video: http://cbc.ca/clips/ram-lo/macdonald_censored020318.ram
Last Updated Tue Mar 19 19:52:12 2002
JERUSALEM - The Israeli army has expressed a note of
contrition after a television station aired a videotape
showing an army assault on a Palestinian home in
which a mother of five children died.
INDEPTH: Mideast Showdown
When CBC News spoke with Ismail Hawarjeh at
Bethlehem's hospital earlier this month, there was no
way to verify the story he told about how his wife
had died, until Israel's Channel 2 broacast the tape
last weekend.
The Palestinian school administrator said his wife Huda
had been killed in their home by an Israeli tank shell
during the army's March 8 assault on the Aida refugee
camp. The army wouldn't comment and foreign
journalists weren't allowed inside the camp.
But Israeli media were
allowed to ride along with
the soldiers, and they
went right into the
Hawarjeh home. An Israeli
camera recorded the army
blowing off the door, and
found Huda Hawarjeh
bleeding on the floor.
The pictures conformed to Ismail Hawarjeh's story
about his wife being hit by shrapnel in the front
hallway of the house, and about the Israeli soldiers
doing little to help her for an hour while she bled to
death in front of her five children.
Finally, the soldiers allowed an ambulance to come to
a nearby street, and soldiers helped Hawarjeh carry
his wife to it. Doctors tried to revive her at the
hospital but couldn't.
Huda Hawarjeh was one of seven people to die in the
Bethlehem area that day.
The Israeli army allows the media such close access
on the understanding it can embargo anything it
doesn't want broadcast.
The tapes of the assault on the Hawarjeh home fell
into that category. But Channel 2 broke the embargo
anyway.
The army, government and many Israeli citizens didn't
like what they saw.
Channel 2 showed
Hawarjeh begging soldiers
to allow an ambulance
through. The camera
captured the terror of the
woman's daughter, and her
brother's attempt to stop
her from showing the
soldiers her fear.
After the woman was finally taken out, one of the
soldiers looked into the camera and said: "I don't
know what we're doing here. Purification, maybe. It's
dirty here. I don't know why a good Hebrew boy
should be here, so far from his home."
The soldiers tore the home apart, evidently looking for
weapons.
Another daughter begged them not to demolish the
home's wall. Soldiers commonly smash walls to move
into adjacent houses.
Israeli spokesman Ranaan Gissin said the government
was disappointed by the decision to air the tapes. "I
would have expected a little bit more self-censorship
on the part of the Israeli media," he said.
Ma'ariv, Israel's second-biggest newspaper, ran the
story on its front page on Monday, under a banner
headline that read "Gaffe!"
The army, after trying to suppress distribution of the
pictures, admitted the soldiers' actions pushed the
boundaries of public acceptance.
"Our action is so difficult to be done that it is to the
extremities of acceptance," said Olivier Rafowicz, an
Israeli Defence Force spokesman.
He called what happened in the Hawarjeh home "a
mistake."