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By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
JENIN, West Bank — Palestinian officials
yesterday put the death toll at 56 in the two-week Israeli assault on Jenin,
dropping claims of a massacre of 500 that had sparked demands for a U.N.
investigation.
The official Palestinian
body count, which is not disproportionate to the 33 Israeli soldiers killed in
the incursion, was disclosed by Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasser
Arafat's Fatah movement for the northern West Bank, after a team of four
Palestinian-appointed investigators reported to him in his Jenin
office.
[Two weeks ago, when European and
particularly London newspapers were reporting estimates of "hundreds" massacred,
Israeli sources in Washington said they expected the Palestinian toll to reach
"45 to 55."]
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan
suggested yesterday, in the wake of the Palestinian body count, that he may
disband a U.N. fact-finding team that was to visit the camp to determine whether
a massacre had taken place.
Mr. Annan was
responding to a decision by the Israeli security Cabinet earlier in the day not
to cooperate with the U.N. team.
The
U.N.-Israeli dispute appeared unrelated to the Palestinian admission there had
been no massacre.
The Palestinians had
suggested that most of the bodies were buried beneath the rubble of houses
bulldozed by Israeli troops. No digging for bodies was taking place here, and
there was no stench that could have come from decaying human
flesh.
The earlier Palestinian claims had
sparked international outrage and prompted the Bush administration to press
Israel to accept a fact-finding mission by the United Nations, an organization
that the Jewish state regards as having a pro-Palestinian
bias.
Mr. Kadoura yesterday showed a reporter
for The Washington Times the official Palestinian list of those who died. It
contained 50 names. Six additional bodies, he said, had not been
identified.
He no longer used the ubiquitous
Palestinian charge of "massacre" and instead portrayed the battle as a "victory"
for Palestinians in resisting Israeli forces. "Here the Israelis, who tried to
break the Palestinian willpower, have been taught a lesson," Mr. Kadoura
said.
He insisted that Israel had tried but
failed, thanks to the heavy fighting, to destroy the entire warren of homes in
the camp that had housed 11,000 people.
The
destruction, pictured graphically on television, appeared linked to Israeli
bulldozing of the houses from which the remnant of the resistance forces were
firing.
In fact, it covers the size of a large
football field and constitutes only about 10 percent of the housing in the camp,
and a far smaller proportion of the housing in the city, which was largely left
untouched by the Israeli incursion.
The figures
shown to The Times included 233 injured persons, mainly men. The figures
revealed that 18 persons had been injured and one had died after the fighting
had ended, the result of accidentally detonating either shells left after the
fighting, or booby traps that were set by Palestinian gunmen throughout the
camp.
A British expert attached to the
International Red Cross said these booby traps were almost identical to those
used by the Irish Republican Army.
The British
claim suggested to analysts that IRA guerrillas were schooled in terrorist
weaponry and irregular warfare, as were many radical guerrilla movements, in
Palestinian, Syrian and Iranian training camps in
Lebanon.
From behind a desk bedecked by
portraits of Mr. Arafat, a string of past "martyrs" and of Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein, the Palestinian chief official in the city, who is also the
Fatah leader, portrayed in an interview the events as another chapter in a long
saga of resistance to foreign invaders — from Crusader times onward — that, he
said, had made Jenin "the heart of Palestine" for
centuries.
The propaganda war continues,
meanwhile, in the refugee camp itself. Families whose homes had been destroyed
were ordered to sit and lie inside tents pitched near the destruction, to be
available for interviews and filming with foreign reporters and photographers.
At dusk, with the press opportunities concluded, they returned to houses offered
to them in the undamaged city or in the rest of the refugee
camp.
Other young men, members of various
factions, have been on duty in the camp's narrow streets, eager to conduct
foreign correspondents to places where they say Israelis killed militants after
they surrendered or had been captured.
Others
in the city say the resistance to the Israeli incursion had been carried out by
only about 10 percent of the militants who had originally been in the area. Most
had retreated into the hills or into city back streets as the Israelis entered
the area, they said.
Families living in houses
directly opposite the destroyed area have told The Washington Times that Israeli
soldiers, who temporarily occupied their houses just before the final battle
began, treated them without violence and assured them: "You will not be
harmed."
They confined the 36 members of the
Abu Khalil family to two rooms, allowing them out one by one, and set up a
snipers' point upstairs through two holes in the wall — under a family framed
message in Arabic: "There is No God but Allah and Mohammed is His
Messenger."
They confiscated identity cards but
left them on the table before slipping out during the
night.
At the United Nations in New York,
Undersecretary-General Kieran Prendergast said "a thorough, credible and
balanced report on recent events in Jenin refugee camp would not be possible
without the cooperation of the government of
Israel."
"Since it appears from today's Cabinet
statement by Israel that the difficulties in the way of deployment of the
fact-finding team will not be resolved anytime soon, the secretary-general is
minded to disband the team," he told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security
Council.
Diplomats said Mr. Prendergast told
council members that Mr. Annan was leaning toward disbanding the three-member
team, which has been joined by numerous advisers. The team, which was to have
arrived in Jenin on Saturday, remained in Geneva
yesterday.
The Security Council is to take up
the issue of whether or not to disband the mission at a meeting
today.
The United States put forward the
resolution adopted by the Security Council welcoming the dispatch of a U.N. team
to find out what happened in Jenin during the Israeli military's
attacks.
Israel initially agreed to the idea,
but subsequently raised questions over the composition of the team, its scope of
inquiry, who could be called as a witness and what documents would be presented
to the panel.
Mr. Prendergast said that "with
every passing day, it becomes more difficult to determine what happened" in
Jenin. U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said Mr. Annan was considering whether to
let the fact-finding team begin its work in Geneva or "simply abandoning the
mission on the assumption that satisfactory terms of reference could not be
worked out."
• This article is based in part
on wire service reports.
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020501-5587072.htm
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