Smuggled into hospital in an ambulance under a pile of corpses

Peter Beaumont in Bethlehem
Friday April 5, 2002
The Guardian

Elias Ka'anan and Imad Isa Ebedallah travelled with the dead to rejoin the living.
Hidden in an ambulance beneath a stretcher carrying the bodies of those who had died in the West Bank town of Bethlehem during the current Israeli invasion, they were told by the paramedics to play dead when troops checked them.

They slipped beneath three bodies, bloodied and twisted with rigor mortis. And so Elias and Imad are safe, the first casualties to reach the hospital, while others injured in the fighting have bled to death as ambulances have been blocked from reaching them.

In their adjoining beds in a ward in the Beit Jala hospital, they told their stories yesterday. Elias, a stocky man of 53 who carves religious figures out of olive wood as tourist souvenirs, was in his house near Manger Square on Tuesday afternoon when the soldiers came looking for his sons.

"I told them that they were only boys," he said, and the troops left his house. They returned 15 minutes later and told him to get his clothes and come with them. They took Elias to his daughter's house nearby and told him to knock on the door.

"The soldiers wanted them to open the door," he said yesterday. "I shouted to my daughters that it was okay. As I was speaking I turned and lifted my arms."

The soldier behind him, one of four he says, opened fire without warning towards Elias and the door. The first bullet severed his index finger. The second hit him in the thigh.

Elias said they left him at the house, propped in a room and told his daughter that the "old man had had a stroke".

His wife called the hospital to ask for an ambulance, but it could not come. Instead, she tried to stop the bleeding with kitchen towels. He lay in the house for more than a day. "I was conscious the whole time," he said yesterday, his hand and thigh covered in bandages. "I was shouting in pain. I lost one finger to the bullet. How can I carve without a finger?"

Imad listened to Elias's story, interjecting quietly from time to time and sighing in pain. The 21-year-old labourer said he was in the Church of the Nativity, trapped with the scores of Palestinian fighters as well as clergy and civilians in the first hour of the siege. He said he ran for shelter there on Tuesday, but seeing the scores of fighters hiding there, he decided to escape.

Was he a fighter? I asked.

He denied it. "It was not my place to be there with the fighters."

Imad said he left the church after half an hour and was crossing from the square when an Israeli soldier ordered him to stop.

Fearing what might happen to him, he said he walked quickly on, and the soldier shot him, hitting his thigh. As he fell he broke his ankle and passed out from the pain.

He showed the wound in his thigh where the bullet went in at an angle and lodged in the muscle. The flesh around it was swollen and yellow.

"When I came round there was a teenage girl pulling me towards her house. She looked after me with her mother," he said. "Her name was Nariman."

On Wednesday night Elias and Imad were finally recovered and placed in an ambulance with the corpses of three neighbours.

How did it feel, I asked Elias, to be transported with the dead? "It is better to do that and to be alive than bleed to death," he said.

Elias and Imad are among the lucky ones. They have escaped Bethlehem's old quarter, the site of many of the oldest churches and the heaviest of the fighting of the last three days.

As the fighting continued yesterday, armed men inside the ancient basilica of the Church of the Nativity, built over the alleged birthplace of Jesus, said Israeli soldiers blew open a metal gate leading into a church courtyard and fired inside, wounding three people and killing one.

The Israeli defence force denied the claim, but soldiers for the third day blocked reporters from reaching the site.

An army spokeswoman said: "Israeli soldiers did not fire any weapons or cause any explosions or storm the church." But a priest inside the church, contacted by mobile phone, told a different story in decidedly unpriestly language.

"I can't tell if they blew up the door," the priest said, asking for his name not to be disclosed. "But they turned my room into a firework display. It was like the fucking Fourth of July."

The Israeli version was also contradicted by Isa Abu Sror, an actor and member of a writing workshop, who is also trapped inside the church. "They blew out the door and then fired into the courtyard, killing one man and injuring three others," he said.

The dead victim, according to Dr Peter Qumri, director of Beit Jala hospital, was Samir Ibrahim Sulman, a mentally retarded man who helped in the church and who rang its bell. Believing that he would be needed for a service, he walked into the courtyard by the metal gate and was shot or hit by a grenade.

Yesterday Bethlehem resembled a ghost town, where fearful residents peeked from their windows at Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles lurking in streets littered with debris and mangled cars. A few residents, emboldened by the presence of reporters in the street, ventured out for a few minutes, but fled at the sight of approaching Israeli troops.

Walking towards Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity, we could hear the sound of fierce bursts of fire and the dull detonation of percussion grenades being thrown into doorways as hundreds of Israeli soldiers moved from street to street and from alley to alley, searching the houses for alleged terrorist suspects.