This is how it was in the early days of the Al Aksa Intifada in the Hebron neighbourhood of Sha'abeh, opposite the Israeli settlement of Harsina. Today things are different. Pierre Shantz and I visited Sha'abeh on 3 January, the morning after a night of heavy shooting from Harsina. The IDF has heavy weapons there and the settler residents are also armed. Unknown gunmen come into Sha'abeh, shoot at Harsina and drive away, we were told, leaving those who live there to suffer retaliatory return fire from the IDF and the settlers.
Residents speculate about who the shooters are' but no one really knows for sure.
We visited one home where a bullet from Harsina passed through a bedroom window and into a dresser mirror, narrowly missing a mother brushing her hair. Her three children were on the bed asleep. Another home had a bullet hole in an upholstered chair in a sitting room. Yet another had a bullet pass through two windows and a steel door' lodging into a wall eighteen centimetres from a door into a bedroom where a child was asleep. Had this bullet been eighteen centimetres to the right' the child would be dead.