Walid Batrawi

“I have very disturbing news,” the lady on the phone said in Arabic with a shaky voice, “The Israeli army took over the building where you lived in Ramallah.” Palestinian journalist Walid Batrawi writes from Missouri about his reaction to news that the building housing his apartment in Ramallah had been occupied by Israeli army.

News about reforms in the Palestinian Authority (PA) come from Yasser Arafat’s headquarters, the only remaining section of the bombed out Mukata’a, the sixty-year old British built military compound in Ramallah, which has become an easy target for any Israeli offensive and a symbol for a nation under siege.