Nerves Fray as Curfew Drags On for Palestinians

For most of the estimated 30,000 Palestinians living in the warren of apartments and small houses crammed into Hebron’s old city and surrounding hills, one simple fact made Monday a good day: They were allowed out.

Their freedom lasted only three hours. But for the first time since Friday, homemaker Amneh Sidr and thousands of others were able to dash to the market for enough food, medicine and other essentials to keep their families going.

Trapped in their homes for more than a month under a curfew punctuated by sporadic breaks that usually last only a few hours, residents of these Palestinian neighborhoods have become--quite literally--prisoners of the latest Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule.

Under the curfew, Palestinians in these neighborhoods are ordered to stay off the streets. Breadwinners in the affected area can’t get to work. And while schools operate normally elsewhere in the city, 12,000 children here stay at home.

Israeli authorities say they have been forced to take the draconian action to protect 700 Jewish settlers who live in four heavily guarded enclaves adjacent to and directly below the Palestinian neighborhoods. The curfew was imposed shortly after the uprising began in late September, not long after the first gunfire erupted between the Palestinian neighborhoods in Hebron and the Jewish settlements and Israeli forces guarding them.

So far, it has done little to halt the nightly exchanges, and each side claims that the other is doing most of the shooting.

“We’ve been shot at almost nightly for the past five to six weeks,” said David Wilder, spokesman for the Jewish community in Hebron. Though the curfew has failed to stop the shooting, Wilder still supports it.

“If we can’t live normally, then they shouldn’t be able to live normally,” he said. “The Arab population has to understand that if they keep attacking us, they have to pay a price.”

Since it has had little effect on the shooting, the action is in part punitive.

“They have to know there’s a price to pay,” said Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman.

Lerner said the curfew will be lifted only when Palestinian snipers stop shooting and calm returns to the area. With Palestinian leaders Monday pledging to press ahead with the uprising and Israeli officials preparing their people for several months of unrest, few think that will be any time soon.

Two more Palestinian youths--both teenagers--were killed Monday as Israeli Defense Forces and Jewish settlers clashed with Palestinians in several towns and villages throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In Hebron, the sounds of sporadic gunfire crackled through the late-afternoon air. As the conflict drags on, some here are starting to go stir-crazy.

Sidr manages an occasional smile, but she admits that her nerves are fraying fast.

All day, every day, she sits at home with her husband, Tawfiq Ayyoubi, and her four young children and awaits the quiet terror that comes with nightfall--when the shooting gets worse. The days seem endless, she says. The family is consumed with eating, sleeping, watching television--and waiting.

Sidr says that electricity is frequently cut and that the authorities are slow to restore service because of the fighting. In at least one respect, she says, it hardly matters. She’s too frightened to have lights on at night because lights draw fire.

“They are talking about psychological help for the children, but how about mothers?” she asks. “I think we need help too.”

Her husband usually has a construction job, but he hasn’t worked since the curfew began, so money is getting tight. When Sidr does shop, she no longer buys meat. Instead, she cooks for the children a thick fava bean gruel called fuhl, which is filling and keeps the hunger at bay.

From the small terrace of the family home that overlooks the old city, she can hear the bustling routine of life only a few hundred yards away, where the curfew is not imposed. She feels it mocks them.

She frets that if the fighting gets worse, there will be no way out. She worries about the impact of it all on her children. Her two girls, ages 8 and 10, hardly sleep at night, while the boys, 4 and 6, have been affected in other ways.

The youngest, Abdul, has watched enough television news that he now has a new set of heroes: the rock-throwing youths who form the vanguard of the Palestinian uprising.

He carries around a piece of red knitting yarn that he has learned to twirl like the youths he sees on TV swinging their rock- or bottle-filled slings. He proudly informs a visitor that he knows how to make Molotov cocktails and what to do with them: “Throw them at Israelis,” he says to the approval of his parents.

Down in the thick of the old city, in a tiny apartment near Hebron’s central market, another jobless construction worker, Naif Abu Doud, worries about his 22-year-old son, who failed to return from work Saturday evening--a night when gunfire in the city was especially intense.

With no telephone, Doud and his wife are cut off from the world outside. When the curfew was lifted briefly Monday, he toured the city’s hospitals and medical stations in a fruitless search for his son.

Such personal crises have become part of the prolonged curfew, according to Kathleen Keren, coordinator of a small nongovernmental organization called Christian Peacemaker Teams that has worked to ease tensions in the old city for the past five years.

She said medical emergencies are especially difficult, and she recalled one instance in which a woman with a suspected burst appendix resorted to flagging down a garbage truck for a ride out of the area because no ambulance was available.

But for many of those trapped here, it is the daily routine of others not under the curfew that takes the greatest emotional toll.

As Sidr and her husband trudged up the hill Monday to their house, laden with the groceries that would keep them for another few days, a loud voice from an Israeli army jeep megaphone reminded them that their ordeal was not yet over.

“Go home!” it screamed.