Hero of Ireland, Caoihme!

national | miscellaneous | news report Sunday November 24, 2002 08:15 by Vince TheConstitutionrules at hotmail dot com

"I tried to negotiate with the soldiers because they were still shooting at kids." (P.S. Hello From NYC!!!!! OH MY GOD, YOU'RE THE BEST!!!!--- Look for fitting internet montage tribute to the NEW HERO OF IRELAND!!!!)

Interview with Caoimhe
by MG Fri, Nov 22 2002, 1:20pm

Speaking from her hospital bed shortly before 1pm (Irish time), Caoimhe Butterly, the injured Irish woman, explained what happened:

"I've been living in Jenin camp for the last few months and there was a re-invasion of the camp this morning from about five o'clock onwards. The Israeli occupation forces are saying that they were looking for one wanted man in particular, but they closed off the bottom area of the camp - it's a closed military zone. There were house-to-house searches going on and around 20 men were rounded up in those searches and were beaten very severely, handcuffed and blindfolded. I received a call from the family of one of them in that zone where nobody was allowed out on to the streets, saying that a young girl needed medical attention, that she was very sick and they were asking if we could try and bring an ambulance in, because the Israelis had refused to co-ordinate with them. So I made my way down from where I live at the top of the camp to the bottom and when I arrived there I was arrested immediately with a cameraman from Reuters for entering a closed military zone and handcuffed and held with the group of 20 men for about two hours. I was then released and I was told that if I didn't leave the area that I would be shot . We managed eventually to get an ambulance in to evacuate the girl and then I went up to another part of the camp where there were clashes going on, between stone-throwing kids and Israeli soldiers. When I got there, the kids told me that a nine-year-old had just been killed and three had been shot - one was brain-damaged. I tried to negotiate with the soldiers because they were still shooting at kids, they were basically shooting live ammunition at them and I started engaging in some negotiation soldier and then another tank drove up, the guy looked out of his hatch and he opened fire on a crowd of kids. Most of them managed to run away, but there were around three small ones left on the road, so I was trying to basically carry them into an alleyway and then I got shot myself."

Re death of Ian Hawk: "I don't work for the UN so I wasn't in the UN compound when it happened. We had been there earlier on and I had seen Ian Hawk there. He had managed to get out the women and the children in the morning, however Ian was still trying to co-ordinate officially with the Israelis to get safe passage out for himself and a number of Palestinians who were stuck inside the compound. At that stage, I left with a group of women and children, before I was shot in another part of the camp. When I got shot I was brought to the hospital here and within about five minutes of getting here Ian was wheeled in. He was still alive. He died within a few minutes of getting here. I'm only getting stories in bits and pieces because I'm in a bed myself, but [I heard] that he was shot hours before he was actually brought to the hospital because people were prohibited from getting to him. Basically, they had to go over the back wall of the UN compound to evacuate him a stretcher to the other side of the camp where the hospital is. He's British as far as I know and as far as I know he's the head of the UN operation in Jenin, possibly for Nablus as well. He was here I think with a foreign delegation, with a group of foreign UN workers, just on a rotine tour of the UN compound, and had been engaging in some sort of negotiation with the Israelis. I know that he had been on to the DCO basically saying that they wanted to leave the compound, but there were snipers positioned all around that particular compound, although they were focusing on houses down the road from it. Again, I think this another example of the kind of collective punishment - it's generally not the people they are looking for who are the casualties in these situations. There's still a very huge military presence in the camp at the moment and they're going house-to-house and thrashing houses and beating people."