Lockdown in Bethlehem Keeps Residents Confined to Homes Military Refuses to Allow Ambulances to Collect Dead, Wounded

BETHLEHEM, April 3 – In the wake of the Israeli army's predawn Tuesday invasion, demolished cars lined the narrow hillside streets of this city today, shops had their shutters ripped away, and the dead shared space with the wounded as a military clampdown kept frightened residents locked in their homes.

In one small house, in Bethlehem's Old City, a woman named Fatheyeh Mousa was wailing at foreign reporters for help in getting a dead man's body removed from her kitchen. She didn't know the man – he was from a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, he told her. He was wounded during the early hours of the Israeli incursion, and the woman's family had taken him in and provided shelter. Since no ambulances were allowed on the streets, he died on a thin mat on her kitchen floor.

"He kept bleeding. We tried to find any kind of medicine to help him, but he had a hole in his waist," the woman cried, as a child of about four stood transfixed by the feet of the corpse in the kitchen. "We didn't know who he was, but we feel like he was family already. . . . I feel like I lost a member of my family."

The man, who told the family his name was Abdel Khader Abu Ahmad, died from his wounds just a few hours before the reporters arrived at the house.

Nearby, in a small mosque, the body of another man, apparently a fighter, lay partially covered under a green coat and a colorful striped blanket. The man had been wounded, and someone tried to give him first aid, apparent from the blood-stained bandages over his right arm.

The military's refusal to allow ambulances to collect the dead and wounded has drawn sharp complaints and cries of outrage from Bethlehem's residents, including medical workers and clergymen. One ambulance was allowed out for about a half an hour this afternoon, under an agreement negotiated between the Israeli military and the Red Crescent Society. The driver, Jamal Balboul, picked up three dead bodies and two wounded people – and with no room in the back, he stacked the dead in first, and put the two injured people on top.

"It's unimaginable," said the Rev. Maroun Lahham, rector of the Latin Seminary of Bethlehem. "Even in the worst of wars, the Red Cross was always allowed to come and help people."