On the night of Nov. 15, 2000, 12-year-old Amira Musallam laid on the floor of her family’s home in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, as tanks and helicopters fired into the neighborhood. Bullets tore through the walls. Small rockets struck nearby houses.
“It was from 6 p.m. until the next day,” she recalled. “We were under bombing from tanks and helicopters and we couldn’t leave the house.”
Musallam, her parents and her two sisters had taken shelter in what they believed was the safest corner of the house. It proved not to be. Projectiles began hitting the room where they were hiding. With no ambulance able to reach them and the U.S. embassy declining to intervene, the Palestinian American family made a desperate choice: They crawled along the ground outside toward a neighbor’s house positioned slightly downhill.
“Thank God we weren’t physically injured or harmed,” Musallam said. “But our house was partially bombed.”
The attack came early in the Second Intifada and marked a turning point in her life. The childhood she remembers — choir rehearsals at her local Catholic church, scouts meetings and afternoons spent wandering the hills above Bethlehem — ended that night.
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With thanks to the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) and Camillo Barone, where this article originally appeared.
