Four rounds of sniper fire
hit Mohammed Amassi, a young Palestinian baker standing on the roof of his home
in the Al-Fawwar refugee camp. As he tries now to recover from his wounds, he
still remembers the mocking words of the soldier who shot him.
Why waste words when the video from the Palestinian news
agency Ma’an shows pretty much everything? Israeli soldiers are on the roof of
the next-door apartment building: One is on the lower roof, two on the balcony
of the apartment above the roof, and two more are looking out from the
apartment window. A few teenage girls and children are looking at them from the
neighboring roof. Total silence. Suddenly, the two soldiers on the balcony
raise their hands, as though giving a signal, and one of them, the sniper, aims
and starts shooting. On the roof of the building, Mohammed Amassi is hit. He
falls to the ground and starts crawling for his life, bent on getting off the
roof. Finally, a medical team gets him down via a ladder. The only thing Amassi
is holding is his cell phone. Nothing about him could have seemed threatening
to the soldiers on the roof opposite, about 80 meters (260 feet) away. The
sniper took aim and fired, hitting him with round after round. The palm of one
hand is covered with blood; he is writhing in pain, stunned.
A
few weeks later, Amassi, 22, is in his living room, lying on a new adjustable
bed that has been loaned to him by a Palestinian charity. He’s a good-looking
young man, smiling and quiet. His family’s home is well kept, compared to
others in Al-Fawwar — a hardscrabble refugee camp, the most southerly in the
West Bank and the one that most closely resembles the refugee camps of the Gaza
Strip, which isn’t all that far from here.
On August 16, a huge Israel Defense Forces raiding party,
consisting of hundreds of soldiers, swooped into Al-Fawwar in the dead of
night. In less than 24 hours, they killed one person and wounded dozens more.
Their haul: two old pistols. The local residents are convinced the raid was
nothing more than a training exercise carried out at their expense.
We arrived at Al-Fawwar on the eve of Id
al-Adha (the feast of the sacrifice). In the butcher shop, a cow was being
sliced up for the holiday. Those who can afford meat congregated around the
animal, waiting for their portion. The IOF rarely carries out raids in this
crowded camp, where about 10,000 people live in an area of one square
kilometer. The troops haven’t returned since the raid.
Amassi is the son of the camp’s baker, Ibrahim
Amassi, and the eldest of six siblings. Their family bakery was the first in
Al-Fawwar, dating from the foundation of the refugee camp in the early 1950s.
In recent years, it’s produced mainly pretzels, cookies and special doughs for
traditional dishes. Mohammed studied interior design, but afterward became a
baker to help provide for the family. He works two shifts a day, morning and
afternoon, seven days a week. He has never been arrested or even been
interrogated by Israeli authorities. Above the living room in which he is now
recovering, another apartment is being built: he will live there when he
marries and has a family of his own.
His hand is bandaged, and
both legs are marked with wounds and scars from the shooting and subsequent
surgery. Bedridden, Amassi continues to suffer from intense pain. It’s not
clear whether he will be able either to walk again or to use his hand. At the
moment, he can only hobble around with the aid of crutches. On the day of the
big raid last month, his younger siblings woke him at 6:30 A.M., three hours
after the soldiers entered the camp. The troops were scouring the alleys and
seizing control of buildings. At first, the camp’s inhabitants thought the
soldiers had come to demolish the home of Mohammed al-Shobaki, who was killed
in alleged stabbing attack . However, it soon became
apparent that the troops had other intentions, though it was not clear what
they were.
Watching the show
The whole camp was up on rooftops, watching the
show, and Amassi was no exception. His house has two roofs: one, with a low
rail, where people sit on hot summer nights; and above it an unfenced roof, for
the water tank and satellite dish. Amassi climbed onto the upper roof to get a
better view. It’s dangerous there: Without the fence, there’s no place to take
cover. Teams from Ma’an and the television channel Palestine Today were
positioned on the roof of the adjacent building, which offers better protection
from the soldiers. Clashes were taking place between soldiers and stone
throwers on the camp’s main street, but quiet prevailed here, on the high hill
where this neighborhood stands.
The troops seized quite a few houses — about
30, according to Musa Abu Hashhash, a field researcher for the Israeli human
rights organization B’Tselem — and carried out searches in about 200 homes,
smashing holes in some walls for snipers. At about 9 A.M., Amassi was talking
to the reporters on the next-door roof. Suddenly he heard a soldier who was
deployed on the balcony of the building below his call to him in Arabic: “Where
do you want to get it?” Amassi was petrified. He knew what this meant: In which
part of your body do you want to be shot?
According to Amassi, there was nothing to
account for the soldier’s chilling question. The street was quiet, and Mohammed
had done nothing that could be construed as a threat to the troops, who were 80
meters away as the crow flies. His father, Ibrahim, believes the soldiers shot
his son in order to demonstrate their power to the camera crews on the roof
next door.
“What did the soldier say to you?” Amassi’s
friend, Ismail Najar, asked from the neighboring roof. But before Amassi could
answer, he saw the soldier take aim and start shooting at him. Three bullets
struck him in rapid succession. The first slammed into his left leg next to the
knee, the second hit him between his hip and his left thigh, the third smashed
into his right leg. When he raised his hands and called out to the soldier,
“Enough, enough,” the sniper fired one more round, perhaps as an encore. The
final bullet hit him in the palm of his hand. They were 0.22-inch Ruger, or
Toto, bullets and didn’t kill him
Amassi then tried to find shelter on an exposed
roof that has no shelter. He could have fallen off. In the edited Ma’an video,
he’s seen crawling desperately. A flimsy, makeshift iron ladder — which I was
afraid to climb — is the only way to gain access the upper roof. Somehow, the
paramedics got him down. They carried him by foot for about 150 meters up the
narrow alley to their ambulance, which took a soldier-bypass route to get him
to Al-Ahli Hospital in nearby Hebron. Amassi was semiconscious. Damage had been
done to blood vessels. To avoid having to amputate his leg, he was moved to
Hebron’s other hospital, Alia. But they, too, did not have the necessary
specialist. That evening, he was transferred to the Ramallah Government
Hospital, where he underwent surgery.
Amassi spent 10 days in the Ramallah hospital.
One bullet remains lodged deep inside, somewhere between his waist and hip and
left thigh, and the physicians aren’t sure they will be able to remove it. If
not, he will probably have to undergo additional surgery in Jordan. Next to his bed is a plastic jar
containing the two bullet fragments that were successfully extracted from his
body. He’s taking five different types of painkillers to try to relieve the
suffering.
We leave him and go up to the roof. There are
tangled iron rods where he fell. A few hours after he was shot, troops killed
Mohammed Abu Hashhash, 19, who was shot the instant he stepped out of his
house, a few hundred meters away, on another street. The soldiers opened fire
through a breach they made in the wall of a neighboring house. That breach,
together with a painting of the dead teenager on the wall, constitute a
monument to a young man whose killing was probably as unnecessary as the
shooting of the young baker in Al-Fawwar.
there is evidence that lady diana was killed because she showed interest in the plight of the palestine people. just as prince harry has shown interest in her work on landmines will he now show interest in this.
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