Trial and Error in Nablus

The single shot that hit Rania was fired from the street below pierced her bedroom window, penetrated her abdomen and passed close to her heart.

The shooting of 30-year-old Rania Shakhsheer on 16 October is yet one more tally to be added to the litany of daily Israeli attacks that take place in Nablus. Rania was lying back on her bed after having eaten lunch with her husband when she was hit by a single bullet. Piercing through her bedroom window from the street below, it perforated her abdomen and passed a hair’s breadth from her heart. A tiny hole with a smudge of blood around it on the pillow where she was leaning is one of the only signs left of what took place here.

A tiny, blood-stained hole on Rania’s pillow marks the place where she was shot.

Much earlier that morning, the Israeli army had invaded Rania’s neighbourhood above Nablus’ Old City. On this occasion, it was seeking the arrest of 36-year-old Abdullah Hawwaj, a member of one of the armed wings of Fatah and a man wanted by Israel until his was one of the 189 names on an amnesty list declared by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in July 2007, a so-called ‘goodwill’ gesture to bolster the position of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in the run-up to the US-sponsored peace meeting in November. No matter. In the autonomous culture of impunity within which the Israeli military operates, it was apparently unimportant that Hawwaj had been given amnesty by its own government.

It was also unimportant that the building in whose side the Israeli military blew an enormous hole at approximately 02:30 on the morning of 16 October in order to capture Hawwaj and his brother Baher, was home to 12 people, including two children aged three and five-years-old. Now, the five remaining Hawwaj brothers are working at their own expense to shore up the foundations of the building to prevent it from collapse.

The 3-metre hole blown into the side of the Hawwaj family home by the Israeli military in order to capture the two brothers hiding in a cave below.

The remaining Hawwaj brothers shoring up the foundations of the family home to prevent it from collapse.

“I’m sorry… We had to do it”

Shaker Wazir’s parents live on the ground floor of the building next door to the Hawwaj family home, a short distance across the valley from where his own house stands. The first he knew of the attack was when he was awakened by the sound of his mother screaming his name at approximately 02:00. “I ran like a crazy person to their house” he said. “When I reached the steps leading up to their house, I was stopped by Israel soldiers stationed there who told me to stop, drop my trousers and raise my shirt.

Shaker Wazir re-enacts how his 70-year-old father was shot after he opened the door to his house upon the orders of Israeli soldiers.

Pointing to his house across the valley from where he ran to his parents’ house when he heard his mother screaming his name.

What he did not know at the time was that metres from where he had been stopped, his 70-year-old father, Abed Shaker Wazir, lay dead having been shot five times by an Israeli soldier minutes before. Responding to shouts over a loudspeaker to open the metal door to his home, Wazir had been hit in the stomach, side and legs when he obeyed their orders.

He was left lying in a pool of blood while Israeli soldiers leaped over his prostrate body and proceeded to ransack the small house, shooting tens of bullets into the bed in the thought that someone may be hiding underneath, upturning furniture, ripping out the contents of wardrobes and cupboards before finally destroying the floor of the bathroom thinking that an imagined cavity below may be providing cover to the man they were searching for.

The Wazir’s belongings riddled with bullets and destroyed by Israeli soldiers.

Soldiers attempted to dig up the Wazir’s bathroom floor in the belief that there was a cavity below, only to discover that this was not the case.

They found nothing. But within the Israeli army’s policy of ‘trial by error’, the killings of civilians; the destruction of homes and property; random, heavy shooting; and the terrorising of ordinary families can be legitimised. As the military left the Wazir’s home to take their rampage up to the next floor, one Israeli soldier turned to one of the Palestinians. "I’m sorry" he said, "but we had to do it…"

“This is Israeli democracy with American guns”

Two storeys up from the Wazir’s, in the Sbeih family home, there was more of the same. A rocket had been shot by Israeli soldiers in the street below, blowing through the window in Salam and Fayez Sbeih’s bedroom as they lay in their bed beneath, and lodging itself in the ceiling above. “Look!” cried Salam angrily, pointing to the gash in the ceiling, to the hollow windows, and to the countless bullet holes that dotted the bedroom walls. She brought her husband’s clothes from the wardrobe; they too are pierced with bullet holes. In their sons’ bedroom on the opposite site of the building, the same images: wardrobes, walls, furniture, curtains, and clothes torn through with holes made by bullets.

“If I could tell people outside about what is happening here, I would tell them that the Israelis want surrender from us, not peace,” said Fayez. “This is Israeli democracy with American guns”

Fayez and Salam Sbeih:
“This is Israeli democracy with American guns.”

“Move back or I’ll shoot you”

Fida Hawwaj, 28, lives directly above the Sbeih’s with her husband and their 3-year-old daughter. Like their neighbours, Fida and her husband were awoken at approximately 02:00 in the early morning of 16 October, but not by shooting; that was to follow shortly. Instead, they were wakened by the screams of their young daughter as an Israeli soldier fired a sound bomb into her bedroom from the garden below. The young couple ran to their child’s room. While Fida grabbed the crying girl, her husband took a bet that the soldier outside was one of the many Russian immigrants that make up the Israeli military. Taking advantage of the nine years he spent in Russia, he cursed the soldier standing just 3 metres from the window in Russian, yelling “why are you shooting at a child?” Sure enough, the soldier shouted back in Russian: “Move back or I’ll shoot you.” The husband ducked, scrambling after his wife and child to the main bedroom seconds before shots were fired at the wall behind where he had just been standing.

Fida Hawwaj and her 3-year-old daughter next to the bullets that were shot at the wall in her daughter’s bedroom where her husband had been standing moments before.

Her daughter’s new clothes, a present for the Muslim festival of Eid, riddled by bullets that struck a chest where the clothes were kept in Fida’s bedroom.

“My daughter is traumatised. She used to be a confident little girl but now she can’t be left alone and always want to be held,” Fida said as her daughter clung to her. “We’ve been staying with my husband’s grandparents since the attack because I’m scared to come back to my own house. When we first came back yesterday my daughter wet herself. I can’t go on living here; I’m afraid.”

Between life and death

In the end, the Israelis got their man. But the cost for the ordinary people of Nablus was deadly.

Rania Shaksheer now lies in a coma in the ICU at Nablus’ Al Ittihad Hospital. An official response on her shooting by the Israeli military stated:

“The IDF (Israel Defence Force) did not shoot the Palestinian woman in question. It is important to note that the IDF force that was operating in the area at the time of the incident heard a burst of gunfire coming from the direction where Palestinian militants were located. It is possible that this was the gunfire that hit the women. At a later stage, the DCO (District Coordination Office) received a report that a Palestinian woman was injured by gunfire. A field investigation showed that IDF soldiers did fire a single shot at the time that the Palestinian woman was injured.”

Local residents firmly deny that there was any Palestinian shooting in the area at the time Rania was shot on the afternoon of 16 October. They pointed out that the limited resistance to the attack put up by seven fighters on a rooftop in the heart of the old city in the early hours of the morning was quickly ended when an Israeli rocket blew one of the men in half, tore the leg off another, and injured the remaining five. Moreover, as the statement readily admits, an Israeli soldier did fire a single bullet at the time Rania was hit.

But whatever the evidence strongly suggests, it sadly does not matter who fired the bullet that has left Rania in limbo between life and death, because in the end, her case will simply sink into the deep sea of impunity that engulfs the Israeli military. No investigation; no more questions. Another Palestinian life irreversibly changed by the occupation.

Rania Shaksheer now lies in limbo between life and death.