"We all believed that this operation was OK, that something had to be done, but it doesn't mean people think it will change things.". After a wretched first night in an abandoned house in the Old City without food or blankets, Aviad and his company moved to the Peace Center, a community hall located across Manger Square from the Church of the Nativity. Tamari rejected Israel's demands to hand over a list of the besieged militants, but then found out that Arafat had given Daoud a contradicting order. Everything was there." There was only one escape: "Go to the church!" Bethlehem is a city located in the central West Bank, Palestine, about 10 km south of Jerusalem. Two days later the electricity was cut off; when an electrician named Hassan Quan tried to run extension cords to the Casanova, he was shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper and was dragged back to the basilica in his death throes; his corpse was stuffed into a makeshift coffin and placed beside the other dead man in the grotto.

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a "Palestinian-led movement" focused on assisting the Palestinian cause in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Italian government said it had received no formal request to take them. On 14 April, Ariel Sharon gave the Palestinians the option of facing trial in Israel or permanent exile, a proposal they refused. The 2006 Gaza cross-border raid was a cross-border raid which was carried out on 25 June 2006 in which a Palestinian militant squad thought to consist of 7 to 8 militants managed to cross the border through an attack tunnel near the Kerem Shalom Crossing and attack Israel Defense Forces (IDF) military positions. He took the leadership of the Bethlehem branch of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs, after the Israeli army killed two of his cousins. See why nearly a quarter of a million subscribers begin their day with the Starting 5. [3], On 4 April, Samir Ibrahim Salman the bellringer of the Church was shot several times in the chest by an Israeli sniper. He also said that the troops would remain in place until the militants inside were captured. The organization has been designated as a terrorist organization by Israel, the European Union, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and the United States. Nor does he regret the massive operation against the Palestinians in the West Bank. "It was the fruits of corruption." The Battle of Jenin took place in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in April 1–11, 2002. Depend on yourself," the notes urged.

Behind a military barricade off Manger Square, tempers were flaring as well: a CNN camera crew demanded to know why Fox's Geraldo Rivera had been allowed to set up shop just a few yards from the church. During one evening of heavy fire, Faltas moved everyone to an underground grotto packed with reserves of food still undiscovered by the gunmen. The setting was not only one of the holiest spots on earth, but also a place familiar with battle. They fired from the marketplace, then burst into the Syrian Orthodox Church, firing Kalashnikovs from the windows as nuns and priests cowered in the corners. But the two sides have not even agreed how to negotiate. But except for a fire-gutted room in the Franciscan Parish, the damage to the church was minimal. The Church of the Nativity, or Basilica of the Nativity, is a basilica located in Bethlehem in the West Bank. [22] The Israeli negotiator was IDF Colonel Lior Lotan, a lawyer by profession. A California-born Army reserve captain in the Jerusalem Brigade, Aviad huddled in the cold as his vehicle crept at six miles an hour behind a bulldozer and two Merkava tanks. As the tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled away in a cloud of dust from Manger Square, priests, nuns and hundreds of worshipers poured through the Door of Humility to survey their beloved basilica. Three times during the first two weeks of the siege, Israeli tanks pulled up to the Abayat home on the outskirts of Bethlehem, hustled the Tanzim leader's mother to the Peace Center and urged her to persuade her son to surrender. A routine errand to buy medicine for his diabetic mother left the 16-year-old student caught between Israeli and Palestinian combatants.

[4] [13], On 11 April, the head of the Franciscan order, Giacomo Bini formally requested that the Palestinians be allowed to leave the church with a guarantee that their lives be protected, and that water and power be restored to the Church while the spokesman for the order reminded Israeli Jews of the role the Franciscan order had played in protecting Jews from the Holocaust by offering them sanctuary during WW2. Then Abayat and his comrades fled from the church as well, leaving a dead fighter behind.

Later that morning the priest was reading in the convent's ground-floor library when he heard a commotion in the nearby cloister.

Pale, plagued by migraines, hungry and weak, Abayat was a man transformed. Trapped between the two antagonists were the Christian clergymen--many of them Palestinian--who had given refuge to the gunmen and now found themselves obliged to suffer along with them. The Israeli Army was ready to accept a coordinated mass release of civilians. The Peace Center was deserted; uniformed policemen of the Palestinian National Authority patrolled the streets that Israeli troops had once held. Amid a hail of bullets, they found the gates to the Catholic part of the church complex locked. In 1342, the Franciscans were declared by two papal bulls as the official custodians of the Holy Places in the name of the Catholic Church. A few nights later Aviad fired five flares over the church, igniting a fire in the compound. Israel insists that it will not pull out its troops from Bethlehem until the wanted men either give themselves up for trial or go into exile in perpetuity. After nearly 40 days of warfare, negotiation, brinkmanship and capitulation, all four survived. It was the largest military operation in the West Bank since the 1967 Six-Day War. It had begun as a sideshow to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's West Bank invasion in March, but the closing act of Operation Defensive Shield became both a media extravaganza and a powerful metaphor for the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinian demonstrators threw stones at police and were dispersed by the Israeli army, using tear gas and rubber bullets. But they were wrong. A sympathetic woman who lived in a house on Milk Grotto Street, adjacent to the Greek Orthodox convent, stuffed linen bags with cigarettes, bologna and canned lentils, and tossed them onto a low wall after dark; then 10-man teams would creep along the wall, retrieving the bags with hooks mounted on three-meter rods. But the Armenians refused to talk to the press, reportedly fearing retribution from Palestinian militants. They were denied permission to meet with their families before their exile. "OK," the governor said. "Abu Atef," she said, "may God bless you.