Fields Of Fire

(2 of 4)

Doctors at Shifa had tried for an hour to save Wael, but it was hopeless. X rays of the boy's skull taken from the front show a perfectly circular entrance above the bridge of the nose. From the side, an X ray exposes an identical round shape resting against the back of the skull. The rubber bullet passed through the boy's forehead and brain. It smashed against the back of his skull, fracturing it, before coming to rest. At the morgue, Wael's X rays lie in a manila envelope, one of a pile, certifying the dead of the Aqsa intifadeh. There are 94 files recording the "martyrs" of the Gaza Strip. Here too is the rubber bullet that killed Wael. Its thin coating of black rubber was stripped away by the impact, leaving it a ridged, fawnish metal ball about half an inch in diameter and as heavy as a wristwatch. Before anyone invented high-tech machine guns and tank shells, this was the kind of bullet people used when they wanted to kill one another.

Mozna and Mohammed Imad buried Wael with a bloody gouge between his eyes where the bullet had entered. He still clung to the stone he had been about to throw. The surgeon at Shifa had been unable to free the rock from the rigor mortis in the boy's hand.

These are the deaths that keep Dr. Abdel Razq Masry awake each night. The only pathologist in the Gaza Strip, Masry records each of the intifadeh's victims. On Dec. 2, he went early in the morning to the morgue at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. Laid out on the stainless-steel dissecting table was the small body of Mohammed Arja. Masry looked at the records sent up from Rafah, the town on the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt where Arja had been shot the previous day. The boy was 11. "I was angry as hell," Masry says. "I'd like to explode like one these damned bullets, I'm so angry."

Arja had been shot while he walked with his father to buy fruit, according to family members. The boy peered around a concrete barrier near the border fence and, as he turned, was hit by a large-caliber round through his neck. The exit wound tore out the boy's throat. Masry filled the throat with gauze, sewed the skin over it and put the child into one of the morgue's Japanese-made freezer trays at 3[Degrees]C. He pulled off the green mask he wears over his bushy gray beard as he works on the cadavers and went to his office to catch up on his death reports. He had a backlog.

3. Soldiers and the Tomb
The tall, crew-cut young man lifted a Maccabi beer bottle and bragged like a high school quarterback after a perfect touchdown pass. His friends sat around him, munching falafel at a simple restaurant in a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. Their faces shone with admiration. The braggart pointed to his M-16A3. On the barrel of the assault rifle, with its special adjustments for use by a sniper, was a 2-in. silver cross etched into the black metal. "I got my first kill, and my commander put this on the gun for me," said the 20-year-old conscript.

He is a sniper in the Givati Brigade, serving in the Gaza Strip. The previous night the soldier had stood guard at Morag, a Jewish settlement near the Egyptian border. With his night-vision goggles, he noticed six Palestinians creeping toward the settlement. They dug a hole to hide a roadside bomb outside the settlement. Quietly he called his commander by radio and asked permission to strike. By the time he got the go-ahead, three of the Palestinians had left. Still, two were killed and one wounded. Then the company commander awarded the crosses. Amid the sniper's admiring friends was another sniper. He was quiet and sullen. His barrel bore no cross. "Not yet, but I'll get one," he muttered.

These snipers are the linchpin of Israel's military strategy in the Aqsa intifadeh. After the violent Hasmonean Tunnel riots of September 1996, started when Israel opened a tunnel near the golden Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the army decided to prepare for an even more terrible outbreak. Major General Giora Eiland, head of the army's operations division, was at the heart of this planning. A former commander of the Givati Brigade, Eiland insisted a few years back on buying the M-16A3 for the army, though most other generals didn't see the urgent need. Eiland believes it was a smart decision. Unlike the older model M-16s, the A3 is specifically designed as a sniper rifle.

The army's plan, developed in the past few years, was intended to keep control over Palestinian rioters without soldiers' shooting into crowds. Instead, Eiland's snipers would take positions above the rioters, picking off only the ringleaders and anyone carrying a gun or a Molotov cocktail. The strategy was a centerpiece of Operation Ebb and Flow, the army's code name for the low-level warfare it has waged around the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for more than two months. The accuracy of the snipers was supposed to reduce casualties. It was a logic that seemed clear after the scattershot exchanges of the tunnel riots killed at least 75 in a few days.