Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2002, pages 54-55

Special Report

 

The Killing of American Suraida Gharbieh: “Defensive Shield” or Offensive Slaying?

 

By Roxane Assaf

Watching scenes of Ariel Sharon’s murderous and merciless assault on the West Bank one was transfixed with horror, as though mesmerized by a deadly cobra. It was impossible for most Americans even to begin to imagine the reality behind the televised images. Tragically, however, it was not left to the imagination of at least one American family—which found itself at Ground Zero, Israeli-style, when Suraida Gharbieh became the first casualty of the IDF assault on Ramallah.

As he mourns, Suraida’s father, Farhan Saleh, wonders why his son-in-law took his young family from their house at five in the morning in the middle of an Israeli incursion. In Farhan’s grief, he cannot help but think his daughter might still be alive if she and her husband had not tried to cross the 300 meters—a mere couple of blocks—from their home to her parents’.

Meanwhile, Farhan and his wife, Hashima, remember the day 21 years ago that Suraida was born in George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC. Perhaps they also contemplate what their lives would have been like if the young couple had stayed in the U.S., either in Washington, or moved to be near other members of their immediate family in New York, Detroit, Chicago or Philadelphia.

According to Suraida’s husband of 18 months, Murad Gharbieh, a 28-year-old elevator contractor, when the Israeli operation (dubbed “Defensive Shield”) was launched with an assault on Ramallah around midnight on March 29, he and Suraida listened as the blasts of automatic weapons and heavy artillery fire grew increasingly closer to their house. After several anxious and sleepless hours, they decided that Suraida’s parents’ house would be a safer place for them and their nine-month-old son, Muhsen. Therefore, with Muhsen on Suraida’s lap, Murad took the wheel of their small Renault and drove the family in the chilly rain toward his in-laws’. Halfway there, however, their budding family life ended.

“One soldier said ‘Stop!’ in Arabic,” Murad recalled, “and then dudduddudduddudduh! Suraida screamed, ‘Murad!’ I said to her, ‘Don’t say anything’—and she never said anything again.”

There, in the usually cheerful Ramallah neighborhood of Ain Masbah, Israeli soldiers surrounded the car and broke the back window. From a distance of two meters, they shot Murad several times in the shoulder and in the head, near his ear, where a bullet lodged. The soldiers shot Suraida once in the neck and twice in the head with dumdum bullets, which explode on impact. She was killed instantly.

Since they were near Ramallah’s security and police headquarters (formerly an Israeli military prison, and where Israel soon would besiege Yasser Arafat), Murad initially thought the soldiers were Palestinian police or security forces. “I put my hand out the window and shouted, ‘Arab! Arab!’” he said, “but there were maybe 20 soldiers, and they started shooting. The bullets fell like rain,” he explained.

Murad was surprised later to learn that there were Israeli soldiers on every Ramallah street corner. The extent of the incursion, he said, was unexpected.

Getting out of the car, Murad fell to the ground. “Many soldiers laughed at me like you laugh at a drunk man falling, like a crazy man who doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Murad said. “Then they told me to show myself and put my arms up.”

When he tried to tell them that he wanted to see his wife, he was unable to form the words properly, and he recalls having trouble seeing and hearing. He stumbled over to the passenger side and took the baby from his dead wife’s arms. “I saw great amounts of blood coming from the side of Suraida’s head,” he said. ‘The soldiers thought I was moments from dying. They just laughed and watched. I fell onto the car with my baby. I saw three Palestinians in blindfolds and handcuffs coming with more soldiers. Maybe the soldiers were waiting there for the prisoners.”

Murad started running toward Suraida’s parents’ house. In his state of trauma and confusion, he ran into the shovel of a parked bulldozer and fell down. “Then I started feeling the pain,” he said. “All I could think was not to fall on the baby.”

Murad said that neighbors, watching from their windows as the Gharbiehs’ car approached, reported having felt that the car was on a path to death. Three of those who came out to help were shot and wounded. Medics came and took Suraida’s body but, because the Israelis fired at the ambulance, it was two hours before another ambulance reached Murad. He was taken by a safer route to a different hospital, where he later encountered the neighbors who had been shot. Doctors told Murad he was lucky to be alive. “They told me, ‘You don’t have any more blood in your body!’” he recalled. “If anyone saw the car, they would say that everyone in that car was dead.”

Suraida was not so lucky. Nor was she the only one. Her body lay for days in a morgue overflowing with dead bodies awaiting burial. Prohibited from taking the dead to the cemetery, Palestinian officials and medical professionals finally gave up waiting for the siege to end and decided to bury Suraida, along with 26 others, in a mass grave in the hospital parking lot.

An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson, who could not locate any record of the incident, dismissed the entire account as Palestinian propaganda. “No IDF soldier would ever do that,” she said. “These are vicious lies. I’m not saying there aren’t cases where civilians are hurt by mistake,” she added, “but this sounds like an execution, a Nazi doing.”

Admitting she had never experienced combat firsthand, she nonetheless insisted that rules are consistently followed in the field. Israeli soldiers accused of looting, for example, are being questioned, she said. “The IDF have strict orders on when to fire,” she told the Washington Report, “and it’s only when we identify the source as a danger to life. There was heavy exchange of gunfire in Ramallah. There were no inquiries about this case. We don’t execute people, ever. They might be killed during exchange of fire, but even with terrorists, we would rather arrest them than kill them. Because of the Holocaust, Israelis will never do things like this.

“If they [Suraida’s family] think it’s true,” she added, “they can call a lawyer or make a report to international human rights groups.”

When informed that Suraida’s death had been covered by CNN and the Pacifica radio program “Democracy Now!” and that the incident had been documented with the human rights organizations B’Tselem and Al-Haq, the IDF spokesperson was doubtful. “If B’Tselem documents something, they will check it out with us,” she said. “CNN would call us. I haven’t seen anything about that.”

As to whether or not the IDF might still investigate the shooting, she replied that it would be difficult to investigate a matter more than a month after it occurred, since many of the soldiers are reservists who have returned to their civilian lives in Israel. She did confirm, however, that there would be records of where the troops had been stationed. She included in her statement a reminder that the Israeli offensive in Ramallah followed a suicide bombing at a Passover celebration.

 

Routine IDF Practices

The prominent Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem’s Web site, however, includes detailed information on published rules of engagement and statistical information about breaches of Israeli and international law. “The defense establishment is not properly vigilant in ensuring that security forces comply with the Open-Fire Regulations,” B’Tselem noted. “Soldiers who violate the Regulations are almost never prosecuted. Furthermore, during the current intifada, the IDF ceased its routine practice of opening investigations by the Military Investigations Unit in cases in which security forces killed Palestinians.”

At an April 18 hearing of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs, held to consider the fiscal year 2002 supplemental appropriations bill, Chicago Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. asked Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage about the amount of Israeli damage to U.S.-funded projects. Jackson also inquired whether there would be any State Department effort to account for the death or injury of American citizens, specifically mentioning Suraida’s case. “I was trying to ascertain whether the State Department has a policy regarding protecting Americans in Israel and the Palestinian territories,” Jackson said in a statement. “Protecting Americans abroad should be the State Department’s number one priority.”

Unfortunately, according to American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee communications director Hussein Ibish, “Arab Americans who are mistreated in Israeli custody are not afforded the same protections as Americans of other ethnicities.”

When a Chinese American was arrested in China, for example, the U.S. “made a stink,” Ibish said. He confirmed that a complaint over Suraida’s shooting had been filed with the State Department, and expressed hope that the U.S. would lodge a formal protest with the Israelis.

Murad openly laments the loss of his wife, but with the demeanor of a depressed man. “Israel says they kill anyone who has a gun. I hadn’t even a stone,” he said. “I think they love seeing Palestinian blood, but when they see Israeli blood, it makes them angry. If I had a gun, I would have shot them when they killed my wife. But even if I carried a gun, I wouldn’t love to kill anybody. I think the Israelis love to see Palestinians die. They saw my wife wearing a scarf on her head. They saw my baby. Now, today, the soldiers are eating or laughing. They forgot what they did in Ramallah. But I will always remember.”

Suraida’s father is aware of the State Department’s silence, and of their distance from congressmen his family has contacted. His grief, however, is more consuming than his desire for words. “It is very hard when somebody loses a daughter or a son,” he explained. “It goes out from the heart. Nobody can believe it. Everybody dies, but not like this. I wish they had taken or destroyed all my property instead of harming so much as one fingernail on my daughter.”

According to Murad, many people are mourning Suraida’s death, including her co-workers in the accounting department of the Palestinian Ministry of Education. But Murad thinks about little else as he tries to make it through another day without his wife. “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep,” he said. “I remember Suraida in everything I do. Sometimes I cry. I’ll never meet anyone else like her. And when Muhsen sees his mother’s picture, he calls for her. Sometimes I wish God had taken me and not Suraida.”

In spite of his pain, both physical and emotional, Murad manages to retain his humanity. “America makes the guns and bullets and planes, but we love American people,” he said. “We love Israeli people if their heart is pure. We love everybody in the world. But we don’t love Israeli soldiers when they kill people and do what they do.”

Roxane Assaf is a free-lance writer based in Chicago.

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