July 7th, 2002

By: A. Abu-Srour

My child is crying. I thought I was dreaming… I’m not dreaming. My 2 years old child is crying… It’s 4:00 a.m. And there I am, struggling to wake up. After all, we have slept for three hours only. My wife is still sleeping.

I got up, in the complete darkness of the room, to reach my child, who was not far from us. I let a candle, from those that I bought yesterday, and held my son in my arms; he smiled and I did the same. His clothes were wet.

I took his clothes off, walked to the bathroom, holding him in one arm, and the candle in the other hand. I put the candle beside the sink, opened the tap, felt the water; it was cold. I took a portion of the water in my hand and washed his backside. I took another portion, and washed him again, then the water sopped running.

“Shit, the water containers are hit again” I thought.

I cleaned the backside of my child with paper tissue, and returned back to the room. I could hear my father snoring, and the deep respiration of my mother in the next room. My wife was still sleeping. I played a little bit with my son, and I recalled all the images of the day and the night before.

“My wife came to see my parents with my son in the late afternoon. Of course she couldn’t pass the check point in the car, because no cars are allowed to pass the checkpoint from Jerusalem to enter Bethlehem. Since we live in Jerusalem, we have to pass the checkpoint.

The problem is that I don’t have the Israeli Identity card, and I don’t have a permit neither to go in and out of Jerusalem, since I am originally from a refugee camp, Aida, at the borders of Jerusalem, north of Bethlehem where my parents are still living.

Anyway, my wife should find another way to enter. She moved back to Jerusalem, parked her car near our house (rented house). She held our son in her arms, and took a taxi to Abudeiss where she has to take another taxi to go to Bethlehem through a road called Valley of hell, that goes all around Jerusalem and enter Bethlehem from the east. After 1h:30, she arrived to my parents house.

It was around 8:00 p.m. when the shooting started, followed by a heavy bombardment of Israeli tanks at Gilo settlement. A lot of water containers were hit. Three houses caught fire. Two of them were completely burned. We couldn’t do anything. The helicopters have bombarded two houses with missiles, and a factory for cutting stones located to the west of the camp. The shelling stopped around 12:30 a.m. Few people moved to see if there were injuries, and then we noticed the great damage that took place. The streets were dark, since the electricity generator was also hit by a missile, so all the camp was in complete Darkness, and we saw the damage under the moon light and some of the candles that people learned to keep in their houses from previous experiences. A lot of kids were in the streets, afraid of being buried in the ruins of their houses or burned in them.

The people were told to move to lower floors in case of bombardment. Two people were injured that night, and one was hit seriously. We were fortunate that night, but the damage in the houses was very important. Some of the houses were completely damaged, or burned.

I returned home around 1:00 a.m. and found my parents and my family very worried. My wife was very afraid, and my son was crying. Well, he was crying all the night in fact, because of the shelling and the noise it made. I didn’t notice that our water containers were hit, and almost all the water has been leaking out. They were only fixed 2 days ago, after the last bombardment.”

This is ugly, I thought. Why do we need to suffer all the time like this. Don’t we have a right to live in peace?

My child smiled at me. I put him next to his mother and lied beside him, and tried to sleep. I woke up at around 7 o’clock. My wife and my parents were a wake. The electricity was repaired, and local TVs started showing images of last night bombardments in our camp and the nearby cities and villages of Beit Jala, Beit Sahour and Al-Khader. Other news from Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus and other cities were the same. In Hebron, a 24 days old girl was dead in her bed, suffocated from tear gas that night.

I took a bottle of water from the refrigerator to wash my hands and my face. I thought I shall repair the water containers when I return back from work. I took my breakfast and went to work. I arrived at 7:30 as usual to the nearby pharmaceutical company where I work as microbiologist. A lot of our workers from the Hebron area, and from the southern areas of Bethlehem couldn’t come to work. Israeli checkpoints didn’t permit any one to pass. So the work in the company couldn’t proceed normally. Around 40% of our workers couldn’t come to work that day. It wasn’t the first time, but it’s always striking to find that when something happen, all the roads are closed by Israeli soldiers and they forbid people from gaining their life. Over 70% of workers in the camp work in Israel, and they become all unemployed since the beginning of the new Intifada. To remain 4 or 5 months without income is catastrophic for such people. Even those who work in local factories or hotels they were sent home, or reduced to part time jobs, because all raw materials come from Israel. Hotels and restaurants have no more tourists so they are in big trouble as well as their workers.

As usual, I finished working at 3:30 pm. During the day, we could hear some shooting at the main street because of the demonstrations against Israeli control points at Rachel Tomb, at the eastern entrance of the camp. Few people were shot, one child, 13 years old was killed.

I returned home. My son started moving his hands and smiling at me. I took him in my arms kissed him and sat down. I ate something, then we started preparing ourselves to move back to our house in Jerusalem. It was 3 days since I was in the camp because of the closure imposed around Bethlehem. My wife told me that the road of the hell valley was open, even though an Israeli checkpoint controls the passage.

So, we said goodbye to the parents, and we walked to the taxis of Abudeiss, by the hell valley road. After around 50 minutes the taxi was full, 7 passengers in total, the taxi moved. The road is divided in different regions some under Palestinian authority others under Israeli control, even though all the populations through that area are Palestinians.

There were two checkpoints, one at the end of Beit Sahour. They ask the driver to stop at the side of the road, ask for all our identity cards and then allowed us to leave. The second checkpoint was at the end of the road, before arriving to Sawahra village next to Abudeiss. The soldiers were nervous, and took my identity card and those of another two people from our car. My wife and the others holding the Jerusalem identity cards, they returned their ID cards to them. The driver was asked to wait at the side of the street. Around five cars were there, waiting. Israeli soldiers took the ID cards of one or more of the passengers in each car, and they verify some of the information about them by radio. They asked some of the passengers to step down and asked the drivers to leave, and asked those passengers to go to meet some captain in a nearby settlement, Maali adomim. And then they shall ask the captain to phone the soldier in order to return to take their ID cards, otherwise they will not be able to take their ID cards back.

We waited about an hour before a soldier called our names and brought us our ID cards. Fortunately, they didn’t take anyone of us.

Finally, we are at home. I was tired, and my wife went to take a shower. When she finished I took my self a shower and took my son with me. My wife was too tired to wash him.

This is my simple story. Sometimes, when I am in Jerusalem, in fact around Jerusalem because I am not allowed to pass the checkpoint to Jerusalem, I am not allowed to go to Bethlehem by this kind of checkpoints, put on roads that only Palestinians use to go from Bethlehem to Ramallah and North or vise versa. This was the only road after the closure of the main road passing by Jerusalem A road which is 4 times longer, and very much more difficult to cross.

Sometimes they don’t allow Palestinian cars or Taxis to pass by this road, so you are never sure when they shall let you pass and go to your work, and when you shall not be allowed to go. Of course, passing the road to Jerusalem for workers is impossible.

So we put our son in his bed, after having his meal. And then we also went to bed after finishing our work. I slept, and I was thinking, would I be able to go to work tomorrow or not? And if I passed could I return back home or shall I be stuck in Bethlehem for other few days! I don’t have any idea what tomorrow will bring to me…. I just remembered now, that I didn’t repair the water containers for my parents…