JENIN —The thought was as unshakable as the stench wafting from the ruins. Was this really about counterterrorism? Was it revenge? Or was it an episode — the nastiest so far — in a long war by Ariel Sharon, the staunch opponent of the Oslo accords, to establish Israel’s presence in the West Bank as permanent, and force the Palestinians into final submission? A neighborhood had been reduced to a moonscape, pulverized under the tracks of bulldozers and tanks. A maze of cinder-block houses, home to about 800 Palestinian families, had disappeared. What was left — the piles of broken concrete and scattered belongings — reeked.
The rubble in Jenin reeked, literally, of rotting human corpses, buried underneath. But it also gave off the whiff of wrongdoing, of an army and a government that had lost its bearings. “This is horrifying beyond belief,” said the United Nations’ Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, as he gazed at the scene. He called it a “blot that will forever live on the history of the state of Israel” — a remark for which he was to be vilified by Israelis. Even the painstakingly careful United States envoy, William Burns, was unusually outspoken as he trudged across the ruins. “It’s obvious that what happened in Jenin refugee camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians,” he said.
The Israeli Army insists that its devastating invasion of the refugee camp in Jenin earlier this month was intended to root out the infrastructure of the Palestinian militias, particularly the authors of an increasingly vicious series of attacks on Israelis. It now says the dead were mostly fighters. And, as always — although its daily behavior in the occupied territories contradicts this claim — it insists that it did everything possible to protect civilians.
But The Independent (the British daily) has unearthed a different story. We have found that, while the Israeli operation clearly dealt a devastating blow to the fighter organizations — in the short term, at least — nearly half of the Palestinian dead who have been identified so far were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. They died amid a ruthless and brutal Israeli operation, in which many individual atrocities occurred, and which Israel is seeking to hide by launching a massive propaganda drive.
The assault on Jenin refugee camp by Israel’s armed forces began early on April 3. One week earlier, 30 miles to the west in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, a Hamas bomber had walked into a hotel and blown up a roomful of people as they were sitting down to celebrate the Passover feast. This horrific slaughter on one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar killed 28 people, young and old, making it the worst Palestinian attack of the intifada, a singularly evil moment even by the standards of the long conflict between the two peoples.
Ariel Sharon, Israel’s premier, and his ministers responded by activating a plan that had long lain on his desk. Operation Defensive Shield was to become the largest military offensive by Israel since the 1967 war. Jenin refugee camp was high on the list of targets. Home to about 13,000 people, it was the heartland of violent resistance to Israel’s 35-year occupation.
The graffiti-covered walls bellowed the slogans of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad; radical Islamists and secular nationalists worked side by side, burying differences in the name of the intifada. According to Israel, 23 bombers had come out of the camp, which was a center for bomb-making. Yet there were also many, many civilians. People such as Atiya Rumeleh, Afaf Desuqi and Ahmad Hamduni.
The army was expecting a swift victory. It had overwhelming superiority of arms — 1,000 infantrymen, mostly reservists, accompanied by Merkava tanks, armored vehicles, bulldozers and Cobra helicopters, armed with missiles and heavy machine guns. Ranged against this force were about 200 Palestinians, with members of the militias — Hamas, Al-Aqsa brigades and Islamic Jihad — fighting alongside Yasser Arafat’s security forces, mostly armed with Kalashnikovs and explosives.
The fight put up by the Palestinians shocked the soldiers. Eight days after entering, the Israeli Army finally prevailed, but at a heavy price. Twenty-three soldiers were killed, 13 of them wiped out by an ambush, and an unknown number of Palestinians died. And a large residential area — 400m by 500m — lay utterly devastated; scenes that the Israeli authorities knew at once would outrage the world as soon as they hit the TV screens. “We were not expecting them to fight so well,” said one exhausted-looking Israeli reservist as he packed up to head home. Journalists and humanitarian workers were kept away for five more days while the Israeli Army cleaned up the area, after the serious fighting ended on April 10.
The Independent spent five days conducting long, detailed interviews of survivors among the ruins of the refugee camp, accompanied by Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch organization. Many of the interviews were conducted in buildings that were on the verge of collapse, in living rooms where one entire wall had been ripped off by the bulldozers and that were open to the street.
An alarming picture has emerged of what took place. So far, 50 of the dead have been identified. The Independent has a list of names. Palestinians were happy, even proud, to tell us which of the dead were fighters for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa brigades; which belonged to their security forces; and which were civilians. They identified nearly half as civilians.
Not all the civilians were cut down in crossfire. Some, according to eyewitness accounts, were deliberately targeted by Israeli forces. Sami Abu Sba’a told us how his 65-year-old father, Mohammed Abu Sba’a, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers after he warned the driver of an approaching bulldozer that his house was packed with families sheltering from the fighting. The bulldozer turned back, said Abu Sba’a — but his father was almost immediately shot in the chest where he stood.
Israeli troops also shot dead a Palestinian nurse as she tried to help a wounded man. Hani Rumeleh, a 19-year-old civilian, had been shot as he tried to look out of his front door. Fadwa Jamma, a nurse staying with her sister in a house nearby, heard Hani’s screaming and came to help. Her sister, Rufaida Damaj, who also ran to help, was wounded but survived. From her bed in Jenin hospital, she told us what happened.
“We were woken at 3.30 in the morning by a big explosion,” she said. “I heard that one guy was wounded outside our house. So my sister and I went to do our duty and to help the guy and give him first aid. There were some guys from the resistance outside and we had to ask them before we moved anywhere. I told them that my sister was a nurse, I asked them to let us go to the wounded.
“Before I had finished talking to the guys the Israelis started shooting. I got a bullet in my leg and I fell down and broke my knee. My sister tried to come and help me. I told her, ‘I’m wounded.’ She said, ‘I’m wounded too.’ She had been shot in the side of her abdomen. Then they shot her again in the heart. I asked where she was wounded but she didn’t answer, she made a terrible sound and tried to breathe three times.”
Ms Jamma was wearing a white nurse’s uniform clearly marked with a red crescent, the emblem of Palestinian medical workers, when the soldiers shot her. Ms Damaj said the soldiers could clearly see the women because they were standing under a bright light, and could hear their cries for help because they were “very near”. As Ms Damaj shouted to the Palestinian fighters to get help, the Israeli soldiers fired again: A second bullet went up through her leg into her chest.
Eventually an ambulance was allowed through to rescue Ms Damaj. Her sister was already dead. It was to be one of the last times an ambulance was allowed near the wounded in Jenin camp until after the battle ended. Hani Rumeleh was taken to hospital, but he was dead. For his stepmother, however, the tragedy had only just begun; the next day, her 44-year-old husband Atiya, also a civilian, was killed.
As she told his story, her orphaned children clung to her side. “There was shooting all around the house. At about 5p.m. I went to check the building. I told my husband two bombs had come into the house. He went to check. After two minutes he called me to come, but he was having difficulty calling. I went with the children. He was still standing. In my life I’ve never seen the way he looked at me. He said, ‘I’m wounded’, and started bleeding from his mouth and nose. The children started crying, and he fell down. I asked him what happened but he couldn’t talk.
“His eyes went to the children. He looked at them one by one. Then he looked at me. Then all his body was shaking. When I looked, there was a bullet in his head. I tried to call an ambulance, I was screaming for anybody to call an ambulance. One came but it was sent back by the Israelis.”
It was Thursday April 4, and the blockade against recovering the wounded had begun. With the fighting raging outside, Ms Rumeleh could not go out of the house to fetch help. Eventually she made a rope out of headscarves and lowered her seven-year-old son Mohammed out of the back window to go and seek help. The family, fearful of being shot if they ventured out, were trapped indoors with the body for a week.
A few doors away, we heard the story of Afaf Desuqi. Her sister, Aysha, told us how the 52-year-old woman was killed when the Israeli soldiers detonated a mine to blow the door of her house open. Ms Desuqi had heard the soldiers coming and gone to open the door. She showed us the remains of the mine, a large metal cylinder. The family screamed for an ambulance, but none was allowed through.
Ismehan Murad, another neighbor, told us the soldiers had been using her as a human shield when they blew the front door off the Desuqi house. They came to the young woman’s house first, and ordered her to go ahead of them, so that they would not be fired on.
Jamal Feyed died after being buried alive in the rubble. His uncle, Saeb Feyed, told us that 37-year-old Jamal was mentally and physically disabled, and could not walk. The family had already moved him from house to house to avoid the fighting. When Feyed saw an Israeli bulldozer approaching the house where his nephew was, he ran to warn the driver. But the bulldozer plowed into the wall of the house, which collapsed on Jamal.
Although they evacuated significant numbers of civilians, the Israelis made use of others as human shields. Rajeh Tawafshi, a 72-year-old man, told us that the soldiers tied his hands and made him walk in front of them as they searched house to house. Moments before, they had shot dead Ahmad Hamduni, a man in his eighties, before Tawafshi’s eyes. Hamduni had sought shelter in Tawafshi’s house, but the Israeli soldiers had blown the door open. Part of the metal door landed next to the two men. Hamduni was hunched with age, and Tawafshi thinks the soldiers may have mistakenly thought he was wearing a suicide-bomb belt. They shot him on sight.
Even children were not immune from the Israeli onslaught. Faris Zeben, a 14-year-old boy, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in cold blood. There was not even any fighting at the time. The curfew on Jenin had been lifted for a few hours and the boy went to buy groceries. This was on Thursday, April 11. Faris’s eight-year-old brother, Abdel Rahman, was with him when he died. Nervously picking at his cardigan, his eyes on the ground, the child told us what happened.
“It was me and Faris and one other boy, and some women I didn’t know. Faris told me to go home but I refused. We were going in front of the tank. Then we saw the front of the tank move toward us and I was scared. Faris told me to go home but I refused. The tank started shooting and Faris and the other boy ran away. I fell down. I saw Faris fall down, I thought he just fell. Then I saw blood on the ground so I went to Faris. Then two of the women came and put Faris in a car.” Abdel Rahman showed us where it happened. We paced it out: the tank had been about 80 miles away. He said there was only one burst of machine-gun fire. He imitated the sound it made. The soldiers in the tank gave no warning, he said. And after they shot Faris they did nothing. (To be contiued)
Don’t allow Israel to upset the probe
JENIN — Israel’s delays and objections to the UN panel of investigation into Jenin are looking more and more like an attempt to emasculate the entire exercise. If this is so, then it will only add to the impression that the country has something to hide. What happened in Jenin was bad enough, as our reportsuggests, without Israel playing games with the international community.
One should also question the wisdom of Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, in bowing to this pressure, delaying the visit of the panel and, worse, considering changing its personnel to accommodate Sharon’s demands for more military members.
Establishing the facts of Jenin, in so far as this is possible, is of crucial importance. The Palestinians feel that a massacre was committed by Israeli soldiers in the refugee camp. The Israelis declare that what happened was no more than heavy fighting in which most of the casualties were Palestinian gunmen. Unless there is objective investigation, Jenin will enter the world of corrosive myth, in a region already overburdened with mythology.
Nor are Israeli objections to the make-up of the panel of any substance. Of course, an inquiry such as this needs to take into account the views of military men who understand the fine line between heavy-handed counter-insurgency and indiscriminate firing at civilians. But to suggest that figures such as Sadako Ogata, the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and Cornelio Sommaruga, of the Red Cross, are too sympathetic to the plight of civilians underlines the weakness of the Israeli case.
On Tuesday night, both London and Washington were united in their insistence that Israel had no right to interfere with the timing and make-up of the panel. Kofi Annan must not retreat from that view. The truth of Jenin must not only be uncovered, it must be seen to be uncovered. Anything less will serve only to poison the waters for generations to come. (The Independent)
