JENIN, West Bank, 28 April — A Palestinian leader has resurfaced in Jenin refugee camp after weeks in hiding, vowing to pursue the resistance against Israel.
“If the Israelis believe they have eradicated the infrastructure of resistance here, they are wrong. Despite all our losses, it will rise again from these ashes stronger than before,” Jamal Abdul Salam Al-Heija of the Hamas group told Reuters on Friday night.
Flags of hard-line factions whose bombings goaded Israel to storm West Bank towns have sprouted from heaps of rubble in the camp since the army pulled out a week ago.
A UN mission to clarify what happened during the army onslaught was expected to leave Geneva for Tel Aviv at the weekend after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to delay it until after an Israeli Cabinet meeting this morning.
“A whole generation will grow up convinced that revenge must be exacted for the destruction and massacres that happened here,” said Heija, 42, a former teacher and father of nine. “We lost many martyrs but it doesn’t matter. The resistance will resume and it will not take long,” he added, cradling the stump of his left arm which he said he lost during an Israeli raid into the camp two months ago.
“I’ve met some of our survivors in the street but a number of our people are missing — how many are dead, how many captured, we don’t know, as the Israelis have not listed everyone they seized,” he said.
Israel denies charges of massacre, saying the army killed about 50 people, mostly fighters, and lost 23 soldiers dead. Several thousand refugees lost their homes to tank and helicopter fire and army bulldozers.
Heija, on an Israeli list of wanted Palestinians, said he escaped the camp as the army attacked on April 3 and hid in a cave on Jenin’s outskirts along with four bodyguards. “We had expected the Israelis to attack so we had prepared a lot of canned food to see us through a long period of hiding if necessary,” he said.
Heija said he slipped back into the camp on Wednesday, three days after Israeli forces vacated Jenin. By Friday, troops and tanks that had continued to encircle the town on nearby hills were gone, and Heija was moving freely inside the camp.
“Be careful. There are undercover Israelis around who could grab you,” said one of the many passers-by who greeted and hugged Heija. His two mobile phones rang often.
“I don’t worry about it,” he murmured later, contemplating the camp’s pulverized main square. “I trust in God that I will be a martyr (in battle) before I’m arrested.”
Heija said about half the Palestinian casualties in Jenin were Hamas activists. The group had run out of ammunition, but its organization had survived.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad have erected painted banners on the rubble, showing pictures and names of fighters said to be lying beneath. “They are shrines to our resistance,” said Heija. Green, black and white flags of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of the Fatah movement, are pitched alongside.
