JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, 17 April — Gaunt and exhausted, Jamal Fayed was yesterday wandering round the vast heap of stinking detritus in which Israel has buried the war crimes of Jenin refugee camp, tormented with worry about the fate of his family.
The last time Fayed, a Palestinian science teacher, saw his wife and children, eight-year-old Majed and Ahmed, six, was just after Israeli forces had invaded a fortnight ago. He told the family to leave their house because he feared that a nearby Israeli tank was about to begin shelling. But he stayed behind, because he thought that if he left with them the soldiers would open fire on them, assuming him to be a fighter.
“Maybe they have gone to another village. I just don’t know where they are,” he said, as he trudged through the dust of what used to be a large residential area which has now been reduced by Israeli bulldozers to a wasteland, fetid with the reek of decomposing human bodies beneath it.
Nearby old women picked through the debris, trying to salvage a few belongings.
International aid workers are beginning to address the arduous task of establishing how many people were killed in the camp during Israel’s so-called counter-terrorism operation — a long bout of fighting which culminated with the bulldozing by the army of hundreds of dwellings.
According to eyewitnesses, they did so when civilians were still inside. The UN agencies and Red Cross say that they are encountering a growing number of refugees who have lost contact with relatives.
Humanitarian aid workers who got into the devastated area of the camp yesterday reacted with deep anger and shock at the scenes.
A large area, about a third of a mile wide, has been flattened. Many other homes — half-wrecked by the heavy fighting, including rocket bombardments from Israeli helicopters — are uninhabitable. One official described the sight as “absolutely unbelievable” and a “humanitarian catastrophe”.
A senior UN official said: “Given the deplorable and unprecedented refusal to allow in international relief organizations into the camps while people were slowly dying in the rubble of their wounds and thirst, the onus is definitely on the state of Israel to account for the missing thousands of refugees who lived in that camp until a few weeks ago.
“I have not met one person in the international community who had any other explanation for this refusal other than the fact that they were hiding a war crime — in fact, two war crimes: the mass killing and the denial of humanitarian relief.”
A spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross said the camp “looks as if it has been hit by an earthquake.” Barred entry for a week, the Red Cross on Monday rescued a man from under the rubble. He was badly injured in the neck. But the Israelis appear to have made no efforts to use heat-seeking equipment, or sniffer dogs, to see if there are more, aid workers said.
Amnesty investigators in Jenin have taken many dozens of eyewitness statements about the events of the last fortnight. These include accounts from people who say they saw bodies being buried in individual graves and one account of Israeli soldiers burying 32 corpses in a trench grave.
They have also interviewed a large number of people who fled the camp after their houses were demolished. According to Derrick Pounder, a professor of forensic medicine from Dundee (Scotland) University working with the Amnesty team, a “pattern of credible evidence” is emerging from eyewitnesses that camp residents were not warned by the army before bulldozers were sent crashing into their homes. “The only warning that they received was their house collapsing.”
Professor Pounder, who has worked in Sarajevo and Kosovo, believes that the lack of any option to evacuate and the fact that there were large numbers of people inside the buildings when the army crashed in — 30 or 40 people in some cases — means that there will inevitably be large numbers of dead civilians. “Sooner or later those bodies will be discovered and the facts will become absolutely clear.”
UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, is setting up an operations center in which it will re-register all the surviving refugees and then match their names to its previous list of 13,000 residents in the camp in the hope of establishing the number of dead. But the task is expected to take months. Thousands are still unaccounted for, not least because many have fled to surrounding villages. Matters are further complicated by the fact that many men from the refugee camp were rounded up for interrogations, and are thought to be in Israeli detention. (The Independent)
