave and enter Ramallah.
A colleague of mine who lives just outside Ramallah has been unable to reach work for four days. She reports that the several times she has approached the Qalandia checkpoint to try and enter Ramallah, Israeli troops have fired tear gas and even live ammunition into the crowds near the checkpoint.
Every day I hear ambulances outside my office window bringing wounded Palestinians who were merely trying to reach their homes or places of work. Another colleague has been forced to rent an apartment in Ramallah, leaving his partner and three-year-old daughter in Bethlehem, because it is too dangerous to make the journey each morning.
Over the last week, a staggering 32 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces — the vast majority of them civilians — while hundreds have been wounded.
Such a large number of casualties has not occurred since the beginning of the intifada and in normal times would have at least raised some comment in the international media.
While Israel's army continues to kill, its leaders are talking of a return to negotiations; both sides have now officially declared a "ceasefire" although the chances of it holding are minimal. A meeting between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres seems increasingly likely, although such an encounter is strongly rejected by the Palestinian street.
The most common analogy drawn today is with the US-led war against Iraq in the early 1990s. At that time, Israel imposed a curfew on the Palestinian residents of the occupied territories for the period of the war. The mass imprisonment of the entire population effectively ended the first intifada that began in 1987. Soon after the end of the war, negotiations began that culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords.
One decade later, many fear that history is repeating itself.