TV Tape of Army Raid Stuns Israelis

The death of Huda Hawajah, mother of five, might have been chalked up as one more tragedy, another Palestinian civilian killed by Israeli troops during a military raid.

Except that Hawajah’s death made the evening news. The Israeli evening news.

And with that came a wrenching debate over the tactics employed by an army that the majority of Israelis regard as a respectable institution with high moral standards. The footage broadcast by commercial Channel Two television forced Israelis to examine their army’s behavior in the aftermath of its largest ground offensive in two decades. And it also set off a firestorm of debate over media access to the war.

Israel’s raids into Palestinian refugee camps and cities earned considerable reproach overseas, among human rights organizations and at the United Nations. The sight of hundreds of men--blindfolded, handcuffed and marked with numbers--shocked people here and abroad. But the short videotape of the raid into the Aida refuge camp brought the troubling issue home to many Israelis.

Some believed that scenes of Hawajah’s children watching her bleed to death as Israeli soldiers stormed her home should not have been broadcast. Too demoralizing at a time of war, they said.

Others said it was important to confront what the army was doing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, for better or for worse.

Channel Two defied the army’s public affairs office, which ordered that the tape not be broadcast. The footage was taken by an Israeli cameraman who was allowed to accompany the troops, and several scenes were included in a current affairs program March 15. Last week, the defense minister ordered the army to “think twice” before again allowing reporters to accompany soldiers in action.

Footage of Searches

In addition to the Hawajah ordeal in the Aida camp, near the biblical city of Bethlehem, the footage showed Israeli soldiers rummaging through the bedrooms and kitchens of other Palestinian refugee families. The searches were part of a massive military operation in which thousands of troops raided refugee camps and Palestinian cities throughout the West Bank and Gaza with the stated goal of rounding up militants and confiscating weapons.

In a scene that caused considerable uproar, one 20-year-old soldier was interviewed.

“I don’t know what we are doing here,” he told the camera. “ ‘Cleansing.’ It must be dirty here. I don’t know what a Hebrew boy is doing far away from the homeland.”

Channel Two said it decided to air the footage to trigger a public debate “on the meaning and consequences of the way we as a country and society defend ourselves.” The reporter who narrated the sequence, Ruthi Shiloni, and the station were flooded with both complaints and praise in the hours after the show aired.

“It is difficult for us to acknowledge that we are doing this kind of thing,” said Matti Golan, a writer who hosts a radio and television talk show called “Documedia.” “My son is in the army, in a combat unit, and I don’t want to think he participates in this kind of thing. But if he gets an order, that is what he will do. But I don’t like it.”

Golan’s program carried a lively debate on the controversial footage and on whether media access to army missions should be restricted. Some participants said that Israel has nothing to hide and should be confident enough in its actions to show the bad with the good. Others said a united front in what Israel describes as its war on terrorism is more important.

Gideon Meir, an official with the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, also took to the airwaves to defend Channel Two’s decision to broadcast the images. But he said he understood the controversy.

“Most Israelis and Jews around the world believe the army does not behave this way, and if there is an exception, they want it to be kept within the family,” he said. “We have nothing to hide. If there are exceptions, they have to be treated by the [army].”

Brig. Gen. Ron Kitrey, the army’s chief spokesman, said he was chagrined by the broadcast--angry at Channel Two for presenting what he said was a distorted and exaggerated report, and angrier at the soldiers.

“I am ashamed at the way the soldiers acted,” Kitrey said. He said cameras were invited to show the professionalism of the army and its soldiers and instead they got what he branded the actions of a minority.

The program opened with soldiers saying morning prayers and then a commander instructing his men to first try to gain entry to a refugee home by knocking on the front door. If that failed, he said, they should take a sledgehammer to it, and in “problematic” cases, use an explosive.

The next scene showed Hawajah’s front door, which had been blown from its hinges and crumpled by the force of an explosion. Viewers did not see Huda Hawajah being mortally wounded, but according to her husband, Ismail, pieces of metal were propelled from the blast and into her body as she stood in the hallway, on the way to the kitchen to prepare lunch.

Viewers did see Ismail pleading for help in getting an ambulance past Israeli military roadblocks, and they heard a soldier, probably the medic, saying he was reluctant to lift the woman on a stretcher because she might lose consciousness.

The Hawajahs’ 9-year-old daughter was then seen weeping, and the reporter explained that she was watching her mother on the floor. The woman was later seen being taken away by Red Crescent medical personnel. Then an 11-year-old daughter, Sumud, pleaded with the soldiers not to tear a hole in the wall, as they did frequently during the operation to create passages between refugee homes. “Please, please,” she said in English. They drilled a gaping hole anyway.

Ambulance Faces Delays

In an interview last week at his home, Ismail Hawajah said he noticed the television camera as the troops came into his living and dining rooms and ordered his family into a single area. He asked the cameraman if he spoke Arabic, hoping the man could serve as a translator. But the cameraman said he didn’t.

Hawajah, 36, said he had expected the soldiers to arrive at his doorstep the morning of March 8 because he could hear them drilling through the walls of other houses in the neighborhood.

“Then I saw them through the [door’s] window, and I was waiting for them to knock. I would have opened the door,” he said. “All of a sudden, I heard the explosion.”

His wife lay bleeding profusely on the carpeted floor. He frantically removed her veil and tried to use it as a tourniquet. Then about 30 soldiers entered and ordered him to stand back. The medic helped attend to Huda Hawajah, but it took nearly an hour for a Palestinian ambulance to get around various roadblocks and tanks and reach the stricken woman. She was pronounced dead when the ambulance at last reached a hospital.

Ismail said he explained to their five children that their mother was dead and had gone to be with God. The two youngest, 3 and 4, don’t understand and still expect her to come home from the hospital, he said.

Huda was a math teacher. Ismail works at an Islamic orphanage in East Jerusalem.

The debate over army tactics comes amid a general acknowledgment that the massive military operation of the first two weeks of March did little to stop terrorism. The raids--Israel’s largest military campaign in the West Bank and Gaza since it conquered those territories in the 1967 Middle East War--also brought rare criticism from Washington and stinging rebukes from human rights organizations.