Night of the Dead in Nablus: A Cook on Vacation Left Paralyzed, a Businessman Lost an Eye - Twilight Zone - Haaretz.com
Two young men are lying in the road. One is dead. The other tries to raise his hand in a plea for help. There’s no one around, no one is allowed to approach or perhaps people are too scared to do so – including ambulance drivers. The two lay there for close to an hour, the survivor tells us this week.
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A few minutes earlier, he recalls, he had still been using his phone to film the escape route he and his friend took as they fled for their lives on their motorcycle. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bullets whistled through the air from all sides, as seen in the footage.
The instant he stopped filming, they became the direct targets of the gunfire. The shots came from in front and behind them. The driver of the motorcycle was killed. His friend was wounded badly and is now paralyzed in both legs. They had both been on their way home from a café.
A hospital bed has been placed in the living room of this third-floor apartment, in a modern building in a residential part of the West Bank city of Nablus. The city is perched on the slopes of Mount Ebal, or what the Palestinians call the Northern Mountain, also known as the Mount of Curses in the Bible.
The side of the mountain is visible from the window; the city’s downtown area with its traffic jams and crowded streets sprawls below, nestled between Ebal and Mount Gerizim across the way.
The man in the bed is Wasim Lubadi, 30. He had lived in rental apartments and worked in Israel without a permit for some 13 years, since completing high school. He’s been arrested 19 times for being in the country illegally.
Wasim Lubadi is photographed on the bed. He holds a picture of himself and Ali Antar who rode with him on the motorcycle and was killed when they were shot.Credit: Alex Levac
He was convicted and served jail time, and paid fines and bail that he says total 50,000 shekels (about $14,600) – but he went on living and working in Israel. Another trial on the same charge is in the offing. In Nablus people have mistaken him for a Jew with his fluent Hebrew, and his all-Israeli look.
For all those years Lubadi worked in the kitchens of cafés and restaurants around the country. Most recently, he was employed at a bar in Haifa – he asks that its name not be published because he doesn’t want to get the owner in trouble – after years of working in Café Landwer in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.
His phone has photos of him on a jet-ski in Lake Kinneret; he has many Jewish and Arab friends in Israel, he says. He would only return to his family’s home in Nablus every few months for a short visit, before resuming his undocumented life in Israel.
So it was that just hours before the night of the dead in Nablus, he arrived home again for a short break: His mother had said she missed him and a friend was getting married. Now it seems that this break will last for many long years, possibly forever.
On October 25, the day in question, he reached his parents’ home in the early evening. A hug for his mother, a shower, supper and then he went out with a friend to a café in Nablus’ lower city, between Ebal and Gerizim, the two of them on his friend’s motorcycle.
Ali Antar, 30, and also unmarried, like Lubadi, was a barber. The coffee shop was jammed. They hung out for about half an hour, until suddenly explosions and shots were heard from a distance. Panic seized the patrons. Lubadi and Antar rushed to the motorcycle in order to get home, up on the mountain, via the city’s main street, Tul Karm Road.
That evening, the Border Police had mounted an operation in the city against the violent group known as the Lion’s Den. Initially, the two men didn’t see any soldiers, Lubadi says now, but they heard heavy fire from side streets.
After about seven minutes of speeding on the motorcycle – with Antar driving and Lubadi shouting directions and filming – they suddenly heard shouts and gunfire, this time from close by. They were by now approaching Shuhada Square in central Nablus. A white van carrying Israeli special forces stopped about 100 meters away.
“We got confused,” Lubadi says. “We didn’t know which way to go. Once we turned right and then to the left, and I was really scared. I told my friend to keep going straight ahead.”
Within an instant they were under fire, while still sitting on the motorcycle. Lubadi was hit in both legs. Take me to a hospital, he remembers telling Antar. Then he felt a sharp pain in his stomach. He bent over to see if he had been hit again, and the next bullet missed him and struck Antar in the neck.
“I’m a lucky guy,” he says, regarding the bullet that missed him and struck his friend.
Another bullet hit the motorcycle and then Lubadi was shot again in one of his already-shattered legs. They both collapsed, with Lubadi bleeding while Antar was not. But then Antar tried to raise his head for a moment, and was hit again, in the chest.
Lubadi calls it an execution. “They didn’t give him a chance,” he says, adding that Antar was now mute and motionless. He apparently died on the spot from the second bullet.
Wasim Lubadi is photographed on the bed.Credit: Alex Levac
A spokesperson for the Border Police this week provided this response to a request from Haaretz: “As with every operation conducted by the Yamam [Police Special Anti-Terror Unit] fighters, in this case too, an in-depth, comprehensive debriefing was carried out.
"In this operation, the Yamam fighters fired only at armed terrorists who endangered their life. We will continue to act with determination, moral standards and professionalism in order to provide security to the residents of the State of Israel," the response said.
Lubadi recounts the whole chain of events in fluent Hebrew, chain-smoking, lying in the hospital bed with its special mattress that is supposed to prevent bedsores. He’s incapable of getting up, his legs have become atrophied and useless. He doesn’t watch television, not even the World Cup.
Members of the family and friends stop by all the time. Leaning against the living-room wall is a large photo of the two friends, Wasim and Ali, the motorcycle in the background, from a trip they took to Jericho a few months ago.
On that same grim night, Lubadi and Antar were prostrate on the road. It was dark. Lubadi decided to pretend he was dead, after what one could call the “confirmation of a kill” that was carried out on his friend, who was shot in the chest when already seriously wounded in the neck.
Lubadi remained there, face pressed into the asphalt, not budging. He says that about an hour went by before anyone came to his rescue. Eventually a Palestinian ambulance took him and his friend’s body to Nablus’ Rafadiya Hospital.
Lubadi underwent two operations on his legs and will need additional surgery. His legs are torn, scarred and stitched up across their entire length; it’s not easy to look at. Bones were completely shattered and replaced by metal.
Will you ever be able to stand? To walk? “Ask me in another year, maybe a year and a half. Be’ezrat hashem – with God’s help,” he says, using the Hebrew phrase.
Lubadi’s dream is to undergo treatment and rehabilitation in Israel. “If I go there, I’ll be on my feet within a few minutes.” In the meantime, he’s bedridden in this handsome, well-designed apartment – purchased with money he earned working in Israel.
About the same time he and Antal were hurtling through the city on the motorcycle, the Palestinian industrialist and businessman Abdul-Jabbar Saqf al-Hait, 31, was on his way home. He and his wife and her sister had gone out for dinner in a restaurant in the Rafadiya neighborhood and now were on the way back in his Seat SUV. It was a little after midnight by then.
Abdul-Jabbar Saqf al-HaitCredit: Alex Levac
Hait’s parents’ apartment, where we meet him, is on the lower slopes of the Northern Mountain, close to the city center; he and his wife, Samar, live in the Ras al-Ain neighborhood, on the other side of Nablus.
He owns a factory that manufactures extracts used in making beverages and ice cream for cafés and hotels, and also imports goods that he sells to Israel. As Lubadi and Antar were leaving the café, Hait had concluded his dinner with his wife and sister-in-law, and they were headed toward Ras al-Ain.
The streets were quiet when they set out. Suddenly, while waiting at a traffic light, Hait saw two motorcycle riders fall to the ground, wounded, just meters away – Lubadi and Antar. Then he was shocked to see a red laser beam aimed at him from a van standing about 100 meters away.
He immediately grasped that the beam was coming from a rifle and hurriedly tried to back his car up and flee, but at that moment he heard gunshots and bullets slammed into his car. His face was covered in blood. He couldn’t grasp what was happening and fainted, out of sheer fright.
Salma a-Deb’i, the Nablus-based field researcher for the Israel human rights organization B’Tselem, who accompanied us in the city this week with her colleague, Abdulkarim Sadi, shows us photographs in which 13 bullet holes are visible in Hait’s car. It’s hard to believe that only his eyes were wounded; the two women in the car, crouching on the floor, emerged unscathed.
One fragment of metal destroyed his right eye permanently, and another sliver remains lodged in his left one, although he can see with it.
“I have no enemies and I don’t hate anyone. I work with Israel, for years I had an entry permit to enter the country – so this has hurt me all the more,” says Hait, sitting with his parents, Faisa and Abd el-Karim.
Hait was taken to Rafadiya Hospital, where, due to shock, he was unable to speak for some time. When he was placed in the CT machine and felt the chill of the air conditioners in the examining room, he remembers thinking he was being put in the morgue.
The names of those killed that night were read out over the hospital loudspeaker system, and he says he was surprised his name wasn’t mentioned. Finally he realized that he had survived. It wasn’t until around dawn that he snapped out of his mute nightmare and discovered his parents at his bedside.
One of the five names read out in the hospital was Hamdi Sharaf, 33, who was married and had two children. Like Ali Antar, Sharaf was also a barber but he lived in the Old City of Nablus, the so-called casbah.
That was where Sharaf’s livelihood was and that was where he was killed, at just about the same time the Border Police shot another barber to death on the other side of the city.