Steadfast in Hebron

War is everywhere in Hebron and so is the Palestinian resistance. Graham Usher reports from a besieged, shell-shocked and inexhaustible city
"War is not an option in the Middle East," cooed Israel's Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in Cairo on Sunday. In Hebron, war is an everyday experience.
The south West Bank city has been simmering ever since Ariel Sharon declared his policy of "restraint," authorised a massive military build-up in the Hebron region and blockaded with earth and shale every access road to its 240,000 people.
Palestinians correctly understand the purpose is to defend the Jewish settlers who live in Hebron proper and its adjoining Kiryat Arba settlement. And their aim is defend themselves against a settler vigilantism and its protective shield of Israeli soldiers "by all available means," in the words of Fatah leader in Hebron, Thiab Al-Sharabati.
The pot finally blew on 12 July when Palestinian guerrillas shot dead a settler near Kiryat Arba. Inevitably, the settlers lit the fuse, beating every Palestinian they could find with sticks, torching Palestinian fields and ransacking Palestinian properties. But it was the army who supplied the covering fire, severing Hebron from its neighbouring villages, placing a curfew on the 35,000 Palestinians in the Israeli- controlled part of town and rolling up tanks at every strategic junction.
"The army has one hand on the mountain of Tel Rumeida and another on the road to Halhoul. From these positions they can shell every location in the city," said Hebron mayor Mustafa Natshe on Thursday.
The army shelled it after Palestinian guerrillas killed a second settler, who had foolishly visited the death ground of his cohort to check if it was "safe". In what residents said was the worst assault of the nine-month uprising, on 13 July the army pounded for nearly eight hours every neighbourhood in the city, wounding nearly 60 civilians, setting seven houses ablaze and knocking out all electricity.
For the first time in the Intifada tanks entered the Palestinian controlled part of Hebron, flattening a Force 17 checkpoint, a container and a small arms store. Seven Palestinian officers were wounded in the raid. One tank fired a shell at a house from a distance of 20 metres, gouging out a wall and slicing off a chunk of the roof. Mercifully, the Palestinian occupants were away at a wedding.
The pattern repeated itself over the next 48 hours. Settlers briefly took over a house in Hebron's ancient Casbah, nominally under Palestinian control, and torched 12 Palestinian homes near Kiryat Arba. The army tightened the siege still further. And the guerrillas attempted to repulse both using classic urban warfare hits on Israeli positions within the city and checkpoints around it.
The army's response was the same, only more so. On Sunday night the tanks again invaded, this time smashing four Palestinian Authority police and Force 17 positions and gutting three electricity generators. Twenty-nine Palestinians were wounded in that assault, including a one-year old baby, hit by shrapnel to the face. But what was the purpose of such massive reprisals?
"I think the shelling and incursions are preliminaries to Israel's re-occupation of the city as a whole," said Mustafa Natshe.
Eventually, but perhaps not in one swoop. Rather the army's tactics in Hebron, as elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza, is a slow, inexorable combination of siege and assault whose principal target is to punish and exhaust the civilian population and so drain the sea in which the guerrillas swim.
"Yes," agrees Rafik Natshe, PA Minister of Labour and a Fatah leader in Hebron. "The Israeli strategy is to wear us out, to tire us into surrender. But we take a long time to tire, longer at any rate than Sharon believes".
He seems to be right, as Hebron's Palestinians endure a war that, since September, has cost them 42 dead, 524 permanent disabilities, destruction and damage to 300 homes and, says Rafiq Natshe, "unemployment and poverty levels of about 50 per cent."
Nor do they resist only with the gun. On Saturday hundreds of Palestinians risked army sights and settler guns to protest again Israel's partition of their city. "We no longer care if we're in Israeli-controlled Hebron or Palestinian-controlled Hebron," said one participant. "We're all under occupation".
And over the weekend Palestinians kept up a steadfast traffic between Hebron and its cut off villages to sustain the bonds of community and solidarity. At a mud-blockaded junction leading to the village of Se'ir, and under the watchful turret of an army tank, Palestinian boys hawk trolleys filled with supplies, women walk with mattresses on their heads and men carry babies in their arms. And a bride, white bridal veil flying in the wind, clambers one side of a rampart to meet and marry her groom on the other. Truly, these people take a long time to tire.
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