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Thursday, April 4, 2002
On Bethlehem's streets, signs of life, signs of death

By James Bennet
New York Times News Service
   Horrors of war overshadow the city's multi-religious beauty
   BETHLEHEM, West Bank - They did not know much about the Palestinian man, just his name, and that he came from a refugee camp, and that they could not stop his bleeding.
   They found him on the stony street on Tuesday morning, shortly after the Israeli ground forces invaded. He had a big hole in his right side, it seemed from shrapnel, and so they helped him into their two-room home and made him as comfortable as they could on blankets piled on the hard kitchen floor.
   As the crimson stain crept over his pale blue shirt, they called for an ambulance. They called again and again. There was a hospital just a few blocks away, but no ambulance could pass through the gunfire or get by the Israeli armored vehicles that were choking the narrow lanes of Bethlehem's old city.
   "They told us to give him water and soup," said Fathia Musa Attiyeh, sobbing as she remembered how helpless she was. "This morning he said, 'I'm dying.'"
   He held out for a few more hours, until about 3 o'clock on Wednesday afternoon. By 5 p.m., his body was stiffening. As a child stared, Issam Issis, who had also cared for the stranger, sat beside the body, gently stroking the black hair and crying softly. The man had been unarmed, Issis said. His name was Abdel Khader Abu Ahmed, and he came from a refugee camp in Jordan.
   Couldn't take the body
   Outside, a wailing woman shouted into the air, cursing the Israelis, the Arabs, everybody. An ambulance that finally reached the neighborhood could not take the body. Two wounded people were already riding atop three bodies inside.
   Bethlehem is a beautiful place wasted, like so much else in this deepening, maddening fight. Spiked by the spires of churches and the minarets of mosques, it climbs the shoulders of a hill, with a view east across olive groves and desert spaces to the mountains of Jordan.
   At its heart is the cobbled Manger Square, where the Omar ben al-Khattab mosque faces the Church of the Nativity.
   The church, originally built in the fourth century, is revered by Christians, who believe it sits above the manger - a grotto, really - where Jesus was born. Lit by flickering votive candles, a silver star marks the very spot.
   The church, fragrant with centuries of incense, is now full of Palestinian gunmen seeking refuge from the Israeli soldiers who have seized Manger Square.
   Bethlehem's streets were terrifyingly empty on Wednesday. The indifferent tread of the conflict has fallen everywhere. Cars were pancake flat. Store fronts were smashed, mint-green steel doors blown in like curtains before a powerful wind. Sneakers and piles of grain tumbled into the streets. People were too neighborly, or perhaps too scared, to loot shelves that were fully stocked.
   In addition to the occasional bursts of machine-gun fire, there were some other signs of life. An improvised kite - a cone of paper trailed by a blue ribbon - danced above one street. The string led back to a child's hand, reaching through the bars across a window.
   The signs of death were more blunt. The door to one house stood open, and no one answered a call of hello. Inside, shell casings littered the floor and bullet holes pocked the walls.
   Upstairs, in the shadows, lay another body. Someone had attempted first aid, bandaging the man's arm and applying an intravenous drip. But it was not enough. The man's torso was bare and stained with dried blood. A loop of red prayer beads lay by the body.
   Cracked water pipes sent jets of water into the streets. An electric switchboard was smashed in. A 3-foot hole gaped in the second-story wall of one house, while a sedan looked as if something monstrous had taken a bite out of its side.
   An Israeli jeep stopped an ambulance, and the soldiers inside forced two medics to stand against a wall while another medic spent 20 minutes taking every item out of the vehicle and proving it was innocuous. Ambulances have been used to transport terrorists and weapons, Israel says.
   Two sections of green-painted armor from an Israeli vehicle lay near one damaged wall, evidently broken free by a Palestinian bomb.
   The proud faces of the martyrs - Palestinian gunmen, most of them, who have died in the conflict - stared down on the wreckage from posters plastered everywhere. It is because of them and people like them, Israel says, that it is conducting this costly invasion.
   Israeli officials say they know their violence could breed more gunmen and suicide bombers, but they insist they have no choice. This invasion should at least slow their opponents down, they say, and prove that Israel is willing to fight, if there is any doubt on that score.
   People here are furious. They talk of an 80-year-old man killed in a mosque. Of a mother and adult son whose bodies lay rotting overnight in a house no ambulance could reach.
   "They are afraid, of course," Hassam Khalil said of his five children. "But I hugged them and told them, 'Don't worry. If we are going to die, we are going to die.'"
   Like so many Palestinians interviewed recently, he said he would like to send a message to President Bush. "What kind of terror is this?" he said, indicating the destruction around him. Palestinians are baffled by the Americans' reluctance to intervene.
   'Last call for Americans!'
   Not everyone was trapped here. On Wednesday night, the United States dispatched armored vehicles to scoop up some of its citizens, most of them peace advocates who came to attempt civil disobedience in the mayhem.
   Preceded by an Israeli armored personnel carrier, four Chevrolet Suburbans - pulled up outside the Star Hotel at dusk. None of the vehicles flew the American flag, but there was no mistaking the men who piled out of them, members of the diplomatic security service. Carrying M-16s, with night-vision goggles at hand and pistols strapped to each thigh, they spread out through the street.
   The peace advocates showed their passports and permitted their bags to be searched, then climbed into the cars. A consular official pleaded with holdouts to join the caravan. "I agree with your politics and I admire the courage of your convictions," he said. "But I think you're in danger."
   At last the armed men backed toward their waiting vehicles. One of them made a final pitch: "This is the last call for Americans!"

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