Last week's Sinai blasts left 34 people confirmed dead, over 100 injured, and a town in disarray. Writing from Taba, Yasmine El-Rashidi provides a first-hand account of the grisly aftermath Taba on the weekend of the attacks is something of a ghost town. The odd civilian emerges on the street, and a few cars zoom by, heading either towards the Cairo-bound highway, or to the Israeli border and out of the country. Even police checkpoints are scarce. Of the dozen from Suez to Taba, most of them are empty, the remainder manned by a solitary soldier and a few barrels placed in a zigzag barricade in the centre of the road. The final checkpoint, less than a kilometre from the Taba Hilton -- site of the biggest blast -- consists of a disenchanted- looking policeman and his single cone. The sense of bewilderment is high, people crushed by an attack they clearly never fathomed could happen. "We've always co-existed with them [Israelis]," Taba resident Mohamed Mahfouz tells Al-Ahram Weekly. "We never expected any problems. We never had any problem with them being here." The Israeli-targeted blasts took place late last Thursday night. The first hit the Taba Hilton just after 10pm, and was closely followed by two more explosions further down the Red Sea coast, in the Sinai "camp" areas of Ras Shitan and Nuweiba, where six persons were reported dead. Each of the blasts was caused by a car packed with explosives -- 600 kilogrammes in the Taba incident, and 200kgs in each of the others. All three locations were packed with tourists, both from Israel for the weeklong holiday of Sukkot (commemorating the years the Jews spent in the Sinai desert), as well from Cairo for the long weekend of 6 October. The resorts were at full capacity, with the Hilton hosting more than 800 guests, the majority of them Israelis. While figures have varied throughout the week, as the Weekly went to press officials confirmed the 34-person death toll to include 10 Egyptians, 12 Israelis, two Italian sisters and an unconfirmed number of Russians. There are conflicting reports as to the number of unidentified bodies. Figures for those injured vary -- Egyptian officials say 159, Israeli sources say 135. News agencies, foreign spokespeople, and Egyptian officials have each offered their own, fluctuating version on the impact of the tragedy; the discrepancies in numbers reflective of a situation sensitive in both its timing and location. The Taba-Nuweiba coast, which comprises a few luxury hotels and many hut-furnished "camps" along the beach, has long been a popular weekend destination for Israelis, who enjoy the convenient proximity of the scenic Red Sea resorts coupled to relatively low Egyptian prices. It is perhaps the only place in the region where Israelis and Egyptians are able to co-exist in peace and with minimal security. Of the 15,000 Israelis vacationing there this weekend, however, at least 10,000 had returned home by Friday midday. Taba, which lies just across the Israeli border from the port-town of Eilat, consists of a three- kilometre stretch of coastal road dotted with hotels. At one end, it forks into the Cairo highway and on to Nuweiba, and at the other is the Taba Hilton, mere metres from the border crossing into Israel. It is there on this weekend that the commotion took place. A stream of Israelis carrying their luggage head on foot across the border; a gathering of Russians linger on the side of the main road, many of them sobbing; and a "rest area" alcove on the road has become host to the international television crews and their mobile communications equipment of satellite dishes, television screens and editing devices. The scenario at the hotel is no less surreal. Egyptian security patrol the entrance to the hotel grounds; basically asking people who they are before waving them through. In the parking lot remain the few cars that cannot be driven out -- their windshields are shattered, their doors smashed in, and a few of them have parts that are disfigured. On site, over 100 Israeli and Egyptian rescue workers scramble amidst the ruins in the hope of recovering any of the missing persons. Bulldozers and cranes, inscribed in Hebrew, take up one wing of the site. Egyptian fire engines take up another. In the centre lies a dirt pathway lined with the black remains of cars and uprooted trees. A pungent smell, partially of soot, saturates the air. A gathering of locals and tourists stand at the side of the building, gazing endlessly, silenced, blankness on their faces. Journalists trek through the rubble, taking note of the personal belongings probably forsaken in the frenzy to escape: a child's pink bag, some beach toys, a still shimmering wrist watch, a psychedelic turquoise bathing suit, and an olive-green backpack embossed with the initials 'JH'. The rescue workers, dominated by a team of 80 Israeli army personnel, work with little distraction from on- lookers. In the early hours of Saturday morning, in the deserted premises of the Hilton, they uncover three bodies, including that of a young child. The discoveries give hope to on-looking tourists who await news of their missing loved ones. "My husband is still there," one woman wails. "Please, please, my husband." This woman, and those like her, probably knew by that point their missing loved ones were dead -- if not taken in the blast, then certainly crushed beneath the hundreds of tonnes of concrete and metal. But finding a body was perhaps a plea for finality and closure -- their cue to return home to grieve. The Taba explosion left the front of the Hilton shattered, an entire 10- storey facade of rooms blasted to the ground, with only the blue-striped wall-to-wall carpeting dangling down, hanging down like laundry pegged to a line. From one of the adjacent rooms on the side of the hotel, bedsheets knotted together to make a rope are attached to the balcony railing. At its foot, a few metres down, two mattresses are covered with rubble. "They tried to jump down," Mohamed Faisal, a hotel employee, tells the Weekly. "I saw a man. I was running to try to help people get out. Maybe others jumped too. I don't know. I don't know if they made it. All that rubble fell on top of the mattresses," he says pointing to the chunks of concrete and broken parts of room furnishings. The mattresses reveal dirt-coated blood stains. Inside what was the reception area of this hotel that hosted the failed Palestinian-Israeli peace talks in 2001, the blackened remains of a mangled vehicle lie amidst the jumble. The unidentifiable vehicle is said to have been the one used for the attack. On a lower level, closer to the pool, a large patch of dried-blood on a wall is thought to have been caused by a suicide-bomber. While rescue workers on-site volunteered the information, no official statement has been made confirming this second explosion and its cause. Last month, Israeli intelligence warned Israelis to keep out of the Sinai, citing information about possible attacks. Egyptian hotel owners were also forewarned of the attacks in the upcoming "holiday weekends". They told the Weekly that higher security measures had in fact been enforced in the past two weeks. "I never thought there wasn't enough security," Yasser Fathy, a Hilton employee and blast survivor, tells the Weekly. "We always felt safe here." Fathy was on the eighth floor of the hotel delivering room service when the explosion happened. "I thought it was an earthquake," he says. "I ran to the elevators, but they had fallen to the ground, so I ran to one stairwell. I went down two flights, but then realised that the rest weren't there, so I headed to the back exit of the hotel. I didn't actually realize what had happened until I got to the ground." Fathy sits on the trunk of an uprooted tree close to the site. Like his three accompanying colleagues, his eyes are bloodshot, and he appears in a daze. "It's very difficult to describe," he offers. "Four of our colleagues were killed. It could have easily been us." The night shift is of the lightest in terms of staffing. And by 10pm, dinner was over -- many of the employees had moved into the pool area to wait on guests, or into the kitchen to help clean up. "If it had happened a bit earlier, it would have been much worse," says Hossam Abul-Eish, who was at the employee housing area at the time of the blast. "Even at the housing complex we felt it. We heard an explosion, and suddenly a huge gust of wind blew our windows in, smashing the glass. That's about one kilometre from the hotel." The governor of South Sinai, Mustafa Afifi, appeared equally shaken as he observed the wreck. But he expressed optimism at what is to come. "It's like with 9/11," he told the Weekly. "People are shocked, and they stop for a while to look at what has just happened, take it all in, but then they move on. Things return to normal. It's too early to say who did this, but time will reveal that. Just as time will bring the Israelis back." The repercussions are yet to be seen, but the Israeli press has quoted many of the returning Israeli vacationers as saying they will "never return". By late Sunday, the rescue mission had come to its end, and by early the next day, the Israeli army unit had packed up its equipment and returned home. By then, all the tourists had gone too. What remains, is an abandoned town. The investigation team hovers around the resort, and employees linger, unsure of their futures and where they will now work. For many, the bombings were much more than just a shock. Those who survived will perhaps forever live the memory -- the fear, the loss, and the possibility that at any time, in any place, it could happen again.
