'The Israeli soldiers came in their tanks and put a gun to my niece's head. It was terrible. How could they do that to us?'

Internal links

Sharon plays into PLO's bloody hands

All I want is my mother, Chaya said, her body peppered with nails

The Hanina is a five-storey apartment block near the edge of Ramallah, the main town in the West Bank. A white, modern building, it has a small communal garden, glassed-in balconies and cars parked outside. It is home to some 20 people – ordinary, working Palestinians and their families who in the 18 months of the intifada have just about maintained the semblance of day-to-day life.

That was until last week. The Hanina might be in all other respects fairly anonymous, but its position near the Al-Amari refugee camp marked it out as a target for the Israeli forces whose tanks rolled into Ramallah at midnight last Monday. Israeli soldiers, believing the refugee camps to be breeding grounds for the sort of suicide bombing missions that have killed dozens of people in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, wanted a vantage point to overlook the Al-Amari, and it was the Hanina residents' misfortune that their building provided it.

Khaled Hourami is a 38-year-old artist who lives in Ramallah and has relatives whose homes are in the Hanina. His account of what happened to them and to other residents – echoing experiences reported elsewhere – offers a glimpse of the terror and suffering that is the reality of Palestinian life under siege from Israeli forces.

Mr Hourami's sister-in-law, Hala Hourami, her daughters Dema, six, and Delia, four, were all in bed when the tanks arrived and soldiers began using explosives to break into the building. "My sister-in-law ran upstairs to one of my brothers," Mr Hourami said. "By the time she went back down the soldiers were at the door, ordering everybody into one apartment. To begin with they wouldn't let her back in to where her children were. She picked up Dema and brought her out of the apartment, and an Israeli soldier pointed his gun at the child and was threatening to shoot. Dema did not speak for two days. She was in shock."

An old man living on his own on the first floor did not wake up when the soldiers arrived, and another of Mr Hourami's brothers tried desperately to reach him to tell him what was happening. All the Hanina residents, frightened and confused, were soon locked into a three-room apartment while 100 heavily armed Israeli soldiers took up residence in the rest of the building, with snipers on the rooftop training their sights on the Al-Amari camp.

The soldiers cut the phone lines and seized mobiles, but the outside lights were still on, and the Israelis wanted them switched off. They were on a timer, so the soldiers smashed them with their rifle butts. Israeli explosives had burst a water tank, and water was pouring through the apartment where the Palestinians were being held. But they weren't allowed out to turn the water off at the mains.

Meanwhile the Israeli soldiers settled themselves in. According to Mr Hourami, they trashed furnishings and stole people's jewellery. This went on for three days, with the captive Palestinians denied food, water or any contact with the outside world. When a Palestinian came up the street in an attempt to bring food to the Hanina, Israeli soldiers shot at him. "Hala's husband – my brother – was away working in the Gulf and was going crazy trying to get through to her," Mr Hourami said. "It was terrible. How could they do that to these people?"

The rest of Ramallah was similarly in the grip of fear. "This has gone on for a year and a half now, and this is the worst situation we have had," Mr Hourami said. "Even with the first intifada the Israelis didn't use tanks, F16s and Apache helicopters."

Finally, on Thursday night, the Israelis in the Hanina came to the Palestinians and told them that "they would be able to get food at 2am". That's when the soldiers would be leaving, but they also warned that they would be back. In the middle of the night, the soldiers disappeared and the tanks rolled away. When Hala Hourami's children returned to their apartment, they found that their pet goldfish had been removed from its tank. It was lying on the floor, cut in half.