October 29, 2001	Monday	Shaba'an 11, 1422

BEIT RIMA: He was at his checkpoint under an olive tree, at the entrance to the West Bank village of Beit Rima, when the Israeli soldiers ambushed and killed him. Kamal Barghouti was not on any list of terrorists wanted by Israel forces. In all likelihood he was sleeping. They killed him just for being in their way.

Kamal was a handsome 20-year-old before a bullet wrecked his face. An agricultural labourer in need of money, who worked among the olive groves that ring this city, he had signed on two months earlier as a ‘soldier’ in the National Security force of the Palestinian Authority, to earn a regular wage.

They arrived at his checkpoint under the olive tree in a van in the early hours of Wednesday. According to his commander, Colonel Kamal Khadami, the van was packed with a small unit of plainclothes Israeli troops from the elite Dov Dovan - Cherry Brigade - disguised as Palestinians.

They fired without warning, killing Kamal in one of the first bursts. Moments later a second undercover unit attacked Beit Rima’s police station. Taking their cue from their colleagues firing down the road, they burst into the police post shouting “What’s happening?” in Arabic before they too opened fire. In the gun battle that followed, at least five men - by the Israeli account - were killed. The Palestinians claim up to nine may have died. They say some of the dead are ‘missing’.

One thing seems certain. The Palestinian account of a lethal ambush on Beit Rima, launched without warning by a massively superior force equipped with tanks, helicopters and elite combat troops against half a dozen men, is given credence by the stories of the assault troops of the Nahal Brigade who attacked them.

Was the fighting fierce? It was not fierce, say Palestinians, because some of those who died - like Kamal - were executed as they slept. This is a view endorsed by Dr Bassem Rimawi, who said he was escorted by Israeli soldiers to inspect some of the dead and wounded five hours after the raid. “This man was lying right next to his bed under the tree. It was obvious he was shot dead in his bed and fell as he was dying.”

It seems what marked out Beit Rima for last week’s military action was what marked it out for attention in the first place - a geographical peculiarity. Surrounded by the huge Israeli settlements around Halamish to the West, it is a village easily cut off at the end of a solitary road.

The suspicion that is emerging is that Beit Rima was selected for no other reason than it was an easy target for Israeli forces to make a lethal demonstration. Next time - the warning is explicit - it will be the Palestinian state, not just a village, which will be the target.

For while the soldiers did not catch Bilal or Abdullah, whose organization, in any case, has not been linked to Ze’evi’s killing - they took some men whose links to Ze’evi’s death may be tenuous at least. What they did do was force their way into the homes of three families with links to suspected terrorists. Once in the houses they destroyed them.

Among the houses demolished was that of Bilal and Abdullah’s Barghouti’s widowed mother, Hana. With her daughters and her neighbours she sat beneath an olive tree outside the collapsed wreckage of her home, one of three demolished by Israeli soldiers.

 “They came to the house at 5am,” she said us. “They ordered us out of our house and brought dogs to search it. They found nothing. They made us sit on the steps for eight hours, while they rested in our house and ate our food. Before they left they blew up my home. I was a rich woman,” she added, close to tears. ”Now I have nothing.”

It is not only the dead and injured who are victims. For if it is enough for Hana Barghouti to be punished as a proxy for her Hamas sons, it is sufficient simply to be a Palestinian to share in the punishment for what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has decreed as the collective guilt for Ze’evi’s killing.

The military operations against six Palestinian cities in the past week became a vast reprisal raid against the entire Palestinian people. In Ramallah and in Bethlehem, in Tulkarm, Jenin, Kalkilya and Beit Rima, it is ordinary civilians who are being given a brutal lesson in the exigencies of the overwhelming nature of Israeli military power and being punished simply for existing.

Last Monday in the El Bireh suburb of Ramallah, the centre of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, Israel’s soldiers were at work. Tanks and armoured personnel carriers tore up and down the road, intimidating the local population, their crews seizing the keys of drivers foolish enough to go out on the road.

At Beit Jala hospital on the outskirts of Bethlehem Dr Peter Qumri, the hospital’s director, three days into the fighting appears exhausted, blinking haphazardly with darkened eyes. He saiys he had been sleeping with his head on his desk. His surgeons had been sleeping on chairs next to the emergency theatre.

Qumri listed the fatalities brought in. They were all killed, he said, by shots to the head, the neck and chest. “They are shooting to kill,” he said, “regardless of whether they can identify the target.”—Dawn/The Observer News Service.