By the time Shaban Shuweiki entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the ancient mosque already was two-thirds full, with Muslims arriving for pre-dawn prayers on a peaceful Islamic Sabbath.
When Sharif Barakat arrived a few minutes later, nearly 1,000 worshipers were on hand in the mosque’s hallowed Hall of Isaac. Quickly, he knelt down in the last row. He did not notice the man in the Israeli army uniform a few feet away.
At the last moment-it was about 5:30 a.m. Friday-10-year-old Khamis Makhmud al Jamal rushed in, relieved not to be late, for this was the middle of Ramadan, the holiest season in the Muslim calendar.
Just as the Imam called “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), their prayers were cut short by an orgy of gunfire that echoed around the world and threatened to destroy already fragile Arab-Israeli peace efforts.
As the kneeling Muslims pressed their foreheads to the floor, the man in the uniform stepped from behind a pillar, leveled a Galil assault rifle at the long rows of bent backs and opened a prolonged, terrifying fusillade of gunfire.
“The brains of the person next to me splattered all over me,” recalled Barakat, 27, a shop worker who collapsed with a wound under his left shoulder. “Half the people in the row next to me crumpled to the floor.
“It was deafening, like a heavy rainfall. I heard the shooting, then the sounds of explosions. There was screaming and shouting. I was shot at the beginning. Then the shooting went on row by row.”
Like other victims, Barakat thought his life was over. As he lay amid the carnage and the shrieks of pain, he murmured a prayer: “There is no God but
Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger.”
The shooting lasted only about three minutes, but it seemed to Barakat that it raged on much longer.
When it finally stopped, he saw the congregation set upon the gunman as he tried to reload for still another murderous barrage-hitting him with shoes, kicking him and beating him with a fire extinguisher.
The Israeli goverment said the gunman, a former New Yorker named Baruch Goldstein, committed suicide. But Barakat is convinced Goldstein was beaten to death.
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The scene of Friday’s massacre is thought to be a 2,000-year-old burial site of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The complex contains a synagogue, and authorities require that Jewish and Islamic services be held a different times to limit the possibility of conflict.
In recent months it has been a source of nearly constant provocation, taunting and bloodshed among the 6,000 Israeli settlers who share this tense, occupied city with 50,000 Palestinians.
The assault by the Arab-hating Goldstein, 38, a physician who moved to Israel 11 years ago, was a desperate act to stop the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
He was one of thousands of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories who vehemently oppose Palestinian autonomy in the lands, which they claim as Israel’s biblical birthright.
The shootings, which killed at least 39 Palestinians, touched off violence across the occupied territories and drew calls for revenge from Muslims all over the Arab world.
“I went to the mosque to pray and everything seemed normal,” said Shuweiki, 31, who had entered the mosque with his 7-year-old son, Behea, early enough to say his suna, a private opening prayer.
In the spray of bullets that followed, he was wounded three times in the right leg. He was hospitalized for hours before learning his son also had survived.
“I fell on the ground and bodies were falling on top of me,” he recalled from his hospital bed. He also reported hearing at least two explosions, which some witnesses identified as caused by grenades.
Ten-year-old Khamis Jamal who had come to the mosque with his 17-year-old brother, was so busy trying to help wounded people strewn around him that he didn’t even notice his head had been grazed by a bullet.
Despite his wound, Barakat was able to help too. He carried out a dead 11-year-old boy as other survivors, some weeping, used prayer mats to carry the wounded, and keffiyehs-checkered head scarves-to stanch bleeding wounds.
Mohammed Suliman Abu Saleh, a caretaker at the mosque, ran out of the blood-spattered chamber and tried frantically to make a phone call for help from an office inside the tomb complex.
But panicked Israeli soldiers closed the door on him. He was forced to race to the nearest house to call, and it took at least 15 minutes after the shooting for the first ambulance to arrive.
At this and other mosques in Hebron, an urgent call for blood donations was broadcast from the minarets usually used to call the faithful to prayer.
The first donors to arrive at Al Ahli Hospital were so infuriated by the blood-soaked procession of dead and wounded that they ran outside to hurl curses and stones at Israeli soldiers who had taken up positions on the roof of a nearby apartment building.
The soldiers opened fire. Some of those arriving to donate blood were wounded.
“As soon as I heard they needed blood, I came right over,” said Saud Kowasmi, 15, who had run from more than a mile away. “I was shot arriving at the hospital and wounded slightly in the shoulder.”
The violence outside the hospital was only one spasm among countless incidents of attacks against Israeli troops by bands of young Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The roads leading into Hebron were strewn with rocks, burning tires and broken glass. Youths hid behind fences and walls with softball-size rocks in their hands, waiting for new targets.
By the end of the day, soldiers had killed another eight Palestinians, and a Jewish passenger in a bus that came under attack fired out the window and killed another. Several soldiers also were wounded.
“It was pretty scary here for awhile,” said a jittery soldier at a checkpoint at one of Hebron’s deserted intersections. “I’ll be 21 in two days-if I make it.”
The Israeli Defense Forces imposed a 24-hour curfew in Hebron and other parts of the occupied territories and called up reinforcements.
Inside Al Ahli Hospital, Abdulgani Aburimela, 67, was recovering from a wound in the leg. The retired municipal worker said trouble had been building at the mosque for some time.
“Almost every day I see signs of disturbances here, provocations,” said Aburimela, who had been praying in the first row when Goldstein opened fire.
“On some days the soldiers will only permit a few inside and make a lot of people wait outside,” he said. “Sometimes the soldiers actually come into the mosque and they’ll get the young men and make them lean against the wall and raise one leg.
“One time a settler came into the mosque and blew a horn to disrupt the prayers.”
After the dead and wounded had been removed, Israeli soldiers sealed off the mosque, but at 10:30 a.m., a group of several dozen Palestinian leaders managed to gain access.
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Despite vigorous Israeli efforts to clean up the mosque, said Nabil Jabari, chairman of the board of Hebron University, “you could still see parts of brains and bones strewn on the floor and there were clothes soaked in blood.”
“It was a horrible scene-beyond expression,” said Jabari, who was a member of the Palestinian delegation that negotiated the Mideast peace agreement signed Sept. 13 in Washington.
Two of Jabari’s cousins were among those murdered in the mosque. Friday afternoon he joined 150 relatives and neighbors at a traditional Muslim wake in a hillside home that overlooked the mosque. From the house, the mourners could see soldiers positioned around the mosque.
“People will be coming to the house all day,” said Jabari, grim-faced. “Everyone in Hebron will visit all the families of the dead. They will go from house to house. The first day after a death is a day of mourning and condolence. So are the second and third. But on the fourth day, who knows how things will go?