Israeli atrocities sowing hatred in Palestinian hearts
By Peter Beaumont
RAMALLAH: Ahlam Nasser was sitting in her ambulance here when the first shots were fired, a mixture of tear gas and rubber bullets. Hunched behind the windscreen, she stared ahead as the first of the ambulances sped off to pick up the first casualty of the day.
She had good reason to feel apprehensive and depressed. A week ago today, Ahlam’s best friend in the Palestine Red Crescent Society, the woman with whom she shared her ambulance, blew herself up in Jaffa Street in Israeli-occupied land, killing an 81-year-old bystander and injuring more than 100.
Wafa Idrees, 28, Palestine’s first woman suicide bomber, had told her friends and family she had been haunted by what she had seen working as a Red Crescent volunteer here - the deaths and injuries to which she had attended. Now Wafa is gone, her friends are left to carry on.
As Nasser waited to be summoned, the first ambulance sped down to the ‘clash point’ outside Yasser Arafat’s headquarters - a place where stone-throwing boys line up 50 metres away from tanks and snipers. A teenage boy had been hit in the leg by a plastic-coated steel pellet. A foreign photographer was hit in the scalp by a steel pellet as he stood among the stretcher-bearers.
The Israeli army says it does not deliberately target the ambulance crews of the Palestinian Red Crescent. The drivers, paramedics and volunteers who go out each day, have every reason to think otherwise. In 16 months of the intifada, 122 of them have been injured by Israeli fire across Gaza and the West Bank. One has been killed. Among the injured is Firaz Samara from the same ambulance station here as Idrees. Ten days ago he was hit in the leg by a machine gun bullet at the clash-point where he left his vehicle to assist a casualty.
A few hours before the clash we are sitting in the office of Mohammad Awad, the director of emergency services for the Red Crescent here.
“The propaganda they are putting out is that Wafa went to Al Quds in one of our ambulances. It is not true. She only worked on Fridays, but it gives them the excuse to come after us.” We have been asked not to question the staff about Wafa, but Awad volunteers the information. “I knew she was stressed. She was upset and angry by what she had seen. She talked about suicide to me and about suicide bombings. Because of the way she was talking, I thought she was joking.
The managers of the Red Crescent are only too aware of the stress their staff and volunteers suffer. Since July, a clinical psychologist, Munir Musa, has been working at the centre to counsel the staff. But in a society that does not feel comfortable talking openly about such feelings it is, as Musa admits, an uphill task.
“The volunteers and staff here have seen terrible things,” he says. “The psychological effect on these very young people who are evacuating the dead and injured can be profound. In the worst cases they are taking bodies away that are quite literally in pieces.
“Typically, the symptoms we are seeing come from feelings of frustration and hopelessness bred from having to work when you are not sure whether the soldiers opposite are going to open fire. Our staff report feeling constantly afraid and apprehensive even when they are safe at home. They complain of sleeplessness and irritability and not being able to eat. If it were not for the fact the crisis is continuing they would be the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.”
A tank came down and hosed the neighbourhood with machine gun fire, forcing us to crawl out of Sharkawi’s office on our hands and knees and continue our questioning elsewhere. “Wafa’s death is causing great pain to our organization,” Sharkawi explained when we were settled in a safer office. “We are not a political organization. Our aim, as we keep trying to tell the Israelis, is a humanitarian one.
“But we are faced with constant accusations from the Israelis. They say we carry gunmen in our ambulances or transport ammunition. It is simply not true and we have gone to the International Committee for the Red Cross to ask them to provide evidence or specifics. They can’t.” It is a problem for the Palestinian Red Crescent, for the accusations of carrying gunmen have been used to justify bringing their ambulances under fire.
“In a recent case,” says Sharkawi, “the Israeli Defence Forces accused one of our ambulances of carrying a gunman, and the same statement was put out by the Prime Minister’s office. When we proved it wasn’t true the IDF retracted but not Sharon’s office. So the media assume it must be true.
Sharkawi’s own situation is an illustration of the attitude towards the Red Crescent. A Palestinian born abroad, brought up in Canada and educated at London’s City University, he came to live in Palestine with his family, sending them back to Canada when it became too dangerous. “Because of my background I have more in common with the Israelis than anyone else. Some of my best friends here are Israelis. You would guess they would want someone like me as a neighbour.”
Ahlam Nasser expresses the Red Crescent’s mission. “When I hear there was been any trouble - shooting or shelling - I can’t stay away. I have to come. I was born to help.” —Dawn/The Observer News Service.
