The rock of Balata

The men may be Balata's resistance. But it is the women who hold the camp together. Graham Usher reports from a camp besieged, invaded but as yet unbowed
You enter from the main road through a gash that was once a wall. In the gloom, women sit in a circle on the floor, creating with talk secure pools of intimacy. Dust turns in the sunbeams, slicing through the shadow. There is no other light. There has not been for three days.
A girl leans against a door-frame. Or perhaps it is just another fracture in the concrete. It is difficult to tell. Domesticity and destruction meld together in Balata.
Men mill outside the shelter and march through its rooms, crunching their boots on a carpet of glass, shards of breeze-block, bits of wire, torn bedding and broken crockery.
"This is where the soldiers entered the camp," says Dalal Salami, Fatah leader and Legislative Council member for Nablus. "And this is how they invaded it."
She is standing beside a hole in an adjoining partition, two metres by one. The Israelis called the technique "walking through walls." They penetrated each shelter with a saw sharp enough to cut through six inches of breeze-block and surgical enough not to bring the roof down on occupier and occupied alike.
We climb through, like they did early Thursday morning. In the twilight, upturned furniture, smashed through windows, fallen masonry.
Then another hole, then a third, each blacker, more hellish, than the last. The catacomb burrows through 30 houses in all, say Palestinians, all the way to the UNRWA boys school, 500 metres from that chink in the camp's defences through which the soldiers slipped.
On news of their entry 50 families fled their homes, terrified they would be killed in their beds. Others were confined in one room while the soldiers tore through the others and clambered on roofs. They were met with fierce resistance: six Palestinian fighters lost their lives in the invasion's first hours. One soldier was killed.
Once the school was taken the decision was made to "retreat," says Dalal. Young men sank into the warren of the camp. The "wanted" militants fled to Nablus city, taking guns and ordnance with them.
"It was a wise move. They had to keep the civilians safe. We have so many children," says Fariza Abu Saris, a physiotherapist at UNRWA Balata clinic.
Like Dalal, she was one of the thousands of women who stayed in the camp. Her main job was to tend and ferry to hospitals Palestinians wounded by the invasion. She worked 48 hours without sleep, helping to staff the ambulances.
"Sometimes the soldiers shot at us like crazy. They wouldn't tell us to stop. They would just shoot, usually from the houses they'd taken over. We would walk to the shelters instead. We treated many of the injured that way."
The most traumatic moments were with the children. "They were hysterical. The shooting terrified them. The worst was when the electricity was hit and the whole camp went dark. All the children were screaming."
"I was scared to death. But what can you do? I'm part of the camp's medical team. I have to help my people."
Kifar Abu Drai, 53, had other reasons for staying. She sits ankle deep in the debris of her house. Thirty-two relatives lived with her. But when soldiers dynamited the home of a "wanted man" next door, the roof caved in and an entire wall collapsed. One more shake and the whole place will topple. She will not leave.
"What if the soldiers were to come back while I was gone? I'm not going -- not even if Abu Ammar [Yasser Arafat] tells me to."
Kifar lost her husband in the first Intifada and a son in the second. She says every one of Balata's 14 martyrs from this latest invasion is someone's son, husband, brother or father.
And she knows that each one of the 100 or so shelters destroyed or damaged in Israel's latest assault was also a home, like hers. Its floors were scrubbed; walls hung with pictures of the Jaffa region whence Balata's refugees come and doors, in this first flush of spring, decked with bougainvillea.
"We work our whole lives to raise our children, build our homes and in a second," she says, with a click of her fingers, "in a second the Israelis destroy everything."
The army left Balata on Sunday. The tanks reversed up the main road. The Apaches flew to their mountain bases. The men returned to the camp, inspecting the blasted doors of factories, tripping over two-metre-wide trenches overflowing with sewage. The fighters came back, too, firing Kalashnikovs into the ether, in a reckless show of bravado.
Tanks swivelled on their axes and fired back. People again flowed into the streets, fearful that another invasion was imminent. Will the Israelis again try to haul down Balata?
"Oh, yes," says Fariza. "The Israelis will not leave the camp like this. There will be a massacre here. Most people believe this."
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