A night among the refugees

The Israeli army has laid a cordon around the refugee camp, where the curfew has not been lifted. A young woman who lives just outside the camp wants to go out to do some shopping just as an Israeli APC pulls into her street. The soldiers who jump out of the back point their guns at her. "Go back into the house," one of them summons her several times, "go back inside or I swear I'll shoot." Another soldier, on the other side of the road, shouts a warning: "Are you crazy, don't argue with her, don't let her get near you, maybe she has a bomb on her and we'll all be blown up."

The soldiers seem genuinely scared of the civilians, a result possibly of the heavy fighting for the camp. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told reporters that the defenders had used every means at their disposal to kill soldiers: "Palestinians who raised their hands to surrender while wearing explosive belts in an attempt to detonate themselves among our soldiers." To explain the destruction in the camp, he said that many buildings were demolished because the Palestinians had wired them with explosives. "There wasn't a house that wasn't booby-trapped," Peres said, "and there was no way to neutralize the danger without demolishing the structure."

The refugees from the camp at the Charitable Center all have stories of the horrors of the fighting. Most of the adults say they saw one or two people being killed or lying dead in the street. None of the people who tell their stories say they themselves saw any massacres being perpetrated. One man tells of an army bulldozer pausing to let 70 people out of the basement of a building it was demolishing. Some people, though, have stories of what they say were random killings of single civilians, and one man tells of many more being buried under the rubble.

"In front of my eyes, I saw the building collapse on my wife's family, the Al-Fayeds, all 67 of them," one man says. "The house was first hit by a tank grenade and then by a missile that brought it down, right on top of the basement where they were hiding." There is no way yet to confirm the story or to ascertain the people were still in the cellar when the building came down or if the family was able to get out afterward. But there are rumors of people trapped under the rubble, using their cellphones to call for help.

Diab Abu Hassani, a coffee vendor in his 60s who has escaped from the camp, relates a harrowing experience he has also repeated to other reporters. He managed to escape from a house that was to be bulldozed, but his neighbor's son was not so lucky. "She was out of the basement and asked the soldier to stop the bulldozer because her son was still inside. She asked me to talk to the soldiers, but why would he listen to me if he didn't listen to her?" The bulldozer leveled the house, he says, entombing the neighbor's son who was deaf and had trouble moving, and was unable to leave.

"The new generation will fight the Israelis hard," says Abu Hassani. "They have a lot of hatred in their hearts now." The Israelis arrested his son on the second day of fighting in the camp, but his two daughters are still with him. He does not know what to do next. "I lost everything I built up over the last 50 years, like most people in the camp. I already lost everything once, when my family was expelled from Haifa in 1948. How can we start over again?"

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