‘He Was Trying to Kill Us All,’ Survivor Says : Mosque: Inside, the floor is awash with blood. Outside, wailing fills the air. Relatives ask, ‘Why?’

Wailing, the heart-rending cries of mourning and anguish, dominated the old casbah of Hebron on Friday as one Palestinian family after another learned of the death of a father, a son, a husband, a brother in the dawn massacre at the city’s Ibrahim Mosque.

As the 48 dead were slowly identified at the city’s two hospitals, grim men, their faces tear-stained, brought the news to families who had been waiting in hope that their kinfolk had survived but also in fear that they were among the dead.

Sometimes the cry from the family was a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” --”God is great!”--here an expression of Islamic submission to divine will. But more often the sounds were of choking sobs that grew louder, turning into the traditional Arab lamentation for the dead.

“Words fail, they simply fail,” Jamil Muhtasib, a history teacher, said as he brought word to families in his central Hebron neighborhood. “At times like this, people can only scream what, in God’s name, has brought this on them and their families.

“The horror of it all is overwhelming--so many dead, so many wounded, all shot as they prayed. How could it have happened?”

Even those who were among the more than 600 worshipers in the mosque at the biblical Cave of the Patriarchs for early morning prayers had difficulty comprehending the enormity of the carnage.

“The scene is that of a slaughterhouse, a killing field,” one relief worker said.

“We were in the midst of the prayers when I heard shots and saw the head of the man in front of me explode,” said Hamad abu Shareh, 52, a hardware store owner. “Then I saw others hit--in their backs, in their heads, in their chests as they turned--and blood was spraying everywhere.

“As I turned, I saw this Jew with a kippa (skullcap), a black beard like those that settlers wear and in an army uniform, and he was firing and firing and firing, using his gun like a hose.

“Only God knows whether he was mad as they say, but for sure he was trying to kill us all.”

Hit in the shoulder, Abu Shareh collapsed and lost consciousness, waking later amid the carnage on the floor of the mosque.

“I wanted to scream, but nothing came out,” he said. “I knew I was alive but could only shake my hand a little and keep blinking my eyes so they would not pile me with the dead.”

Suleiman abu Saleh, 33, the guard of the Ibrahim Mosque, said the gunman, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, an immigrant from New York and a member of the extremist Kach movement, had pushed him to the ground to enter the mosque by force.

“He was trying to kill as many as possible,” Abu Saleh said. “He would fire until his (ammunition clip) was empty, come out and reload and go in again to fire.

“The floor was quickly full of bodies and blood. Worshipers who were kneeling and tried to run away were hit as they stood.”

Abu Saleh said he called for the Israeli soldiers guarding the shrine to stop him but charged that they instead ran in the opposite direction, tear-gassing the mosque, apparently in the belief that Palestinians were attacking.

“This man shot for 10 minutes,” Abu Saleh said. “The army did not intervene until the massacre was over.”

When the shooting was over, according to U.N. relief workers who entered the mosque hours later, the floor was awash with blood and the walls were spattered with it.

“There are even parts of human beings,” the relief worker said.

“The scene is that of a slaughterhouse, a killing field.”

Many more men had come to the mosque than usual this Friday morning, worshipers said, because this is Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, and Friday is the traditional day of prayer for Muslims.

“We came as families, as neighbors, as old friends to pray,” said Ahmed Jabari, 50. “We came in peace, as the Koran commands, and we prayed for the peace we all want. . . . How could this happen? Why do the Jews hate us so?”

Those questions of “Why?” and “How?” were asked through the day in Hebron as the families were told who had been killed and who had been wounded.

“You want to scream with them,” said teacher Sari Abu Nijmeh, 43, who went from Hebron’s Ahli Hospital into the city six times with reports of those who had been killed--until he could do it no longer.

“To tell a wife she is a widow is a terrible, terrible thing. To tell a mother she has lost her son to a mad man like this requires words that do not exist. To tell children that their father is no more is almost like murdering him again yourself.”

Among the young men of Hebron, there were calls for vengeance.

Local leaders of the militant Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, which has already killed a number of Israeli soldiers and settlers in the region, vowed to “make the ground burn” and “drive the Jews out of our land.”

The only Palestinian town with a Jewish settlement within its borders, Hebron has become a stronghold for Hamas, which opposes any peace deal with Israel. More than two decades of friction between the Palestinians and Israeli settlers, who came to the Kiryat Arba settlement after the 1967 Middle East War to re-establish a Jewish presence here, have fed the hate.

“It is them or us,” one youth said, giving his name only as Jamil. “After this, I admit that Hamas and the settlers are right--there cannot be peaceful coexistence. This man who murdered so many was a doctor, and so what does that tell us about the rest of our neighbors?”

Angry crowds gathered at the Cave of the Patriarchs and at Hebron’s hospitals, and they clashed with troops, although a curfew was imposed on central Hebron and the town was declared a closed military zone.

“Our city is soaked in blood,” Muhtasib said. “It flows in the streets, it almost drips from the walls, it poisons our water and our lives. But this is the worst we have suffered in many years.”

The traditional burial site of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and thus sacred to Jews and Muslims, who pray at the same graves but at different times, the Cave of the Patriarchs has been a battleground through much of this century.

In 1929, Arabs massacred 69 Jews in Hebron, and in recent years Palestinian residents of the town have fought bitterly with Israeli settlers in nearby Kiryat Arba, a community of 800 families, and in Hebron itself, where 40 Jewish families and 150 seminary students live.

Among the families of those killed Friday, however, the push was to bury their dead before sundown according to the Muslim custom.

“To lose so many in one day and in such a way is to suffer a wound that will tear at us for generations,” Muhtasib said. “Even if there were peace we would not recover from this. . . . These cries of grief will last generations.”