Read this. It's from an Israeli newspaper, not a Palestinian one.
The building under discussion is a five-story structure in El Bireh that houses the Palestine International Bank. It was captured by the Israel Defense Forces on Friday, March 29, the first day of its incursion into Ramallah and its twin city, El Bireh.
For 23 days, a large force of soldiers remained in the building, on the bank's three floors (plus the basement) and on the two floors housing private consulting and advertising agencies (including the Sky advertising agency, which won the monopoly on Palestinian advertising on Palestinian television and is run by Tarek Abbas, Abu Mazen's son).
For three weeks, four or five armored vehicles and a tank or two were permanently positioned next to this building that symbolized a milestone on the road to developing the Palestinian yuppie business sector, considered a pillar of the concept of "building a peace process by developing the private sector." The building and the main branch of the Palestine International Bank were described as a "five-star hotel"; it had marble corridors, designer furniture, matching drapes, state-of-the-art electronics, pleasant waiting rooms, the latest computers and a parking lot for clients' cars.
For three weeks mounds of dirt and flattened cars dragged into the middle of the adjacent streets ensured that no one would approach the building. On the third day of the IDF's invasion of the city, March 31, two days after it had taken over the building, the soldiers were observed bringing some things into it and removing other things from it. With guns aimed, they instructed journalists to leave the place and said they were searching for weapons and wanted individuals.
Two days ago, walking from room to room and floor to floor, one found it was possible to discover what had transpired in this building.
The IDF force's attempt to break into the main safes was apparently unsuccessful and the locks were ruined. Bank officials' safes were broken into and their contents disappeared. The safe of the automated teller machine also could not be broken into, but the soldiers did manage to ruin the actual machine, which costs around NIS 40,000.
The soldiers smashed glass doors and windows; on some floors, they broke down walls, apparently in a not very thorough search for weapons that were not found (otherwise they would have broken down all the walls), tore out marble tiles, ripped out telephone wires, destroyed telephones (other equipment disappeared), broke a few pieces of furniture, littered the floors with food scraps and scrawled in Hebrew on the walls.
The state-of-the-art telephone switchboard (made by Telrad) was removed. The soldiers threw around files of documents while other folders disappeared or were found piled up in a corner of the room.
But the main focus of the force's mission was to destroy the bank's entire computer network.
"The saboteur knows about computers," concludes the bank's director general, Osama Khader, who on Sunday wondered around from room to room in a daze and pointed out the damages. The bank, which was founded in 1997, serves 16,000 clients. The up-to-date database of accounts, recent transfers, transactions, checks paid out to and received by customers - all was destroyed. The soldiers, Khader pointed out, damaged the main computer room, ripped out wires, took away diskettes and damaged the hard drives or took them away. The bank's computer terminals were all thrown around, broken or had missing or broken drives. Computer parts were found strewn around the courtyard and other parts were found charred in the pile of food that had been set alight.
"Please don't litter," was written on a piece of paper found hanging on a wall in the manager's office. The floor was covered with sunflower seed shells and coffee stains. There were blue booklets strewn next to demolition tools and hammers, and the stamp on each one indicated that they were a donation from the Kabbala Learning Center for world peace, love and human dignity.
There was a similar scene in the offices of Sky: a decorative wall near the entrance had disappeared; Tarek Abbas, the director, wondered where the wall had disappeared to: there was no trace of it. The clogged toilets emitted a stench. There were computers strewn about the room that had been damaged, disk drives that had been broken and hard drives that had disappeared. One drawer had had $1,000 in it and that too disappeared. A VCR disappeared. Children's toys marketed by the company were destroyed. All of the business cards of customers and potential customers had disappeared.
Similar and even worse scenes of destruction were uncovered two days ago in other offices in Ramallah and El Bireh (as well as in Nablus and Bethlehem) which the soldiers had stormed into: in the housing bank and in all of the Palestinian Authority's offices (except for the Ministry of Planning headed by Nabil Sha'ath and the Ministry of Sport and Youth), the computers had been destroyed by various methods and documents were tossed out, torn up and disappeared. The offices of human rights organizations, independent research institutes and non-governmental health organizations were destroyed: at the Medical Relief Committees' eye center, all the eyeglasses were found broken and scattered on the floor, the same organization's warehouse for aids for handicapped people was broken into and some of the equipment was destroyed; data bases and computers used by the research institutes to monitor health, agriculture and environmental and water quality were destroyed.
Officials at the Higher Education Authority thought that they had been spared the destruction: Last Friday, when the curfew was lifted for a few hours, its three floors of offices and six wings were still intact. Officials even made sure to leave the doors open so that the soldiers would not break them down if they wanted to enter the offices in their search for wanted individuals and weapons.
But on Friday night, the soldiers burst into the building. A neighbor counted 11 explosions and related that the soldiers remained in the building no more than an hour. On Sunday morning, Dr. Gabi Baramki, the authority's adviser on academic affairs and a former president of Bir Zeit University, hurried to the place. "So much damage in just one hour," he said stunned and searching for words to describe the losses incurred.
All of the computers were piled up in a few corners and blown up, along with the printers. The explosion tore a hole in the floor of one of the rooms. In the Ministry of Education, which had been broken into two weeks earlier, written documents, books and printed research papers were destroyed or had disappeared. In the offices of the Higher Education Authority, at least some of the hand-written documents remained intact. But as Baramki says, the general destruction indicates that the purpose of the operation was to strike at the infrastructure of Palestinian civil society, to cause it to regress, erase its accomplishments and halt its development.
The IDF also blew up the computers in the large Max supermarket in the city's southwest. A few Palestinian businessmen built it in 1998. Some of them had lived for years in the United States. The force entered the supermarket twice: once some food products were taken from the shelves, but that isn't what bothers Hisham Abd al-Rasul, one of the owners; when the computers were blown up or disappeared, the large supermarket lost all of its business records, receipts and orders.
The first time the force went into the store, it tried unsuccessfully to break open the safe. Two weeks later, the force returned with more appropriate equipment for breaking into safes. There was NIS 60,000 in the safe, but one day after the curfew was lifted, the supermarket's managers discovered that the money had disappeared. Neighbors and managers circulated this information in e-mails that were sent all over the world. After a few days, Civil Administration officials contacted Palestinian liaison officials and informed them that this was not the objective. The money was returned.
Dozens of Ramallah residents (and residents of other cities) were not so lucky even though many of them wrote in e-mails about the money, jewelry and electronic items that disappeared from their homes after IDF soldiers broke in or were positioned there. An eight-year-old girl's gold earrings, gold jewelry, cash (NIS 800 here, $400 there and more), VCRs and video cameras were hidden beneath a soldier's coat. Hundreds of people have been busy over the last two days cleaning the mess left behind by the soldiers, trying to straighten out the apartments and offices and recording the damages incurred: the office owners and private banks, at least, are planning to file suit against the IDF.
http://news.haaretz.co.il/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=154751&contrassID=2&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y&itemNo=154751
