New birth brings new hope in the deserted streets of a city under siege and weeping

April 5, 2002


Streets are deserted except for snipers and Israeli soldiers and tanks, Elaine Lafferty reports from Bethlehem

An avocado lays crushed on the street, only noticeable because stepping on it momentarily halts the crunching sound of broken glass underfoot. Water from shattered pipes gushes from the sides of ancient sand-coloured stone buildings in the old city. This is Bethlehem, a city under siege and weeping in all ways imaginable.

The streets are deserted, devoid of all people, and the shops are shuttered. The Israeli army has seized the city in its pursuit of Palestinian fighters. About 200 of them, some armed, have taken refuge in the Church of the Nativity.

"The situation is very serious. The Jews have knocked down the door of the nativity church where all the Palestinians were," Father Ibrahim Faltas, custodian of the Church of the Nativity, said in a telephone interview with RAI television news.

"The Palestinians are now in the convent. There is a battle going on between the two sides and we are in the middle. We are in danger. Try to save us," he said.

The Israeli army has denied its forces were in action and denied it attacked the church. Israel has deemed the city a closed military zone and shut off road access.

But a group of journalists entered the city on foot yesterday afternoon, shuttled in by Palestinians eager for the world's attention to the place that was under their control until Tuesday. We stop first at the outskirts of the city at Beit Jala hospital, a 150-bed facility. The curfew here has prevented people from leaving their homes. The Red Cross negotiates with the Israel army in order to be allowed to pick up wounded people as well as regular patients needing care.

"There is no freedom of movement and we cannot get people to the hospital without \ co-operation," said Mr Graham Lemen of the Red Cross. "All we can do is comply with their wishes." At the moment, Mr Lemn said he was trying to get access to wounded people inside the Church of the Nativity, but without success.

Dr Omar, a 30-year-old Palestinian physician, stands at the hospital entrance, shifting from foot to foot, waiting for an ambulance. He grew up near here and trained in the Soviet Union. I ask him how many injured are in the hospital, a simple question but one that is too much for him to bear at this moment.

"Injured? All of us are injured by what they are doing to us. A whole nation is injured. How can I count for you?" His statement seems not hostile or even evasive,just an expression of pain. An ambulance pulls up, and a moaning woman is taken in on a stretcher. She is pregnant and already in hard labour.

Upstairs, five bodies killed by Israeli soldiers are covered, awaiting a date for burial that no one dares yet predict. A frustrated hospital worker volunteers to display one particular body that has no head, but the offer is declined save for an Asian photographer.

We leave the hospital and walk up the main street towards the Church of the Nativity, normally a 15-minute stroll. What becomes eerie, what you notice most, is the total absence of people on the street and yet their hidden presence in small apartment buildings and shops.

A shop burglar alarm shrieks futilely from the Shifa pharmacy. The shop signs recall normal life,Golden Star Fashions, an engineering firm, a souvenir kiosk with kitschy yet touching replicas of the Christian manger scene of Jesus's birth. All the windows have been broken. A dog howls in the distance. The sound of water flowing from destroyed pipes whooshes. And then there are gunshots. Loud, and several. Someone yells there is a sniper on a rooftop, but the shots seem further away. We continue up the road, until, that is, we encounter Israeli soldiers.

"Go back," they shout and add a few things I do not pause to analyse or debate.

All we wanted to do was speak with the pastor of the Lutheran Church, who had emerged from his building's shell to speak with us. The soldiers hustle him back into the church.

Suddenly, one of them yells to his comrades to take up assigned positions, fall into formation. We do not know what is going on. Will they shoot at us, as soldiers did the other day at Orla Guerin of the BBC?

It seems there may be a sniper close by, but if so, we are distracted by the sound of two nearby explosions, mostly likely shells from Israeli tanks.

It seems like a good time to turn back. We will not make it to the doorway of the Church of the Nativity, the place of Jesus's birth according to the Bible.

It is only 60 seconds walk, but these soldiers are much too tense. Instead we duck into the Grand Hotel of Bethlehem, where we find Ms Hind Bindak and her family. They have owned the hotel since 1983; they have not had a paying tourist here since October 2000.

"We don't want them to shoot up the hotel," she says. "I have my children here. We left the eighth floor because it was not safe." Now she, and eight others, are sleeping in the first floor registration offices. "Christians, Muslims. We never asked each other. We are neighbours," she says. "Why is this happening?"

At that moment, a friend of hers sweeps into the lobby, ecstatic and smiling, waving his arms.

What possibly, in this situation, could make a man so happy? His name, he says, breathlessly, is Khaled Bandak. He has just heard; his wife has just given birth to a healthy baby girl!

Did she go to the hospital about three hours ago? I ask.

"Yes, that was her! I am a father! It is a girl!" What does this young father think of the prospects for his daughter?

"I have hope for the future," he says. "What future this child has I don't know. But I have hope."