Purifying the Land

ABC News, March 22, 2002
Real Media report (1.9mb)

In the hours after Israel invaded Bethlehem’s Al Aida refugee camp two weeks ago, the ABC found Ismael Huwaja at Bet Jala hospital. He’d just learned of his wife’s death. He told us that after Israeli troops had blown the door of his house in, she’d been left to bleed to death while waiting for an ambulance.

At the time, Israel’s army said it couldn’t confirm what had happened. Foreign press were banned from entering the camps during the operation. But Israeli TV journalists were allowed to accompany the raids, and now one network has broken an army embargo on showing pictures that embarrass it. Those pictures describe exactly what did happen in the Huwaja house that day.

The soldiers blew the door apart and found Huda Huwaja mortally wounded on the floor.

And so, Israeli television viewers got to see Ismael Huwaja plead with the soldiers for help to bring in an Ambulance,

knowing troops on the edge of the camp weren’t allowing medics in.

Throughout, the Huwaja children are watching the soldiers,

and watching their mother dying.

After more than an hour, Huda Hawaja is finally evacuated to hospital – she arrived dead.

Meanwhile the troops busy themselves with the task of smashing through a wall into an adjacent home,

as one girl begs the soldiers to stop.
“please!”

The army admits, Huda Hawaja shouldn’t have died this way.

OLIVER RAFOWICZ, Israeli Army Spokesman:

”It’s a mistake. Honest, terrible mistake”

In another scene, the troops finding neither weapons nor wanted men, are told not to break too much.

“Just turn everything completely upside down,” says the commanding officer, “so they’ll have some hours of work to do when we go.”

After Israel’s channel 2 ran the pictures, the whole incident made it onto the front page of one of Israel’s largest newspapers. “A gaffe – a stuff up”, it reported.

The Israeli government’s response hasn’t been to condemn what happened in Al Aida camp, despite the fatal injury to the woman, the distress of her children, and the crucial delay of the ambulance. What the government has been concerned about, is that the story made it to air.

RAANAN GISSIN: Israeli Government Spokesman:

“I would have expected a little bit more, I would call it, errr, ‘self-censorship’ on the part of the Israeli media, the same as was deploy…displayed during various phases of the operation Afghanistan by the American media – that’s all I want”.

And what most stung the government wasn’t so much the overall conduct of it’s troops, as the words of one of them:

“We’re meant to purify this camp of something dirty here”, he says, “but personally I don’t understand why a young Hebrew soldier finds himself so far from home.”

Not only did the Israeli actions in the Al Aida camp kill Huda Hawaja – a woman in no way connected to the attacks on Israelis – they missed the men they were intended to round up.

A few days after the incident, a young man from Al Aida camp blew himself up in the streets of Jerusalem.

Tim Palmer, Lateline.