During Tul Karm countdown, anguish in Atil

By Amira Hass

Some 48 hours before the planned withdrawal of Israeli forces from the area of Tul Karm, an Israel Defense Forces unit took the trouble to commandeer a home in Atil - a nearby village that will also be handed over to the Palestinian Authority - and to imprison in one room a terminally ill cancer patient with her husband and nine children.

It took some 12 hours, and concerted efforts on the part of Hamoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual and the Red Cross, before the IDF allowed the woman and her children to leave the house. Four or so hours later, at around 9:30 P.M., the IDF vacated the house, in the presence of representatives of the Civil Administration.

"I got up as usual last Saturday at 5:30 A.M. to prepare breakfast for my sisters and brother before they left for school," recounted the family's eldest daughter, Rozanne Kahala, not yet 16, to B'Tselem investigator Abd al-Karim Sa'adi, a resident of the same village. "I quit my 10th-grade studies some two months ago when my 35-year-old mother, Ra'ida, contracted cancer, so that I could look after my sisters and brother.

"Suddenly, we heard dogs barking in our neighborhood, in the eastern part of the village. My brother, Muaman, looked out the window to see why the dogs were barking and told us that soldiers had surrounded the house."

The Kahala home lies a few hundred meters from that of an Islamic Jihad wanted man, Luay al-Sa'adi.

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