Jara and I play in the neighbour’s garden under the pleasant Mediterranean sun. ‘Do you have everything?’ she asks the neighbour. It is one of those routine questions which people now ask each other and which she has picked up as a normal way of showing concern.
The Israelis didn’t see it coming. Clearly, after the failure to get people inside on April 28, they must have assumed that the International Solidarity Movement did not pose a threat to their siege of the Church of Nativity.
Almost 3am, and there is no point in trying to ignore the sounds and to try sleeping anymore. It is just too loud, too near. The heavy machine gunfire, the thuds of tank shelling.
‘When they begin shelling the houses, we want to go to our relatives’. So we all go to my brother’s house next to us. We all move over there. Then the Israeli soldiers come with the bulldozer and the tank. They tell us to come out of the house.
The reality left behind by the Israelis in Jenin Refuge Camp defies even the most vicious imagination. One after another, the people of Jenin have been trying to tell anyone in the world who will listen what they have witnessed and lived through since the beginning of their most recent tragedy on April 3, 2002.
‘Greetings from your friend Alaa’, starts a message from one of my best friends in Nablus. We used to be neighbors in a neighborhood called Ras al-Ain. Since Israeli forces entered the city, we had been out of touch.
