HEBRON, West Bank, 30 June — The Israeli Army yesterday ended a four-day siege of a Palestinian Authority police headquarters by imploding the hilltop compound where it said about 15 suspected persons had taken refuge. The fate of the wanted Palestinians was unclear after the fortress-like structure in the city of Hebron was flattened by a thunderclap explosion in the morning that shattered windows in dozens of homes and propelled parked cars through the air.
“This destruction, without taking into consideration that there might be injured people inside that compound ... shows the brutality of the (Israeli) occupation,” Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said. An Israeli Army spokeswoman said: “If there are any bodies there, they’ll be found. But it will take a while because there was a huge amount of destruction.” No corpses had been discovered by the evening.
Witnesses said the barracks-like building buckled and tumbled into a pile of rubble after the explosions, which rocked the West Bank city after midnight. A reporter saw a mountain of broken concrete rising from where the building once stood as dust settled over the area.
Hayat Masawdeh, who lives nearest the building known as the “muqataa”, said “they cut the electricity and we couldn’t see anything except for the flashlights of soldiers moving from room to room. At first we thought they were looking for besieged people but later we understood that they were putting explosives inside the building.”
“Then suddenly there was this unbelievable noise, worse than an earthquake. I hid my face under the blanket. When it was over I looked around and saw that my family was safe and sound, so I cried,” she said.
A water tank and some telecommunications masts teetered in the sea of rubble covered by a thick gray blanket of dust in the forefront of the building. A number of cars, apparently abandoned by office employees when Israeli troops entered Hebron on Tuesday, were destroyed. Some were blown into the air and landed on top of a nearby wall. Israeli bulldozers began clearing the rubble yesterday morning, as some of the troops that laid siege to the building were seen leaving the area by truck.
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s senior aide Nabil Abu Rudeina told reporters he did not rule out the possibility that “martyrs”, or Palestinian victims, were inside the building when Israel destroyed it. “Every day the Israeli occupation forces invent pretexts to destroy all the institutions of the Palestinian Authority in order to cripple it and prevent it from carrying out the reforms” announced on Wednesday, he said.
Hebron is one of seven West Bank cities reoccupied by the Israeli Army in sweeps for activists after bombings killed 26 Israelis last week. Some 700,000 Palestinians are under curfew, which is lifted occasionally for food shopping. Israeli Army Radio said earlier that Israeli officers believed the occupants of the headquarters were dead after military engineers detonated two tons of explosives. But Israel Radio said it was possible they escaped through tunnels.
A blast late on Friday destroyed part of the Hebron headquarters and a second explosion hours later finished the job, sending flames shooting into the sky above the city divided into Israeli- and Palestinian-run areas under an interim peace deal. “It was like a strong earthquake. I was thrown on the floor. Windows broke. The children cried,” said Raid Hamedi, 23, a jewelry-maker, as he surveyed the damage from his home about 200 meters from the scene of the explosions.
Talal Sadr, a former Palestinian Cabinet minister who had gone into the headquarters on Friday to urge the activists thought to be there to surrender, said after the demolition he could not be sure anyone had been inside. “The last time I went inside no one gave me a response. Maybe Israelis killed the Palestinians within the first few days of the standoff,” Sadr said.
Israeli armored bulldozers cleared the way for army sniffer dogs to search for bodies. Down the street, a car blown into the air by the force of the explosion was embedded in the wall of a police barracks. A Japanese-funded school for Palestinian children adjacent to the compound suffered heavy damage, its classrooms littered with glass, broken desks and fallen ceiling tiles.
Abed Rabbo said Israel’s decision to blow up the headquarters showed that its “main aim is to impose ... Israeli rule upon the Palestinian people and to destroy all the symbols of the Palestinian Authority and its infrastructure”. Israeli troops are now also stationed in six other West Bank cities — Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jenin, Qalqilya and Tulkarm — as they search for suspects and carry out operations they say are aimed at destroying the “infrastructure of terror”.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher accused Sharon of “feeding” Middle East violence after his troops blew up the Palestinian building complex. “Sharon is feeding the violence and further complicating the situation,” Maher told journalists in Cairo, who asked him about the destruction of the sprawling complex in Hebron. “This policy is not unusual coming from Sharon, but the whole world must be aware of the acts being committed,” he said.
In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian witnesses said Israeli Army gunfire killed a Palestinian woman and wounded her husband in a village near the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom. Moaweya Hassanein, chief of emergency at Shiffa Hospital in Gaza City, told reporters that the Israeli Army prevented Palestinian ambulances from reaching the couple, with the result that Amna Al-Louh, 31, bled to death.
The army was also investigating an incident in which Palestinian witnesses said a 14-year-old youth was killed by an Israeli tear gas canister that hit him in the chest during protest in Al-Fara refugee camp near Jenin.
