The Economist
What happened at Jenin
Under the rubble of the refugee camp
Apr 18th 2002 | JENIN REFUGEE CAMP
>From The Economist print edition
Reuters
Picking through fact and fiction after Israel's assault on Jenin
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MANY facts are known, others are still contested. On April 2nd the Israeli
army invaded Jenin as part of its military operations to root out the
Palestinian "terrorist infrastructure" which, in Israel's mind, now includes
the Palestinian Authority. The conquest took three days. Then the army laid
siege to the refugee camp just outside the town.
The camp had been among the prime targets of Israel's assault on the West
Bank, along with the casbah in Nablus and the Palestinian gunmen sheltering
in churches in Bethlehem's old city. Huddled on a northern mountain-side
lush with cypress trees, it has long been a bastion of Yasser Arafat's Fatah
movement and, recently, of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Of the 100 Palestinian
suicide bombers in the 18 months of the intifada, 23 were bred in its warren
of poverty, breezeblock shelters, sloping lanes and a militant brew of
Palestinian nationalism and radical Islam. "The Palestinian Authority
doesn't really exist here. It's the fighters who run things," said a camp
resident, before the invasion.
For five days Israeli helicopters and tanks relentlessly rocketed the square
kilometre of the camp to soften the resolve of the 160 Palestinian
militiamen holed up within it. Men aged 15 to 45 were ordered by loudspeaker
to surrender. Hundreds did so. They were stripped to their underwear,
manacled, hooded, beaten and finally dumped in neighbouring villages. Some
were used as human shields in front of the army as it pushed its way into
people's houses. Women and children were told to flee to Jenin town.
By April 8th a UN official estimated that perhaps half of the camp's 13,000
refugees had gone. The army then tried to breach the camp's interior with
infantry. "We figured it would be a breeze," one reservist told Haaretz
newspaper. It wasn't. Instead, 23 Israeli soldiers were killed, including 13
on April 9th from an elaborate ambush involving a suicide bomber, a
booby-trapped house and a hail of gunfire.
It was then that the army took the decision to crush the resistance once and
for all. There was an intensive blitz of shelling into the camp's heart,
followed by an invasion of tanks and bulldozers, tearing down everything
that stood in their way. The army insists civilians were given fair warning
that the thrust was coming. Palestinians say it was a massacre, with
anywhere between 100 and 500 Palestinians killed, most of them buried
beneath the razed buildings.
Neither claim can be proved or refuted. What is beyond doubt is that the
camp one week on from the invasion is a scene of devastation that has had no
equal throughout Israel's 34-year conquest and occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza.
There is literally no house without bullet marks. Some have had lower floors
sheared away by the blades of bulldozers or tracks of tanks. From one
three-storey house all that is left is a stairwell, hanging in the ether,
descending into nothing.
This is the lesser destruction. The camp's residential core-the last redoubt
of the fighters-resembles an earthquake. Vast craters have been ploughed,
girdled by shored-up mountains of earth, topped by concrete avalanches of
houses, offices, a restaurant. It is a massive furrow the size of three
football pitches.
There is a mass grave beneath it, insist Palestinians. Or, rather, say many,
there was before the Israelis collected the corpses and sped them away while
keeping the Red Cross, the UN and other independent witnesses firmly at bay.
"I saw the soldiers dumping the dead in trucks...I saw this with my own
eyes," says a woman from the camp.
Less disputable acounts of horror are legion. A man describes what happened
to his neighbours, the Fayed family. "We heard the bulldozers coming. Jamal
told the soldiers they couldn't evacuate so quickly because of his disabled
son. The soldiers suspected he was a wounded fighter. They pulled down the
house with the son inside. That's where he's buried." He points to a mound
of earth.
Other Palestinians describe how, in the chaos of the assault, they had no
idea whether they were supposed to stay in their homes or flee. "The orders
were confused," says one. "Some soldiers told us to get out, others told us
there was a curfew. We decided to run and were immediately fired upon by the
army. I have a wife, four daughters and three sons. I haven't seen them
since that moment. I don't know if they're alive or dead."
Whether there was a warning or not, the evidence of the Israeli army's
absolute negligence in trying to protect civilian life is everywhere. One
man describes how his elderly father was shot in the head while getting
water from his kitchen, six metres from the room in which his family was
sheltering. The son could not reach his father for six days because of the
intensity of the shelling.
Nearby is the shell of another family home. Flies hover. There is the sweet,
acrid stench of human decomposition. Three corpses lie inside. They might
have been fighters or civilians. It is impossible to tell. Flesh, skulls and
clothes have been burnt to a blackened pulp.
The army says the dead were left for so long because Palestinians refused to
gather them, "for propaganda purposes", a brigadier told Haaretz. A
Palestinian doctor seethes with rage. "We could not leave our homes and the
army refused to let any medic, Palestinian or foreign, into the camp for
five days. How on earth could we remove them?"
On April 16th refugees in the camp picked through the detritus of their
lives. A woman trips over a house reduced to a petrified mess of glass,
crushed stone and tangled wire. Others are frantic for news about sons,
daughters, husbands and wives missing in battle or in flight. Hundreds
gather in a mosque used by the army as an observation post: there are torn
Korans on the floor, piles of cigarette butts and empty vodka bottles.
"My husband was a fighter from Hamas," yells a woman at a gaggle of
journalists. "And I am proud he was a martyr...Where were you when the Jews
were killing us?" Alone, she mellows a little. She looks out from a home
without walls above a lake of sewage that was once the camp's main street.
Two of her sons are missing. Her daughter's eyes are blank. "I know I will
see him again in heaven," she says. "But I would have liked to have his
wedding ring...it's under the rubble."
...............................................
Be the change
you want to see in the world.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
