Bethlehem, in Pain, Tries to Pick Up the Pieces

BETHLEHEM, West Bank —  Palestinians here and in neighboring Beit Jala awakened Monday to find the Israeli army gone from their streets, but their joy at the predawn pullout was tempered by the devastation inflicted by 11 days of street fighting.

From refugee camps to affluent neighborhoods, residents started the painful task of digging out and rebuilding. Merchants swept up piles of glass and bullet casings and put their wares back on display. Housewives salvaged what they could from homes that had been shelled or burned. Children went back to school and parents back to work for the first time since troops thrust deep into the towns after Palestinians assassinated an Israeli Cabinet minister Oct. 17.

Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Israel withdrew from the towns after the Palestinian Authority agreed to block militias from firing on the nearby Jewish neighborhood of Gilo, which Israel considers part of Jerusalem. “If it succeeds, we’ll continue,” Ben-Eliezer told reporters.

Troops Entered Towns After Minister Was Slain

Israel launched its widest military operation in years in Palestinian-controlled territory after Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi was assassinated in a Jerusalem hotel by gunmen from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Israeli troops entered six major West Bank cities after the government demanded that the Palestinian Authority arrest Zeevi’s killers and hand them over to Israel. More than 40 Palestinians, including many civilians, died in the fighting that erupted after the incursion began. The army has called the operation a success because it was able to arrest, kill or wound dozens of wanted militants and thwart planned attacks on Israelis. But the Palestinian Authority still has not complied with the demand to arrest Zeevi’s killers and extradite them.

The Bush administration has pushed Israel to immediately withdraw from all the seized areas, but Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said he will pull troops out one city at a time, leaving each community only after fighting there stops and the Palestinian Authority agrees to impose order. Israeli troops and tanks are still in the West Bank cities of Jenin, Kalkilya, Tulkarm and Ramallah.

Palestinian officials praised fighters in Bethlehem on Sunday for resisting the Israeli troops. But the city where Christians believe Jesus was born paid a high price for the street warfare that raged here. Palestinians say 23 people, most of them civilians, died in the fighting in Bethlehem and Beit Jala. Dozens more were wounded. The two communities suffered tens of millions of dollars in property losses, according to Palestinian estimates.

Photos of Soldiers in Homes Spark Criticism

In Israel, the army was criticized after local newspapers and Israel Television ran pictures of grinning soldiers lounging inside occupied hotel rooms and civilian homes two days before troops withdrew.

“I saw IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers lying in their uniforms and boots on fancy beds in hotels, while their comrades sprawled on armchairs, making private homes their own,” wrote Amram Mitzna, mayor of the Israeli coastal city of Haifa and a retired major general who once commanded West Bank troops. The army’s disregard for Palestinian civilians damages national security, Mitzna wrote Monday in the Israeli newspaper Maariv. “In this way we are, with our own hands, widening the circle of hatred toward us, every hour of every day.”

Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz responded to the criticism by issuing a statement saying he has repeated a directive to soldiers and commanders that they “must be respectful of the honor and property of the Palestinian population.” The images of disrespectful soldiers, Mofaz said, do “not reflect the reality in which the IDF, its soldiers and its commanders operate.”

There was more rubble than honor evident in Bethlehem on Monday. Streets that just two years ago received thorough face lifts in anticipation of millennium celebrations now are littered with cars and lampposts crushed by tanks and armored personnel carriers. Several blocks of Manger Street, the main shopping boulevard, suffered heavy damage. Some stores were destroyed in the fighting, and apartments built above them were pocked with bullet holes. One hotel, the Paradise, was reduced to a burned-out shell.

In Azza refugee camp across from the Paradise, several homes were badly damaged or destroyed by direct hits from tank shells and heavy machine-gun fire.

“It took me 20 years to build this home. Now look at it,” said Bassam Kassi, 38. He stood in the charred remains of his brother’s apartment, one of four apartments in a three-story building erected by the Kassi brothers.

In Azza, as in other refugee camps, temporary shelters built by the United Nations have over the years been replaced by permanent homes refugees have built, including multiple-story apartment buildings that house large extended families.

Twenty people live in the Kassis’ structure. Now, all are huddled in a ground-floor apartment that suffered only minor damage.

Family Struggles With ‘a Miserable Feeling’

An unemployed construction worker, Kassi said he has no idea how he will rebuild.

“People are bankrupt,” he said, as his family picked dispiritedly through blackened clothes and household goods. “It has been almost a year of complete closure and siege. There is no income to feed the children, to stay alive. How can we repair this?”

The family was forced to flee in the middle of the night to relatives in another neighborhood after troops surrounded the camp and battled militiamen shooting from its narrow alleys.

“It is a miserable feeling,” Ayed Kassi, 32, said as he surveyed the wreckage. He is convinced, he said, that the troops will return someday.

The Kassi family’s losses, however, are reparable. Others were not so fortunate.

In Beit Jala, Mario Kharoufeh, 32, has been sleeping on the sofa since his wife, Rania, 24, was killed while traveling to the market to pick up milk for their children. She got caught in a firefight Oct. 20 and was killed by Israeli tank fire when she took shelter in a store, her family said.

Kharoufeh said he has been unable to sleep in the couple’s bed since she died. He cannot bring himself to dispose of her clothes that still hang in their closet, and he cannot find the words to explain to 4-year-old Ronza and 16-month-old Ramzi what happened to their mother.

He takes no comfort in seeing his wife’s smiling image pasted up on storefronts, an incongruous addition to the scores of posters of hardened gunmen who have died fighting the Israelis since peace talks collapsed and violence erupted in September 2000.

“I lost the most important person in my life,” he said.