A war-shattered family on both sides of the border
Palestine, Local, 11/12/1997

Ali Mohammed Jawarish, 7, was shot in the head by Israeli troops who opened fire in the area of Rachel tombs during demonstrations that broke out in Bethlehem on Tuesday. He was rushed to Beit Jala Hospital where only first aid was accorded to him. The doctors decided to transfer him to Hadassah Hospital in West Jerusalem due to his critical wounds. At first, his transfer was not possible due to Israel's refusal to allow the ambulance through the military roadblocks. Only after senior Palestinian and Israeli officers discussed the matter was the ambulance allowed through. Medical sources in Hadassah said Wednesday the boy's condition is critical.

Relatives of Ali said he was shot while playing in their house's playground and had nothing to do with the demonstrations that took place outside during a visit to the site by Israeli Defence minister Yitzhak Mordachai. A senior Palestinian police source said Ali was shot by the soldiers though he was within the PNA parts of Bethlehem. Palestinian police Colonel Farouk Amin said the Israeli soldiers opened fire from a distance of no more than 17 meters.

Joel Greenberg, a reporter for the New York Times, confirmed this version. He described the incident as follows: ³The children threw stones from a distance and it did not appear they endangered anyone¹s life. At a certain stage, a group of soldiers from the Engineering Corps left from the direction of the tomb and flanked the children. The soldiers restrained three children and arrested them while the rest ran away. One of the soldiers kneeled and opened fire.² Greenberg emphasizes that, ³the fire was carried out at a relatively close range of about 15 meters.² Other eyewitnesses said the boy lay on the ground while part of his brain was out of the skull, but none of the soldiers approached him to offer help. The soldiers, eyewitnesses said, were guarding the three children and even handcuffed one of them. Jawarish lay on the road for several minutes until a car from the adjacent refugee camp came and took him to the hospital.

Ali Jawarish's family originally comes from the Lod area. They were among those who were forced out of their homes by the advancing Israeli troops prior to the proclamation of the Jewish state in 1948. They had come to the Bethlehem area and lived since then in the UNRWA-run Ayda refugee camp. However, many of their relatives stayed behind in what is known today as the Jawarish neighborhood in the city, which now has a Jewish majority.

In the camp, relatives and friends of the family poured into their house to express solidarity with them. They mostly spoke of the Israeli army and the trigger-happy soldiers who open fire even in the least threatening circumstances. Very little was said about the ongoing civil war in the Lod area between the Jawarish and Kurraja families there. Ironically, one day before Ali was shot by Israeli soldiers in Bethlehem, members of his family back in Lod had allegedly fired a LAW anti-tank missile at the house of the Kurraja family but missed it. Instead, the missile hit a Jewish house in the area but did not explode. Police sources said only a miracle had saved the lives of all those living there because had the missile went off, it would have leveled the whole building.

Police sources said the missile was fired in revenge for the killing of Hamidah Jawarish and the injuring of four of his relatives in a shootout that took place a day earlier. The Israeli police declared a state of alert in the whole neighborhood since in this mini-civil war between the two families. Not only knives were used but also automatic weapons and, as in the Monday case, missiles that were believed to have stolen from Israeli army warehouses.

A few hours after the missile was fired, both families exchanged fire in their neighborhood but had to cease firing and resorted to their hideouts minutes before police troops arrived. The battles between the two families date back to a number of years ago and all efforts by Arab notables to bring the two sides to an agreement had failed.

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