West Bank Villagers Describe Raid as ‘Like a Horror Movie’

Her brow furrowed in concentration, Hinan Rimawi picked carefully through the rubble of what used to be her cousin’s home Thursday, searching for anything that had withstood a raid by Israeli troops the night before.

Triumphantly, the 9-year-old pulled a floppy-eared stuffed rabbit from the ruins, dusty and battered but intact. Next came a handful of felt-tipped pens. Earlier, she said, she had found some of her cousin’s clothes. But most of the belongings of the 17 family members who shared the two-story home still lay buried beneath the wreckage of the house.

“It was like a horror movie,” said Ahmed Yusef Rimawi, 73, the family patriarch, who watched as the troops blew up the home he built 30 years ago. “Now we don’t even have a blanket to cover us.”

No one in the family was hurt.

This prosperous village of 4,000 lies 20 miles north of Jerusalem in Palestinian-controlled territory. In the wake of one of the fiercest raids of the Israeli army’s wide-scale operation in the West Bank, five security men lay dead, three houses were demolished and one home was burned. Several people were wounded and at least 11 were arrested.

Rimawi, who belongs to an extended clan that makes up the majority of this village’s residents, said soldiers told him they blew up his home because it housed his son-in-law, Mohammed Rimawi, a suspect in the slaying of Israeli Tourism Minster Rehavam Zeevi.

Palestinian officials are calling what happened in Beit Rima a massacre, based on villagers’ charges that soldiers shot Palestinian policemen and security officers as they slept in the police station and allowed at least some of them to bleed to death. The Israeli army said it had warned Palestinian security officers that the raid was coming and that they should tell their men to hold their fire. Those who died were those who chose to fight, the army said.

“They could have gotten away, but they preferred to stay in their positions and take up arms,” Maj. Gen. Amos Malka, head of the army’s military intelligence branch, told reporters Thursday.

The army acknowledged barring Palestinian ambulances from entering the village for hours after the raid began. But it denied that anyone was allowed to bleed to death. Army medics treated the wounded on the spot, and three were evacuated to Israeli hospitals, an army spokesman said. The army spokesman’s office released videotape of a villager purportedly being treated by army medics in his home to back up its version of events.

But in the seemingly unbreakable cycle of vengeance that has become the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during more than 12 months of fighting, the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine immediately vowed that it will seek revenge for the killings in Beit Rima. Thousands attended the funerals Thursday for the dead security officers--none of whom came from Beit Rima.

The PFLP’s assassination of Zeevi triggered the army’s incursion into Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank last week. But villagers said the army’s raid caught them completely by surprise.

“I brought my wife and son into an interior hallway where I thought they would be safe when the shooting started,” said Shadi Rimawi, 27. “We used to hear on TV about shelling and shooting, but we never imagined it would be like this.”

Villagers were ordered to stay in their homes from the start of the raid until the troops left about 25 hours later, Rimawi said.

Odeh Zeidan, a 33-year-old police officer, said he and six other officers fled the police station when the troops entered the village but were caught in the olive grove across the street. Two were shot dead there. The others crawled out on their hands and knees, he said. He denied that anyone had given them warning of an Israeli raid, or that they opened fire on troops.

“There is no way we would confront them,” he said.

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Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.