U.S. family of aid worker gets death threats

Stuart and Doreen Shapiro react with relief as their son Noah ends his cell phone call with his brother, Adam, in their Brooklyn home Saturday.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The parents of an American aid worker in Ramallah have been forced to leave their Brooklyn home amid death threats after their son ate breakfast with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his besieged compound.

Noah Shapiro, 26, who lives in New York, said the people making threats accused his brother Adam, 30, of betraying Jews for supporting Palestinians. His parents, Stuart and Doreen, are now in hiding, he said.

"The threats my parents and I are receiving are these severe death threats, calling for our death, calling for my brother's death to burn in hell in a fiery death," Noah Shapiro said.

"It's really very bad," Adam Shapiro said. "They've called the police and had to get the FBI involved, and my parents have had to leave their home."

He said the Anti-Defamation League has spoken out against the threats, which began over the weekend after he negotiated with Israeli soldiers to gain access to Arafat's headquarters.

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"I was volunteering on an ambulance picking up the wounded and dead in Ramallah," he said. "We got a call from the compound saying there was wounded inside that needed medical attention -- one person had been bleeding for over 12 hours -- and so we went to the compound."

Three hours later, the soldiers granted them access. Adam Shapiro said the ambulance left for the hospital and he stayed behind to treat the rest, expecting the ambulance to return.

"However, the ambulance was impounded and everyone on board, including the injured, upon leaving, were arrested," he said. "So I was stuck."

After staying in the compound all night, he said, Arafat gave him breakfast the next morning.

"I think he was grateful for the efforts that we were making, in a humanitarian capacity, to try and help the Palestinian people, who are really under siege here in Ramallah," he said.

Adam Shapiro has lived in Israel for three years, his brother said, and for the past three months has been in Ramallah, where he lives with his fiancee, who is from Detroit.

Adam Shapiro and his Palestinian fiancee, Huweida Arraf, at an engagement party in Michigan in November 2001.

He works for the International Solidarity Movement, a nonprofit group that seeks to raise awareness of Palestinian issues through nonviolent means, and he said his efforts were misunderstood by those making the threats against his family.

"I have always stood for peace and for co-existence and for the use of nonviolence," he said. "I have always condemned the use of violence to achieve political goals, and I do that through my work."

But it is Adam Shapiro's support for the Palestinian cause and the public expression of thanks from Arafat that triggered the backlash.

"My brother, with 100 percent conviction, and my family, condemns suicide bombings and condemns deaths on both sides," said Noah Shapiro. "My brother, in fact, teaches Palestinian people that there is a nonviolent solution to the end of this."

-- CNN Correspondent Brian Palmer contributed to this report.