- The Guardian, Tuesday April 16 2002
Today the siege of the church, built on the spot that has long been commemorated as the birthplace of Christ, enters its 15th day. Stationed outside the church, tucked out of range of Palestinian snipers, are countless Israeli soldiers and tanks, their weapons and cameras trained on the complex.
And inside, entering their third week without medical supplies or fresh food or water, is an unlikely band of around 200 people; the determination of many of them not to leave matches that of those who surround them. The exact mix of clergy, gunmen and civilians inside is not clear, but the group is believed to include at least 35 armed militants, along with 26 Franciscan friars, four Franciscan nuns, four Greek Orthodox priests and two Armenian monks. Six of the besieged are reported to be children under 14. There are also at least two corpses.
The Israeli army may have pulled out of some of the West Bank towns and villages it occupied following the launch of Operation Protective Wall on April 1; it may have completed its objectives in Nablus and the refugee camp of Jenin; but the situation in Bethlehem's Manger Square remains as perilously stalled as it did two weeks ago. This famous spot, so loaded with meaning, has become the site of the most iconic clash of the present Israeli offensive against the Palestinian cities of the West Bank and the 18-month-long intifada, pulling together all the ironies and tensions of the present violence in the Holy Land.
It is towards that church that we are heading, calling out the name of a French-Israeli colonel who we understand is prepared to speak to us about the siege. A khaki-clad figure emerges from a street next to the Omar Mosque, behind Manger Square. He hurries us into Najajareh Street, the last street before the square, and orders us to sprint across the entrance of a short alley that opens into the square itself, overlooked, he warns us, by Palestinian snipers in the church. Suddenly we are there.
The frontline position of the Israeli army outside the church is a building on the corner of Najajareh Street. Two storeys high, it houses Bethlehem's chamber of commerce and the offices of Dr Robert J Tabash MD. These days, the faces that peer from the windows are not Palestinian businessmen or nervous patients, but the stubbled faces of Israeli soldiers. And at the very corner of this building, steps descend into Manger Square, the site of the church itself.
You can see the church as you walk down Star Street past the rubble and bullet-perforated cars. Viewed from this vantage point, the church sits at the far corner of the square. An elegant bell-tower, topped with a cupola of blue-grey lead, rises from one end. To the left of this tower are the walls that surround the basilica itself, as solid and crenellated as a castle keep. As besieged fortresses go, it looks fairly well designed for the job; it is a large complex of three monasteries, one each for the Franciscan, Armenian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox churches, each clinging possessively to the ancient chapel.
What the world wants to know is: what is going on behind those solid limestone walls?
The Israeli version is articulated by Colonel Olivier Rafowicz as he stands in Najajareh Street. The balloon cameras, he tells us, have demonstrated the level of infiltration of the gunmen into all areas of the church compound.
"With the tapes from the cameras we have been able to see what is going on," he says. "We can see tens of terrorists, with their weapons, running all around the church. Others are simply lying with their weapons at their side." He adds that the entire complex is now being controlled by Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Fatah factions, and that the exterior doors have been booby trapped.
"We know that they have Kalashnikovs and grenades inside, and we also believe they may have some explosive belts. The other people - the churchmen and civilians - inside the church cannot leave even if they want to. Their position is somewhere between that of being hostages and prisoners."
The colonel's words are, of course, contradicted by the Palestinian version of events, pieced together from snatched conversations on mobile phones - their batteries fading rapidly - between journalists and those trapped inside.
On April 2, they say, after Israeli tanks rolled into the Arab Christian majority town, scores of people fled to the church for sanctuary, believing that the army would not dare to shell or storm the sacred spot. Many of those inside, both sides agree, are armed. The Israelis have named 10 men inside the church who they say are noted Fatah, Tanzim and Hamas militiamen; they believe the men are responsible for organising suicide bombings, shootings and other terrorist operations. But Franciscan church leaders in the city say many of the others are simply civilians who found themselves cut off from their homes when the Israeli army rolled in, and sought sanctuary with the friars and monks inside the complex.
The churches also insist, despite Israeli briefings to the contrary, that they are not being held hostage inside the complex. At the weekend, Father David Jaeger, a spokesman for the Franciscan friars and nuns inside the complex, told an independent Catholic news service that they had agreed at the weekend to remain inside the church, arguing that, as traditional custodians of the Christian sites in the Holy Land, they have a duty to stay and protect the shrine's sanctity.
But the conditions inside, by anyone's reckoning, are becoming increasingly desperate. Those inside say they are almost out of water and are eating plants and weeds growing in the complex's few small courtyards, and drinking tea brewed from stagnant water collected in an ancient cistern.
"We can hardly drag ourselves from one place to another," said one of the men, who identified himself to journalists only as Yaqin. "Even talk is consuming too much energy. We spend most of our time thinking about our destiny, whether we're going to walk out of here or if we're going to be taken out on stretchers. We don't know anything that's going on outside. It feels like everybody is part of a conspiracy against us."
On Sunday I speak to Isa Abu Sror. The line is poor. He sounds tired and distant. "It is very bad in here," he says weakly. "The water is cut. The electricity is cut. Food and drink is a serious problem. Sleeping is a problem." Another man inside the church, who will not give his name, says they are surviving on sips of water and that he has eaten two meals in 14 days, the last four days ago.
On April 8, according to reports from inside the compound, a Palestinian man named Khaled was shot dead by Israeli soldiers while trying to put out a fire that had broken out in part of the compound; his body was moved into the enormous, ancient transept, a simple but majestic space lined with pillars and frescoes and still sporting some remnants of the original chapel built in the fourth century by St Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, after she converted to Christianity and made one of the earliest pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Down a narrow flight of stairs, underneath the high altar, is the tiny grotto in which Christ is said to have been born; this most sacred space, says Yaqin, has become the place where the injured are taken. A Franciscan nun, he says, is caring for four wounded Palestinians just next to the altar that marks the location of the manger.
Nearby, probably in one of the network of caves that runs under the church, Khaled's body and that of another dead Palestinian have been laid out; on Saturday, according to reports from inside the church, 26-year-old Hassan Mesman was shot in the neck by Israeli snipers positioned in a hotel on Manger Square. The Franciscans say they tried to treat him by candlelight but he bled to death.
One of the bitterest ironies of this siege is that it need not be happening at all, save for one of the Israelis' most misguided policies during the intifada - the assassination of militant Palestinian figures, including those in Bethlehem. For among the "terrorists" that Israel says are inside the church are a number of gunmen of the Abbayat clan, a family of local toughs whose main interest, before the present intifada began 18 months ago, was not politics but crime.
At the beginning of the intifada, Hussein Abbayat, who is involved in smuggling arms across the Dead Sea, headed a group of about 10 gunmen loosely associated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, which regarded him as a loose cannon.
Arafat was not the only one who feared Abbayat's potential influence in the city. Abbayat's men had been involved in shootings across the valley towards the Israeli settlement at Gilo. Fearing that his power was growing with the intifada, Israel decided to remove him from the scene, firing a missile into his car as he was travelling in Beit Sahour - the Shepherd's Field - and assuming that, after his death, his group would simply splinter.
Instead, the reverse happened. Hussein was replaced by his cousin Atef, who consolidated the group's hold on Bethlehem's militant Palestinian scene as the violence of the intifada worsened. When Atef, too, was killed in an Israeli rocket attack in October, a new heir took over the Abbayat clan, whose dominance over the city's burgeoning militant groups blossomed.
Now the Abbayats are inside the church. Given the family's experience of Israeli extrajudicial killings, the Abbayats are not keen to surrender. But surrender is what they certainly must do - unless they plan an act of violent immolation. Under growing pressure from the Vatican, Greek Orthodox and Anglican churches, and international political figures, Israel has been forced to concede that the stalemate in Manger Square cannot be ended with a storming of the church. Now, Israel's most powerful weapon in Manger Square is time.
"We regard this as a military crisis that will be handled by the army," says Colonel Rafowicz. "But we started from the very beginning negotiating with the terrorists inside, and we have set up a negotiating team. We are aware of the special feelings about the church. We do not want to fight them. We simply want to arrest them."
Rafowicz says that many in the church would have surrendered already but for the interference of Arafat, who has appointed a mediator to help to end the siege. The colonel's claim is impossible to check, but it is vigorously denied by senior Palestinians.
Walking back out of Bethlehem's centre, I run into an Anglican priest. Tall, and with the burly build of a rugby front-row forward, he is the Rev Canon Andrew White, the Archbishop of Canterbury's special envoy to the Middle East. He introduces himself with some irony as the "new Terry Waite" and says that he is involved in trying to negotiate a peaceful end to the standoff.
He does not seem optimistic. Both sides, he says, are placing obstacles in the way of a peaceful end. Neither is interested, yet, in serious negotiations. "They are negotiations about negotiations," he says. The Israelis, he tells us, do not want to negotiate with the Greek Patriarchiate for the time being. He intimates that there is also a problem with the Israelis talking to the papal nuncio. "The Archbishop of Canterbury is desperate about the situation here," he adds. "We are in daily contact, and Dr [George] Carey has been in almost daily contact with the foreign secretary and the prime minister.
"The reports I have been getting from inside have been quite horrendous. There is no food or water and there are 10 people who are very seriously ill. Last Wednesday one of the nuns had to sew up a bullet wound of one of the more serious cases. I thought four days ago that I had succeeded in persuading the Israelis to let me have one of the bodies removed. I offered to get the body myself, but the talks fell down at the last minute." And White is worried that as the siege drags on, an unpleasant outcome becomes more likely. "The atmosphere is building into a volcano. It is waiting to erupt."
However critical the situation inside the church, no one is willing to predict how this standoff can be concluded. On Sunday the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, offered the gunmen the choice of surrendering or being permanently exiled; Mohammed al-Madani, the Palestinian governor of Bethlehem, who is himself inside the church, rejected the proposed compromise as he had done several others, saying that no solution will be acceptable to those inside unless endorsed by Arafat.
Meanwhile, at the weekend, Israel employed a new tactic to force those inside to surrender, hoisting a large speaker over the square through which it has played deafening screeches that can be heard 2km away. In response, the bells of this ancient and holy site rang out over the troubled city as they have done for millennia - a small, pitiful gesture of defiance.
Additional reporting by Esther Addley.
