The View From Within a Hallowed and Haggard Place

BETHLEHEM, West Bank —  It took a minute to get used to the dark. Men were rushing, trying to grab food. Their faces looked wild. Except for weed soup, they hadn’t eaten in three days.

Inside the vestibule of the Church of the Nativity, several candles burned on the floor around the sanctuary, and a large one flamed in the center. They gave the only light. The men--civilians, accused terrorists and Palestinian police officers--reached for candy bars, crackers, rice and lentils.

All had been there for a month. They included 13 whom the Israelis considered to be extremely dangerous, some of them accused of killing Israeli civilians and producing explosives. They had fled into the church when Israeli troops invaded the West Bank after a series of suicide bombings.

Although the Israeli soldiers surrounded the church, the siege was not airtight. Supporters brought the Palestinians food. The Palestinians slipped out to steal blankets. They made scores of calls on their cell phones--at least one to the Israeli troops outside.

The church sanctuary stands over a grotto revered by Christians as the birthplace of Christ. This was my first time inside.

I had been photographing Yasser Arafat’s return to Ramallah for The Times. I returned to my hotel in Bethlehem exhausted. On impulse, I grabbed a camera and headed down to the church to catch up with colleagues and see what was going on.

When I got there, I heard that members of a nongovernmental group, the International Solidarity Movement, planned to make a run past the Israeli soldiers and their tanks to deliver food to the 124 Palestinians inside the church. I followed them.

The soldiers spotted Solidarity and gave chase. They caught several laggards, but 10 members of the group reached the church. It was at that moment that I realized they were going in.

We ran, our hands up, to the low, wooden entrance. It is called the Door of Humility. Some say humility is what it teaches as you stoop to enter. Without a second thought, I ducked and found myself inside with them.

“Thank you! Thank you!” the Palestinians said. Many shook hands.

The movement members were not happy that I had joined them. I had not brought food, only a camera, and I was there to take pictures. I was the only media photographer to enter the church since the siege began.

I stood in a cross-shaped sanctuary that looked about 45 yards long. Blankets were spread on the 4th century stone floor. The heart of the sanctuary was empty, except for a burning torch fashioned from candle wax. Around the torch were chairs. It was the central gathering area.

There were more blankets on the floors along the walls of the arms of the cross. In the left arm, I would learn later, slept the older men.

In the right arm was a man who had been shot, and around him were the leaders, including Abdallah Daud Kader, head of the Palestinian intelligence service in Bethlehem, accused by Israel of smuggling weapons and supplying militants with explosives; and Ibrahim Abeiyat, the Bethlehem commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia that has taken responsibility for suicide bombings and is affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah movement.

A Steady Diet of Weed Soup

The church smelled of burning candle wax and the fried leaves from trees in the backyard. The blackened leaves had the scent of burned popcorn. Those leaves and weed soup had been the staples until we arrived.

All around me was a constant rumble, sometimes nearly a roar. The men were speaking, all at once. The sound ebbed, flowed and swirled in the sanctuary. The language was Arabic, and I could not understand a word. I could speak only one: “Thank you.”

As the noise dropped, I could heard birds singing outside open windows high among the vaulted beams of the ceiling.

The men took the food and made a meal.

They gave us blankets and showed us where to sleep: in the grotto under the floor of the front center of the sanctuary, not 15 feet from where Christians believe that Jesus was born. The birthplace is marked by a star. I felt a little uncomfortable. It was a sacred place. Nobody should be sleeping there.

But I was safe. I was under a church with stone floors, heavy fortified walls and thick doors with metal bars. I felt protected.

Our meal had been thin soup, hastily prepared with rice brought by the Solidarity members. I went to my blanket after only eight spoonfuls. It was so cold, I hardly slept. But morning came with a surprise.

I awoke to priests in vestments singing their liturgies, a cappella, at a small altar in the grotto. At one point, they turned to face the Solidarity members and me. The priests seemed to be praying for our safety.

During the morning, the Palestinians took us on a tour of the church compound. It had been damaged during the siege, but it was impossible to know exactly how each part of the damage had been done or who had done it.

At 2 p.m., a chubby Palestinian cook, named Abu Ibrahim, had lunch ready, made with more of the rice and lentils brought by Solidarity. He was a good chef, tending a pot 4 feet wide and 2 feet tall, positioned on the raised altar floor in the main sanctuary. He apologized for making it his kitchen, but he said this was the only safe place to cook.

Most of the Palestinians said they had lost at least 30 pounds since the beginning of the siege. But their chef seemed to have been sampling his wares; he still had plenty more to lose. His colleagues called him “big chief”--mispronouncing chef every time. They loved his cooking. The best thing about it, they said, was that he could make something out of nothing.

The leaders, who speculated that they might be deported to Italy when the siege ended, wanted to take their “big chief” along so he could learn to cook spaghetti and teach their wives, if and when they ever returned.

I encountered a Palestinian member of the coastal police who had a cell phone like mine. I began borrowing his charger. He showed me how someone had managed to bring electricity into the church and how the Palestinians were using it to charge the 50 cell phones they had brought in with them. Charging your cell phone became a preoccupation.

Last Saturday, my third day in the church, a single shot brought down Khalaf Najezeh, 40, a member of the Palestinian security force. He was hit in the chest by a small-caliber bullet. Other Palestinians carried him to the raised altar floor. One of them gave him an injection for pain. He moaned and lay still.

On a cell phone, one of the Palestinians called the Israelis and told them what had happened. They arrived at the door in about half an hour and took Najezeh to a hospital in a jeep. He died before he got there. The Palestinians sat in a rectangle and told stories about him, then said evening prayers.

They prayed together twice a day, at 4:30 a.m. and at 7 p.m., both times in the main sanctuary. They had it to themselves, because the only Christian services were down in the grotto. When the Palestinians prayed, they faced the right wall of the church, toward Mecca.

The Palestinians said they had promised the Christian clergy in the church compound that they would not shoot out of the church. I never saw a Palestinian in the church fire his weapon. Indeed, I heard only one shot fired in nearly eight days--the one that killed Najezeh.

That Saturday, I called my parents in Pennsylvania. After covering the war in Afghanistan, my father had suggested that I should consider staying home for a while. But he wasn’t angry.

“Have they hurt you? Can you get out of there?” my mother asked.

My father said he was assuring her that I was safer inside the Church of the Nativity than anywhere else I could be in the West Bank. I don’t know if he believed it, but that’s what he told her.

On the same day, word spread in the church that negotiations to end the siege were almost complete. “Big chief,” the chef, was singing. Everyone went to bed happy. I wanted to be near the door to take photographs of the end, when everyone left.

By now I had two blankets. Someone had slipped out the back of the church, gone to a nearby hotel, called the Casanova, and stolen 11 new blankets and pillows, still wrapped in plastic. The Palestinians gave me one.

I went upstairs and joined a group of men, including the seacoast policeman who had shown me how to charge my cell phone. He seemed to have everything. In a satchel he carried across his chest, he had Band-Aids, paper and pens, and two phone chargers. Best of all, his group was near the door.

The Palestinians kept several guns there. I slept not far from them.

Preserving a Precious Commodity

On the fourth day, a Sunday, I concentrated on conserving the battery for my camera. I slept with it in one of my pockets to keep it warm. After each photograph, I removed it from my camera to keep it from draining even a little.

Food was running low, and by Monday we were eating fried leaves and weed soup again. The leaves tasted like pastry flakes with a hint of lemon but no sugar. In the frying pot, they looked black and crispy. The chef fried them in cooking oil that he got from the priests.

The weed soup tasted like weak spinach, but when you were hungry, it was hot and satisfying, especially if it had a little salt in it. When you spoon it down, you think that you’re having a meal, but you’re not: It’s just water and a plant that looks a bit like seaweed.

Before long, I was hungry again.

I grew nauseated, I felt weak, and all sounds seemed amplified. I worried that any food I ate would not be there for others--even the weed soup. If I did eat, my stomach seemed to contract around anything I put in it.

Negotiations were dragging. It was one of my bleakest days.

On Tuesday, the mother and a sister of Abeiyat, the commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs, sneaked some food through a hole in a door behind the church. Oranges, rice and tomatoes.

Our chef prepared what the Palestinian men joked was an Indian meal, because it had an orange flavor. He mixed the rice with the tomatoes, sliced up the oranges, without peeling them, and cooked everything into a kind of rice-orange-tomato stew. The men loved it, but they did not eat the orange peels.

Negotiations sputtered through Wednesday, my seventh day inside the church.

Word was the talks were going well, but then they were crumbling. Finally they were on track again. Buses lined up outside the church, and the Israelis put food and water on a table nearby. Scores of reporters and photographers gathered.

But nothing happened.

On Thursday, I went to an outside spigot, where someone had managed to tap into water from outside the compound. I washed my face and hands and hair.

One of the Palestinians, an old man, watched.

My clothing was disheveled.

“Wait,” he said.

He returned with a clean, long-sleeved cotton shirt and a pair of women’s panties.

It seemed crazy. Where had he gotten them?

I’ll never know.

I followed him to an empty room inside another building in the compound. I closed the door and changed. A perfect fit.

He reached around the door and handed me a new pair of blue military pants.

When I went back outside, I used my only Arabic: “Thank you.”

At midday, I ate. With rice and lentils left over from Abeiyat’s mother and sister, we had a large meal. Should the negotiations succeed, the Palestinians wanted to be full so they would not be tempted to dignify the Israelis by eating the food they were likely to place, once more, on the table outside.

After the meal, the Palestinians grew sleepy. They napped. The sanctuary was quiet. I could not sleep. I daydreamed about a massage, maybe a soak in the Dead Sea, perhaps a giant falafel in Jerusalem.

It was all I could do to fight off depression. I did not have enough camera battery left, negotiations were stalling, the story was not over, and I did not think I could last until the end.

A Fatah gunman sat next to me with a Kalashnikov assault rifle across his lap.

We said not a word.

Before dawn on Friday, my ninth day inside, word swept through the sanctuary that an agreement had been reached to end the siege.

At 5:30 a.m., the Palestinians ate another large meal of rice and beans, the last of the food.

A little after 6 a.m., the end came.

One by one, the 13 Palestinians whom Israel was sending into exile lined up just inside the Door of Humility.

The other men walked by and said farewell.

I had only a little power left in my camera battery. I took pictures of each as he walked through the door.

They carried Jihad Jaara, who had been shot in his right ankle.

I took his photograph, and the battery died.

After all of the Palestinians had left, I thought about staying inside the church. If I waited, there was a chance that the Israelis might pull out, and I could walk out without being arrested. When it became clear that this was not going to happen, I decided to leave.

The Solidarity group remained inside.

The Israelis took me to a bus, where I waited for hours while they took the Solidarity members out of the church. They brought us to a small prison, where the American consul arrived and spoke on my behalf.

The Israelis released me.

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The Church of the Nativity

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