POLITICS-ISRAEL: Where an Attack Is Not Just News

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ferry Biedermann

JERUSALEM, Sep 10 2003 (IPS) - First comes the blast, towards the end of the evening in this quiet, residential Jerusalem neighbourhood. The loud dry sound is unmistakably that of a nearby bomb attack, the windows shake and the phoneline goes dead for a split second. After a minute or so of eerie silence, the sirens start screaming. The familiar scenario of a Jerusalem suicide attack once again unrolls outside in the street.

Jerusalem had been on extremely high alert all day. The police had received warning of a suicide attacker having left the West Bank city of Hebron, and they seemed to know where his target was. The Emek Refa’im street where the attacker blew up the Hillel Cafe in the evening and killed at least six people had seen unprecedented heavy police patrols and security checks during the day.

Israeli security forces were expecting retaliation from the Palestinian militant Hamas movement after the air force had tried to kill the top leadership of the Islamic group in Gaza over the weekend. After the failed attack on the leaders, including the movement’s founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas had said characteristically that it would “open the gates of hell.”

In the afternoon on Tuesday, the movement’s answer seemed to have been delivered. Eight Israeli soldiers were killed in a suicide bombing near the Tsrifin army base in the centre of the country. The heavy police presence in Jerusalem was somewhat scaled down, and within five hours the second blast of the day followed. The realisation that the security forces had been on the highest alert, yet were unable to prevent two bombings added to the sense of despair among Israelis that evening.

The violence comes at a time of political turmoil in the Palestinian Authority after the resignation of former prime minister Mahmoud Abbas after he had lost a power struggle with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. His expected replacement, parliamentary speaker Ahmed Qureia, condemned the attacks. But he is seen by the U.S. and Israel as even less likely than his predecessor to act against the militants.

After the bombing, calls for the expulsion of Yasser Arafat and for the completion of Israel’s controversial separation fence became louder. Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox mayor Uri Lupoliansky visited the spot of the blast later at night.

The government’s failure to complete the fence near Jerusalem was proof of its “abandonment” of the city, he said. “The fence may not be hermetic but the fact that all the attacks are taking place near spots that are not protected by a fence right now makes its absence criminal,” he said.

A visit to the site in the aftermath of the blast provided a rare glimpse of just what it can feel like.

The air in the German Colony neighbourhood of Jerusalem is filled with the smell of cordite that grows stronger nearer the spot of the attack. The cafe where the attack came is a black smoking hull.

Out in the streets there are bloody puddles and human remains. The head of the suicide bomber has been separated form his body, and there is at least one other body in the street. It appears to be that of the security guard who stopped him form entering. Bloody pieces of flesh are blown into neighbouring gardens and driveways. Later in the evening ultra-orthodox Jewish rescue workers will gather all the bits in white plastic bags.

Alon Krispin leans against the wall of a nearby house wearing a blood-stained T-shirt. Krispin is a medical student at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital. He was visiting friends who live right opposite the cafe when the bomb went off. He had dealt with numerous such cases in the past but in the hospital’s emergency room and in ambulances, not at the spot of the explosion itself.

“I knew immediately that it was an attack and ran out to offer assistance,” he says. He had to go into the cafe to help the people who had not been able to run out immediately after the blast. In the street he saw the severed head of the bomber close up. “I knew it was the attacker because he looked Arab,” he says.

Inside he saw three people seriously wounded. “One was breathing but his hand was severed at the wrist,” he says. “Another needed more attention because he had stopped breathing. I gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation to try and bring him back.”

Another victim’s wife kept screaming his name over and over again. Her husband seemed in a state of shock, his hair all burnt off, recalls Krispin. “The smell in the place was terrible, burnt hair and burnt flesh.”

Krispin tries to approach the carnage from a medical point of view but after a while anger spills over. “I blame the government,” he says. “When you emaciate the peace process and take the aggressive steps that they take, then you should expect the consequences.”

From the balcony of a nearby house angry residents shout at the policemen guarding the site of the blast. “This is all your responsibility, how come that with all those policemen here you fail to protect us,” someone shouts.

The Hillel cafe was a popular all-day drinking and eating spot that had only opened three months ago. Liron levy, a young woman living opposite the cafe says the whole neighbourhood expected it to become a target. “It was always so busy and the way it was built, all the glass and the tables outside, it was an obvious target.”

But most people in the neighbourhood say they frequented the cafe and will keep going to the remaining ones. “It’s a roulette but that goes for everywhere you go here, in the streets, in the buses, you never know,” says one resident. “But life has to go on.”