INSIDE THE SIEGE OF BETHLEHEM

Newsweek
May 20, 2002 Issue

Snipers, Militants, Vandals And Priests: Everyone Had A Story From
The Siege Of Bethlehem. Here Are The Tales Of Four.

Inside the Basilica of the Church of the Nativity, the stench of
150 unwashed human bodies mingled with the reek of fecal matter. The
halvah, cans of lentils, chocolate bars and Marlboro Lights had run
out days before, and the food stocks ransacked from the Franciscan
compound were nearly gone. Weakened men boiled soup made from the
leaves of lemon trees picked in the Greek Orthodox compound–gathered
under the menacing sight of a remote-controlled sniper rifle bolted
to the top of a crane at the edge of Manger Square.

In the southern corner of the basilica, Ibrahim Abayat paced the stone
floor, a mobile phone in his hand. Pale, plagued by migraines, hungry
and weak, Abayat was a man transformed. Gone was the confidence of the
gunman who once strutted around Bethlehem, boasting about how he’d
orchestrated the killings of Israeli settlers in the occupied West
Bank. At that time the 29-year-old leader of Bethlehem’s Aqsa Martyrs
Brigades had vowed to "go out either as a winner or a martyr." Now
Abayat was feebly pleading for exile. He would gladly move to Italy,
he told NEWSWEEK during a brief phone conversation. "They’ve got
spaghetti there, so I’ll be OK."

Moments later Abayat’s mother–sitting beside a NEWSWEEK correspondent
at her home in Bethlehem–got on the phone. "Abu Atef," she said, "may
God bless you. You haven’t received food? We hope God will send you a
table of food like they did to the prophet Moses in the desert." When
Abayat told her that his last meal had been two spoonfuls of macaroni,
eaten the previous day, she began to weep. Her son, a top figure on
Israel’s wanted list, calmed her, then begged her to let him hang
up. "I’m too weak to talk," he said.

Ibrahim Abayat’s ordeal would soon be over, and he’d neither be a
winner nor a martyr. Thirty-nine days after Israeli tanks and troops
surrounded Palestinian gunmen inside the Church of the Nativity,
the standoff at Manger Square wound to a close last Friday morning
with an emotional homecoming for some who were trapped in the church,
and indefinite exile for others. It had begun as a sideshow to Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon’s West Bank invasion in March, but the closing
act of Operation Defensive Shield became both a media extravaganza
and a powerful metaphor for the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The test of wills, on one of the world’s most sacred sites, had the
feeling of a slow war of attrition. During the siege, Israeli snipers
killed eight people in and around the church, including a mentally
retarded bell ringer, and injured 22, among them an Armenian monk; an
Army spokesman claimed that all the dead men except the bell ringer
were "terrorists." Trapped between the two antagonists were the
Christian clergymen–many of them Palestinian–who had given refuge
to the gunmen and now found themselves obliged to suffer along with
them. As the siege dragged on, it seemed to capture the essence of the
Mideast struggle: a prolonged, seemingly insoluble dispute between
two stubborn and deeply distrustful enemies. Even the on-again,
off-again negotiations over the terms of the release–conducted
through intermediaries ranging from the Vatican to the CIA–spoke
volumes of the larger inability of the two sides to settle their
differences without foreign pressure and help.

Over 39 days inside the church, snipers killed, monks pleaded,
militants abused a sacred sanctuary, soldiers vandalized,
politicians threatened and cajoled, and everyone made a claim to
righteousness. This is the story of four people intimately involved
or caught up in the mayhem: Abayat, the gunman who had made it his
mission in life to kill Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank;
Mike Aviad, an Israeli reservist and son of a leading peace activist;
Father Paul Delalande, a Franciscan priest and historian, and Omar
Habib, a 16-year-old student from the Terra Santa School in Bethlehem,
who found himself caught between Israeli and Palestinian combatants as
he was trying to pick up a prescription for his diabetic mother. After
nearly 40 days of warfare, negotiation, brinkmanship and capitulation,
all four survived. At least two expected to fight again another day.