http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020422&s=hammerrubin042202
NABLUS DISPATCH Halftime by Joshua Hammer & Elizabeth Rubin
Post date: 04.11.02 Issue date: 04.22.02
"All residents surrender immediately because the army of Israel has surrounded the whole area," intoned a voice over the megaphone in thickly accented classic Arabic. "Anybody protecting an armed person, the hand of the Israeli Defense Forces is capable of reaching you. Your life...," and then the Israeli soldier's voice stopped. Silence filled the old stone houses in the casbah packed around Al Nasr (Victory) Mosque. Then came the voice again, moving through the alleys: "This is the time of surrendering. All people carrying guns, you are surrounded." Moments later two Palestinian men emerged on a road overlooking the old town, white bands of surrender wrapped around their foreheads. Israeli soldiers raced back up the steep road, shouting, "Taftish, taftish"--"Search, search"--as other soldiers in their unit led out two other men, in bathrobes, their hands bound with plastic handcuffs.
The battle of Nablus has been going on for nearly one week, and Israeli soldiers have steadily driven back Palestinian guerrillas from the alleyways of the old casbah. As they have, the strategy behind Ariel Sharon's Operation Defensive Shield--Israel's largest military operation since the Six Day War--has come into view. It looks increasingly like a premeditated strategy aimed at wiping out the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Yasir Arafat's Fatah organization. And in large measure it is succeeding.
That's not to say Al Aqsa is the only terrorist group in Israel's sights. In Jenin, which gained infamy last year as the suicide-bombing capital of the West Bank, the army's prime target is Islamic Jihad, whose fighters have declared that they will die before surrendering, leading an Israeli general to call Jenin the "Masada of the Palestinians." By contrast, the group that seems to be best weathering the onslaught is Hamas. (Which is not to say the group has suffered no losses--several of its leaders have been killed.) Hamas is taking fewer casualties because, unlike the Tanzim guerrillas--who seem to revel in their notoriety and were relatively easy to locate--Hamas remains a secretive and dispersed organization less identifiable to Israeli intelligence. Whereas Al Aqsa fighters parade with their weapons displayed and their faces uncovered, members of Hamas are more private and, during the current attack, have gone deep underground. What's more, Israel has in the past relied heavily on Palestinian Preventive Security to root out and arrest Hamas militants--an unlikely alliance now that links between the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) and Israel appear irreparably severed. All of which underscores the irony of Israel's offensive: In destroying Arafat's terrorist network, they may give Hamas a freer hand.
This week Israeli forces cornered Al Aqsa fighters in Nablus's Al Yasmina, a tiny quarter of ancient stone buildings accessible only through a series of tunnel-like passageways lined--in preparation for an Israeli attack--with unexploded pipe bombs and barricades of sand-filled dumpsters. The streets of the old city have been thoroughly trashed: Apache helicopters have turned two- and three-story buildings into piles of rubble, and water sprays from broken mains. Once-cobblestoned streets, churned up by tank treads, are now seas of mud. Store facades have been peeled away, leaving shoes, men's suits, and women's embroidered dresses suspended on their racks as if at an open-air market. Palestinian families peer through their window bars, hopeful that the sight of journalists walking the streets means the end of their siege. Two women, balancing on what was left of the landing of their second-floor apartment and framed by their collapsing roof, wires, and pipes, beckoned us in for coffee. As smoke billowed above the rooftops near the turquoise-domed Al Nasr Mosque, a woman surrounded by three kids asked us if we could find her husband, brother, and 18-year-old son, all of whom had been seized from their home three days earlier and herded into a nearby girls' school along with scores of other men who've surrendered or been arrested.
Most of the remaining fighters are now hiding out in the ancient buildings of Nablus. Previous Israeli incursions into West Bank towns had concentrated on the refugee camps where the Brigades were born and where they enjoy their strongest popular support. And so fighters knew they could take refuge in the centers of West Bank cities, such as Nablus's old city and Bethlehem's Manger Square, believing that the Israelis would respect their cultural and economic importance. As recently as one month ago you could find Ibrahim Ebayat, leader of Bethlehem's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and his gang of gunmen hanging out around the Church of the Nativity, boasting that "the Israelis would never dare come into this area--it would be a propaganda defeat for them in front of the world." And indeed, four weeks ago when Israeli tanks entered Bethlehem, they refrained from invading the old part of the city, emboldening Ebayat's forces. But this time Ebayat and his men--along with fighters in Nablus and Ramallah--fell into what looks like an Israeli trap. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, snipers, and infantrymen have caged the guerrillas into each of these sites--Manger Square in Bethlehem, the casbah in Nablus, and Al Manara Square in Ramallah. "The Israelis played it smart," says one Palestinian journalist. "All the gunmen from Fatah fell into the trap. They have killed many of the leaders, and many of the rest are surrounded."
Among the key Al Aqsa leaders to fall was Nasser Awais, from the Balata Camp near Nablus, a charismatic commander in the P.A.'s security force who trained as a policeman in Iraq and returned to live in the West Bank after the 1994 Oslo peace accords. After he founded the Al Aqsa Brigades last year, he repeatedly defied Arafat's demands for complete obedience (reportedly calling him a "motherfucker" in public) and criticized his corruption. Arafat stopped paying his salary, and Awais responded by ignoring Arafat's demands for a cease-fire last December--earning himself a spot on Israel's ten-most-wanted list. A few days ago he was killed in Nablus's casbah. Israeli military sources claim he strapped a bomb belt to his waist and jumped on a tank. But, says the Palestinian journalist, "he is the Godfather of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and they would never sacrifice him. He probably got caught in a bomb." Ebayat, meanwhile, is trapped inside the Church of Nativity, surrounded by Israeli tanks and snipers. The once ubiquitous Marwan Barghouti, considered by Israeli intelligence to be the military leader of the Brigades, vanished from his headquarters in Ramallah nearly two weeks ago and has been in hiding ever since. "The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are in a state of denial," says a Palestinian analyst from Jerusalem we talked to in Nablus. "After this incursion, they will be completely paralyzed, and I don't think Fatah wants to restart them."
On Monday evening Israeli shooting died down enough for the guerrillas, who had been immobilized for days by heavy bombardment, to evacuate the ten dead and roughly 30 wounded who had been lying on the floor of a mosque commandeered as a field hospital in Nablus's casbah. The fighters carried them through the stone archways that led from the casbah to Martyrs' Square, where they were collected by Red Crescent ambulances--the only moving vehicles in the town besides TV cars and tanks. Outside the hospital today a shopkeeper named Mahannad, who said he'd raced to the old town when he heard the Israelis were coming and picked up the machine gun of a dead fighter, claimed that he and dozens of other civilians were using borrowed pistols and AK-47s to defend their town from Israeli invasion. "They [the Israelis] are trying to get people to shoot every last round they have," he said, conceding that resistance in the old city has been overwhelmed. In the future, he said, "the resistance will be there, but it won't be active. We know we will need it again."
The huge number of deaths and widespread destruction caused by the Israeli army may indeed have routed Al Aqsa, as Sharon hoped. But it could also spawn a wave of new martyrs eager to join Hamas, which has apparently gone underground for the duration. "Hamas gets its strength from oppression and misery," says the Palestinian source in Nablus. "Before the invasion, if there were ten people willing to be suicide bombers, now they're waiting in line. Hamas has to turn them away." Nevertheless, the Palestinian people, no matter how defiant, are exhausted, their resources depleted, their infrastructure bombed. And so it may indeed be, as Mahannad said, a time of hibernation for the Palestinian resistance.
Joshua Hammer is Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and author of Chosen by God: A Brother's Journey. Elizabeth Rubin covered the war in Afghanistan for TNR.