OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 14 April — The first evidence emerged yesterday of the scale of the carnage in the Jenin refugee camp — an atrocity which could derail Colin Powell’s Middle East peace mission.
Palestinians escaping from the West Bank camp, which has been sealed off by the Israeli Army for the past 11 days, have spoken of hundreds of deaths, including many who slowly bled to death because ambulances were prevented from entering. But no photographic evidence of the ferocity of Israel’s attack had emerged until yesterday, when a Reuters photographer managed to enter the camp briefly before being chased out again by an Israeli armored vehicle.
His two snatched photographs show a house in Jenin which is littered with three-day-old corpses. Most are covered by blankets, and it is impossible to tell whether they are Palestinian fighters or civilians. But when the US secretary of state meets Yasser Arafat today, the Palestinian leader is sure to tell Powell that Israel is preventing access to Jenin to cover up evidence of a massacre.
Yesterday Powell secured a statement — crucially in Arabic — from Arafat, condemning Friday’s bombing in Jerusalem, in which a woman from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades blew herself up at a bus stop, killing six Israelis. The attack caused the Americans to call off a meeting with Arafat planned for yesterday. But after his announcement of “strong condemnation”, read on Palestinian TV, the US State Department said the meeting would go ahead today in Arafat’s devastated compound in Ramallah.
The once-teeming Jenin refugee camp was a scene of devastation, its houses and passageways smashed and riddled with bullet holes. Several bodies lay decaying in the inner-city camp, the epicenter of resistance to Israel’s two-week-old West Bank campaign, two days after the last die-hard fighters surrendered or were killed.
Women and children struggled to survive in ruins cut off from the world by the Israeli Army after it crushed Palestinian fighters.
A Reuters news team, which slipped past tanks roaring back and forth around the walled camp, found the closely packed concrete houses and labyrinth of alleyways smashed by tank and helicopter gunship shells.
The contorted bodies of four Palestinian men lay blackened by decomposition in the ruins of one living room, apparently devastated by a helicopter missile. In another room, the bloated body of a middle-aged man lay on its side next to a bookcase and stereo.
Residents said the army had arrested most men in the camp and had told those remaining over loudspeakers they should leave unless they wanted to end up in the rubble of their own homes.
Many residents said bulldozers had been busy in the camp for days. They could be heard at work overnight by reporters a few hundred meters from the camp entrance.
Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the army not to bury the bodies of Palestinians in the Jenin camp, Israeli public radio reported. The order comes after allegations that Israeli troops were using bulldozers to make mass graves and to cover up the massacre.
The European Union said it was deeply concerned over the massacre reports. “(The EU) finds the reports of the events which happened at the Jenin camp very alarming. If they are confirmed, they will have very serious consequences,” the EU said in a statement from Madrid.
Israeli tanks and troops thundered into three more Palestinian towns, underscoring the decision of the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to ignore pleas from the United States, his closest ally, to halt his invasions of the West Bank. Dealing a further snub to Powell, the Israeli Army moved into Arabe, Hashmiyah and Al-Yamoun.
Israeli Army killed three Palestinians yesterday. Israeli troops shot dead a Hamas activist near Nablus and killed a Palestinian policeman who stepped out briefly from Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, witnesses and security sources said. They also killed a civilian in Nablus.
