Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter

Ex-bank manager defends Palestinian suicide bombers

Anne Gwynne is conducting her own war on terrorism. A retired bank manager from Wales, she originally planned to join the thousands of other foreign volunteers who spend a few weeks each year picking olives, monitoring Israeli roadblocks and acting as human shields in solidarity with the Palestinians.
But after nine weeks in the West Bank city of Nablus, with bullet shrapnel in her leg and horrors she never imagined etched on her mind, she says she has come to understand - perhaps support - the more extreme and tragic tactics of a brutal conflict. She has found friends in the men with guns and the proud relatives of suicide bombers, the "martyrs" whose pictures paper the streets.

"I had never seen a tank before. I'd never seen a soldier. I've seen dead people, but I've never seen someone killed by these huge 25mm bullets. The injuries are horrific. The cannon from the tank takes the whole chest off," she said. "This is terrorism gone completely and utterly crazy. There is no other word for this because it's not one incident, it thousands of incidents across the whole city.

"I really, really understand the martyrs [suicide bombers]. I am very good friends with the family of the two who went on the mission to Tel Aviv. One saw the other explode, and then he walked away and blew himself up. They are such lovely families and very proud of their sons."

Twenty-three people died in those bombings in Tel Aviv in January, including many poor foreign workers. Was it wrong?

"I agree that it is a strategic mistake but I understand why they do it," she said. "Let's not blame the victims. It's clear who the real terrorists are here.

"I'm going to fight it."

It is not what she imagined for herself just a few weeks ago.

Ms Gwynne, 65, retired in 1998 after 15 years as a manager for Barclays in Aberystwyth. Since then she has split her time between her two daughters, one in Germany the other, at university in California, who took her to a Palestinian solidarity meeting at which she was so outraged by accounts of children shot by the Israeli army that she decided to see for herself.

She arrived in Tel Aviv proudly announcing her intention to help the Palestinians. Immigration officers held her for three hours and tried to persuade her it was too dangerous to go to Ramallah and to ask why she wasn't there to help Israeli victims.

"I had three people telling me how dangerous it was to come to Ramallah, which I find ironic seeing as the Israelis are the ones causing the danger," she said.

Through an encounter at a New Year's Eve party, she found herself in Nablus, which has suffered even more than most West Bank cities under virtually perpetual curfew for more than six months. She is working as a volunteer "nurse" - although she has no training - with a Palestinian ambulance driver, Feras al-Bakri, taking the wounded through Israeli army checkpoints to Raffidia hospital.

It is dangerous. Last week Mr Bakri was shot in the hand and another man had a testicle shot off by a soldier who opened fire for no apparent reason.

Nine weeks latershe is something of a veteran.

"It hasn't surprised me but it has shocked me to see a baby die because it's mother has been dumped next to the roadside in the cold because the Israelis won't let the ambulance through; to see a child in a hospital with its nose shot off; to hear an Israeli soldier threaten to kill us all. He said: 'I can kill you all in 10 seconds.' This is a crime of unimaginable proportions unless you live here."

Ten days ago the Israeli army surged into Nablus's old city, the Casbah, destroying homes, searching for Palestinian fighters. The killing went on for a week. At the end 11 people lay dead, including three children, one a 14-year-old boy shotby the army alongside his grandfather.

Hundreds were wounded. Among them was a boy who took a bullet through his palate.

"It would be better if they'd killed him. He's in hospital in a terrible state," Ms Gwynne said. "I found it very difficult to handle at night. For the first week I wept, but after that I became so angry I couldn't shed any more tears."

During the fighting she caught a piece of shrapnel in the leg while trying to reach a woman who had gone into labour. She says an Israeli soldier deliberately shot between her leg, even though it was evident that she was unarmed.

"The Palestinian fighters say I am one of them now, wounded on the battlefield."

Ms Gwynne is small and, at first glance, might be mistaken for fragile. But in any discussion about the injustices perpetrated in Nablus, she offers by far the most energetic denunciations, loudly berating the Israelis while Palestinians who have lived with the misery for years almost mournfully recount the suffering.

Threat of rape


"I've been arrested too. One of the Israeli commanders threatened me with rape. He was very graphic," she said. "I've told Israeli soldiers that when you say you're just obeying orders, please remember that it was what every German soldier said.

"The soldiers say we must defend our land; God gave us this land; if I don't kill them, they will kill us.

"I used to think it was all excuses, but they actually believe this shit. We have nothing to kill them with, just a few AK-47s."

We? "I feel I am one of them. I want to live here now. I have a pension. It's not a lot but it's a $1,000 a month and it's more than a doctor here gets," she said.

Ms Gwynne plans to remortgage her house in Wales and use the money to buy a computer and digital camera to document events in Nablus for what she calls her own struggle against terrorism.

"I'm ashamed I didn't come before but I was working. I was a single parent. I had children at university. Now I'm here as a witness."