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Washington Post. 26 April 2002. Ill-Prepared For a Battle Unexpected. Excerpts. JERUSALEM -- It was the second day of the battle for the Jenin refugee camp, and things were going badly for the Israelis. Palestinian gunmen, firing from sandbags hidden behind curtained windows, had pinned down advancing Israeli troops on the camp's western edge. Two Israelis had already died. To a young Israeli army sergeant watching from a nearby rise known as Antennae Hill, perhaps 400 yards above the camp, it was clear that his commanders had been wrong when they had confidently predicted a few days earlier that the Palestinians would surrender at the first sight of approaching tanks. That's when he heard the orders to open fire. "The orders were to shoot at each house," recalled the sergeant, a member of a heavy weapons company in the Yoav regiment of the army's Fifth Brigade, a reserve unit that did the bulk of the fighting in Jenin. "The words on the radio were to 'Put a bullet in each window.' " The sergeant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was troubled by the orders, which did not require soldiers to actually see the gunmen they were trying to kill. But he said the Israeli soldiers didn't hesitate. They pounded a group of cinder-block homes -- the apparent source of Palestinian sniper fire -- with .50-caliber machine guns, M-24 sniper rifles, Barrett sniper rifles and Mod3 grenade launchers. "It's not true there was a massacre, because guys did not shoot at civilians just like this," the sergeant recalled. "However -- and this is terrible -- it is true that we shot at houses, and God knows how many innocent people got killed." In separate interviews Wednesday, the sergeant and another Israeli reservist who fought in Jenin, Sgt. Shlomi Lanyado, offered a detailed account of the battle from the perspective of the Israeli forces. Both sergeants participated in the house-to-house combat in the center of the densely built refugee camp. The sergeants' accounts add up to only a small piece of a much larger picture. Their recollections are parallel in some respects, but do not provide a comprehensive account of the battle. Both sergeants have returned to civilian life, and spoke without the presence of Israeli army press officers. The soldiers described a lack of preparation by Israeli reservists. They were hastily mustered from civilian life less than two weeks before, and were told to expect a Palestinian surrender within three days, the sergeants said. They spent barely a day rehearsing the operation. They also described the trauma of losing close friends in battle. They expressed grudging admiration for a mostly unseen enemy that had meticulously planned for the assault, stockpiling ammunition, food and medical supplies as well as crude but effective bombs made frommetal canisters filled with phosphate and acetone. "I can't be contemptuous of them," said Lanyado, 32, a cheerful, animated stage actor and producer who lives in a high-rise near Tel Aviv with his wife and two small children. "Somebody there had thought very much what to do and how to fight and succeeded for 10 or 11 days against a very big army." Both Lanyado and the other sergeant said they do not believe that Israeli soldiers intentionally killed Palestinian civilians. Lanyado said he and the other members of his platoon went out of their way to treat Palestinians with respect, providing them with water and once summoning a medic to treat an elderly man who collapsed in his bedroom. [N.B.] The other sergeant, however, said he was troubled not only by the order to fire through open windows without specific, identifiable targets, but also by what he said were insufficient efforts by the army to allow civilians to leave their homes in safety. [N.B.] He also questioned the decision to use bulldozers to knock down houses at a time when he said the fighting had mostly subsided. Neither soldier said he was aware of Israeli troops using noncombatants as human shields, to open doors, closets or packages that could be booby-trapped, as Palestinians have charged. Both sergeants acknowledged, however, that soldiers often drafted Palestinians to knock on neighbors' doors as the soldiers moved from house to house in search of gunmen and terrorist suspects. The sergeants were called to active duty on March 17, about two weeks before the start of Israel's offensive in the West Bank. Israeli intelligence had identified the camp as a center of operations for two militant groups, the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, as well as fighters affiliated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. On Monday, April 1, Lanyado said, he and other members of the company rehearsed their mission -- to round up terrorists and gunmen -- using empty buildings at an army base near Jenin. "We practiced knocking on the door and then waiting" to one side, he recalled. "We were told specifically that once the Palestinians see the tanks, they'll give up," the other sergeant said. "Those were the words my company commander told us." The mood changed abruptly, however, on April 3, when the first soldiers set off down Antennae Hill, so named for two large radio towers atop the hill, which slopes toward the two- and three-story houses at the edge of the camp. The Palestinian gunfire was much heavier than the Israelis anticipated and it quickly claimed its first victim, Maj. Moshe Gerstner, felled by a bullet to the throat. "We began to understand that the Palestinians are taking this very seriously," said Lanyado, who later that day led a squad of six men into the first row of houses. The other sergeant disputed official assertions that the army had made every effort to empty the camp of civilians. [N.B.] "The civilians, they never got a real chance to get out," he said. He recalled that on the fifth day, he was inside an armored personnel carrier broadcasting appeals in Arabic for fighters to surrender. The commander of the vehicle, he said, asked a senior officer who was riding with them why they did not broadcast the appeal on more than one street. [N.B.] According to the sergeant, the officer replied, " 'These are my orders. Do you really think the brigade wants to give them a chance to give up?' " The sergeant said there were still plenty of civilians inside the camp during the period of the fiercest fighting. On guard duty inside a house one night, he recalled, he heard a baby crying unattended for hours in an adjacent building. Fearing that the mother was dead, he asked an officer to investigate. But the officer said it might be a trap. "He said, 'I'm sorry. I wish I could, but I can't,' " the sergeant recalled. Toward the end of the battle, he said, he was peering out the hatch of an armored personnel carrier when he noticed a young man in bluejeans crawling on his hands and knees through the rubble. His platoon commander, a lieutenant, who was in another vehicle ahead of him, ordered the man in Arabic to stop, then fired a warning shot. But the man kept crawling toward the vehicles. Fearing a suicide bomber, the lieutenant shot him dead, he recalled. Lanyado said he has been shocked, since hanging up his uniform, by the international storm of criticism over Israeli tactics in Jenin. "I'm ready to speak with anyone, to look them in the eye and tell them that I and my soldiers, we were as clean as we could be," he said. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
