RAMALLAH, 10 February 2007 — It was after 1 a.m. Thursday, a cold February night, when Wisam Rafidi, 47, his wife and two young daughters, 7 and 6, woke up to the sound of explosions outside their Ramallah home. Six hours later, when an ordeal the girls may never forget was over, the family got busy cleaning up and repairing the heavy damage caused to their home.

“We did not know what was going on when we heard the explosions,” Rafidi said as he stood in his flooded and wrecked second-floor apartment in an area close to the West Bank city’s center.

He then heard voices through loudspeakers ordering everyone in the two-story building with four apartments to leave. He knew the voices belonged to Israeli soldiers who surrounded the building looking for a wanted militant. Israel has been carrying out these arrest raids on a nightly basis since the current Intifada (uprising) erupted more than six years ago amid a deadlock in peace negotiations.

Since then, thousands of suspected militants have been detained and Israel says it prevented score of suicide bombings by acting on information gathered during interrogations.

The Israeli military says that of all those arrested in 2006, 187 were potential suicide bombers. “We all came out in our night gowns,” said Rula, Rafidi’s wife. “It was cold and the girls were frightened.”

The army force, which Rafidi said included more than 30 military vehicles, an ambulance and a bulldozer, separated him and his 34-year-old nephew, who lives next door, from their families. The women and children were ordered into a nearby building under construction while the two men were stripped off their clothes and forced to wear a white uniform provided by the army.

“They told us ‘we want the one inside the lower apartment’,” Rafidi recounted. He knew they were talking about Anwar Amir, also known as Abu Anas, who only 10 days earlier had rented the apartment from him.

He said he did not know much about his new tenant, other than that he had come to Ramallah to work for the Education Ministry and planned to have his wife join him as soon as he settled in.

Israel said Amir, 44, an activist in the ruling, Islamic Hamas movement from the town of Bala’a near Tulkarm, had been on its list of wanted militants since a Hamas suicide bomber from the area killed 29 Israelis in the central Israeli town of Netanya in March 2002.

Amir belonged to the Hamas “infrastructure” which organized the deadly bombing, security officials said. Since then, he had been active recruiting militants for Hamas in the northern West Bank. “They sent me in to the apartment and used me as a human shield to bring him out, threatening that if he did not they would shell the building and demolish it,” Rafidi, the unwitting landlord of the wanted militant, continued.

He called Amir but no one answered. He went in but after searching it, re-emerged to tell the soldiers the apartment was empty.

Apparently the soldiers did not believe him and so they brought dogs and a robot to check the house. They even fired four shells at the lower-floor apartments. But still no one came out.

At about 5 a.m., Rafidi said he saw light come on in his own apartment and heard shots fired. He knew the soldiers were inside. Later, and after the army had left the area in the morning, he found out the Israelis had arrested the wanted militant as he was hiding in a yard outside the building.

But Rafidi found his apartment ransacked, flooded with water and riddled with bullet holes, mainly in the bedrooms. “It was purely an unwarranted revenge act,” he charged. “There was no need to enter my apartment and cause the damage they did.”

Busily cleaning and repairing his apartment and the lower floor, which was worst hit as a result of the shelling, Rafidi said he did not send his daughters to school, but to an aunt who took them to play and get their mind off a night they may never forget.