The New York Times · New York, New York · 25 October 2001

CP-2001-043

Restraint Used in Bethlehem, Israeli Major Says

By JAMES BENNET

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Transcribed from the clipping

BETHLEHEM, West Bank, Oct. 24 — With the Paradise Hotel burning a few blocks away and gunfire resounding around the Israeli position there, Maj. Kobi Katz unfolded a large black-and-white aerial photograph of Bethlehem on the concrete floor of an army outpost here this morning.

He jabbed a finger at buildings circled in red — the schools, churches, mosques and monasteries of this storied city, which is now a war zone. “Honestly, I’m the father of a child,” Major Katz said. “The orders are very clear. We don’t shoot at these positions.”

During a visit to the outpost — a small Palestinian apartment building whose top floor has been hung with camouflage netting, reinforced with sandbags and armed with three machine guns and a box of grenades — two or three bullets smacked into the outer walls. The bullets, the soldiers said, were fired from a nearby mosque.

Gesturing at an Israeli sniper who was lying on sandbags as he gazed through a rifle scope toward the mosque, Major Katz said, “The snipers here can see the barrel of the gun, day and night, but we don’t shoot.”

Which raised a question — one of many by Israeli critics from both the right and the left — about the goals of the incursions into at least seven Palestinian cities and villages since the killing of an Israeli minister on Oct. 17. If the Israelis were not firing back at such gunmen, what was the point of conducting the operation in the first place?

“It’s very problematic,” Major Katz said wearily. “Without going into details, it’s very difficult, because we’re very limited.” As the deputy battalion commander, Major Katz is the No. 2 man in the operation here.

The Israeli Army brought four foreign journalists, one of them an American, to see an outpost here, apparently in an effort to counter impressions that it was recklessly endangering Palestinian civilians.

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