The Saga of the Siege

The Church of the Nativity, one of the world’s oldest working churches, has never been an especially peaceful place. The holy men who run it–Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox and Roman Catholic clerics–bicker over who gets to clean which piece of sacred wall, who can walk in which aisle. The theft in 1847 of the silver star that was meant to mark the precise place where Jesus was born is thought to have helped start the Crimean War. Seized and besieged by a host of armies over the centuries, the church has even inspired bickering among scholars, who argue about whether Jesus was born here at all. Many believe he was actually born in Nazareth, not in Bethlehem, and certainly not in some little manger in the cool grotto over which the Holy Roman Emperors built a shrine to their deepest hopes.

But holy places still have special power, this church not least among them. Muslims are specifically ensured the right to pray in the Church of the Nativity, a privilege dating back to A.D. 638. Israeli soldiers, swarming into Bethlehem last month as part of the campaign to crush the machinery of Palestinian terror, surrounded the church compound but did not storm it. Two hundred forty gunmen and bystanders took refuge in the church but in time agreed to leave it. The end of the siege last week, after long negotiations that nearly went off a cliff several times, brought relief to officials on both sides: to the Palestinians, who had feared a violent denouement, and to the Israelis, who were increasingly embarrassed by the presence of their troops around one of Christianity’s most venerable shrines.

The church bells rang out at last on Friday morning, as the sun came up and the men left the church that had been their haven for five weeks. They had to crumple low to pass through the squat Gate of Humility, a large door reduced to a tiny entryway during the time of the Turkish Empire to prevent looters from driving carts inside the church to carry off their booty. Some of the men waved and cheered a victory; others knelt to pray. A man with bullet wounds came out on a stretcher. All passed through metal detectors. U.S. embassy officials later found more than 90 rifles and other guns left behind, and Israeli troops said they found 40 explosive devices. From the rooftops around the adjoining Manger Square, relatives called out “God is most great!” and shouted to sons and brothers they had not seen in weeks and might not see again. The 13 gunmen most wanted by Israel were flown to Cyprus, on their way into exile in Europe and possibly Canada. Twenty-six others, considered less dangerous, were handed over to Palestinian authorities in the Gaza Strip, while the rest of the captives, excluding the clerics, were interrogated by the Israelis, then released.

That outcome had taken weeks of negotiation. When Israeli and Palestinian authorities consented to the deportations as a way to defuse the standoff, Israeli hard-liners and Palestinians of every stripe complained that it was a sellout. But the situation had grown desperate. The city of Bethlehem had been in lockdown since April 2; food inside the church compound had virtually run out. Eight Palestinians had been killed by Israeli gunfire, and an Armenian monk had been wounded by an Israeli sniper.

All last week those stuck inside thought their ordeal might be close to an end, only to hear that the negotiations had faltered. Finally, rumor of a breakthrough came late Thursday night. Candles flickered over the carved doorways and limestone columns, over the scraps of mosaics and the filthy mattresses spread across the floor of the 4th century sanctuary. A top gunman from al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Jihad Ja’ara, spoke with a TIME reporter by cell phone. “Is it true that an agreement has been reached?” Ja’ara asked. He was more eager than most to make it out; the gunshot wound in his leg had become infected, and it hurt. “Alhamdulillah,” Ja’ara said when he heard the deal was done: Thank God. “We’re going to get out of here!” he yelled through the nave, and his words echoed in the dark. Others began to chant, “It’s over! It’s over!”

No one had ever planned for it to start in the first place. For weeks Manger Square had been a refuge for Palestinian gunmen like Ja’ara. By day they lounged on cheap foam mattresses in the spring sunshine, believing this was one place the Israelis would not dare to strike. By night they sneaked out to the edges of town to shoot across the valley at Gilo, a suburb of Jerusalem built on occupied land. On April 2, Ja’ara and his gang clashed with the Israelis in the Fawaghreh neighborhood of Bethlehem’s Old City. A bullet shattered Ja’ara’s leg three inches below his knee. His comrades carried him to Manger Square. As Israeli soldiers converged, the gunmen, anticipating that the Israelis would not hesitate to enter the square this time, fled into the church with members of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, a group of Hamas gunmen and about 100 bystanders.

“At first, we thought this would be over in a matter of hours,” recalls Rahid Shatara, who works for Palestinian military intelligence. Khalid Salah, an officer from general intelligence trapped inside, says it wasn’t until the second week that it dawned on him that the siege might last a long time. “When anybody tried to go out onto the terrace, the Israelis would shoot,” he says. “That’s when I realized that they had no intention of letting us out.”

The Israelis knew they could not storm one of the holiest sites in all of Christianity. But there were dozens of accused terrorists inside, including Ibrahim Moussa Abayat, head of the Tanzim militia in Bethlehem, who was convicted of murdering a fellow Palestinian by a Palestinian court two years ago but was released after a few weeks because his violent clan rioted. Israel blamed him for the June 2001 shooting death of Lieut. Colonel Yehuda Edri. They were not about to let him walk away.

And so they settled in for a long wait. Inside the church, nuns tended to the wounded. According to Shatara and Salah, Palestinian Authority officials divided themselves into teams based on their jobs–military intelligence, general intelligence, tourist police, regular police, National Security Forces. They rotated guard duty, cleanup, food preparation. Each appointed one delegate to a food committee, to be sure everyone got a daily ration.

At first, those inside lived off stores of food kept by the monks and nuns in residence at the church compound. Just one meal a day was served, at about 2 p.m. One of the civilians appointed himself cook. He had few ingredients to work with: rice, pasta and lentils. When Israeli soldiers brought in additional food for the clerics, they shared it with everyone inside. “They ate what we ate,” Salah says, “and in equal portions.” Eventually, the monks began stripping the leaves from lemon trees in the courtyard. “We’d make soup out of that, with salt,” says Salah. Ja’ara and his comrades chopped up lemon rinds and fried them. “It was enough to make you sick for two weeks to taste it,” he said. Ahmed al-Ayan, a fleshy 200-pounder when the siege began, came out 40 pounds lighter.

The clerics retired apart, and the rest of those trapped inside initially slept on the cold flagstones in the basilica. But after the first week, several of the Palestinians admit, some of their number broke into the monks’ quarters and stole blankets as well as crucifixes and icons. Even with covers, a full night’s rest was out of the question. The Israeli soldiers outside kept the noise constant with loudspeakers calling on those in the church to come out. Then, too, the captives were constantly on edge, fearing a surprise attack.

Initially, the priests, surrounded by so many armed Muslims, were afraid to pray conspicuously in groups, according to al-Ayan. But in the final week, they began to conduct services. Muslims prayed individually, except on Fridays, when they gathered in the center of the basilica for midday prayers.

News from outside came in wafts, mainly over cell phones. The Israelis cut off the power in the main church, but the monks’ rooms in adjoining dormitories sometimes had electricity, and the phones were charged there. The only toilets were on the second floor of the compound; they were soon foul because they couldn’t be flushed once the Israelis cut off the water. “To get to the bathroom, we had to run though an open space within sight of the snipers,” Salah says. “Sometimes they shot at us. So we only went once a day.” The only water was in three old wells in the compound. It was impure, and many in the church developed diarrhea. Dashing out to the wells was dangerous; six Palestinians were hit by Israeli snipers as they tried to draw water. No one showered or shaved.

The Israelis hoped that the shortage of food and water would force an end to the standoff. They sent chocolate in for the priests on Greek Orthodox Easter but blocked any cigarettes from getting in. “Imagine smokers who haven’t had a cigarette for a few days, let alone weeks,” said a member of the Israeli negotiating team that huddled with Palestinian officials to end the siege. “You wouldn’t be able to stand it.” Hungry and frightened, almost 100 civilians left the church over the first few weeks. The soldiers and gunmen stayed, as did the priests, determined to protect their sanctuary.

If the Israelis couldn’t draw out their quarry together, they could pick off the gunmen one by one. Outside the church, they set up a 300-ft.-tall crane and floated a blimp attached to a high-tension cable, mounting surveillance cameras on each. A team of intelligence officers kept track of movements in the church compound and relayed the information to snipers from the Special Police Unit, an elite squad that has the best marksmen in the Israeli services. The intelligence officers communicated with the snipers by using an aerial photo divided into tiny sectors; that made it easier to describe where a Palestinian had been spotted.

On May 2, when a similar siege at Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah finally ended, the men in the church were certain they would be liberated next. They began to fire into the night air. The Israelis, thinking the shots were aimed at them, launched flares to illuminate the area. The flares, as they came down, set fire to some rooms in the Franciscan area of the complex. An officer of the National Security Force, Khaled Siyam, 25, rushed to put out the fire; a sniper’s bullet killed him instantly. Disgusted by the carelessness of his comrades who fired into the air, an intelligence officer bitterly told a friend, “I wish the Israelis would come in here and slaughter every one of us.”

Once Arafat was freed, negotiations over Bethlehem did pick up. At a May 3 meeting in Ramallah, Arafat’s Cabinet ministers questioned his willingness to accede to U.S. and British proposals that some of the men inside the church be deported. “What can I do? This is what the Americans want,” Arafat complained. “I can’t continue saying no to the Americans. You should show some understanding of my situation.”

The basic framework of a deal was pounded out by last Tuesday night. One last wrinkle came from, of all places, a group of international “peace activists” who had marched into the church the week before, claiming solidarity with the Palestinians inside and taking them food and supplies. They were accompanied by Los Angeles Times photographer Carolyn Cole. “They wanted to be dragged out by Israeli soldiers on camera,” says a church official who helped negotiate a resolution to the siege. In the end, they were the last to leave the church, taken out forcibly by Israeli authorities.

The 13 men facing deportation were the first to leave the church. “The men sent abroad were heartbroken and crying,” says Mazin Hussain, 28, an officer in the Palestinian Authority’s drug-prevention unit. “They sacrificed themselves so the siege could end, for the sake of the people of Bethlehem.” When the group of 26 militants entered Gaza by bus, they were greeted like returning heroes by the crowd lining the streets. That evening, military intelligence’s Shatara, 23, chatted by cell phone with his girlfriend back in Bethlehem. “Yes, I’ve had a bath,” he told her. “Yes, yes, yes, I’ve had a bath.”

But all the celebrations in Gaza could not disguise the fact that men most Palestinians consider fighters on their behalf had been sold out by Arafat. “After weeks and weeks of the siege, Arafat has basically given in to all the Israeli demands,” said Hosam Hillez, a 27-year-old Gazan. “So what was the point of dragging the whole thing out for so long?” As the monks begin to clean up the squalid interior of the basilica, whose walls smelled of urine and whose altar had been used for cooking meals, they will no doubt be asking the same question.

–With reporting by Aparisim Ghosh/Gaza, Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem