THE DESTRUCTION OF THE JENIN REFUGEE CAMP
" [A] massacre [has been carried out in the camps] The soldiers are almost not advancing on foot. The bulldozers are simply 'shaving' the homes and causing terrible destruction. When the world sees the pictures of what we have done there, it will do us immense damage. However many wanted men we kill in the refugee camp, and however much of the terror infrastructure we expose and destroy there, there is still no justification for causing such great destruction."
- Shimon Peres, Israeli foreign minister, Ha'aretz, April 9th 2002
Note Peres' concern for the damage it will do to Israel, not the other way around
ONCE UPON A TIME IN JENIN
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WHEN ISRAELI FORCES WENT INTO JENIN?
JUST AS THE WORLD IS GIVING UP HOPE OF LEARNING THE TRUTH, JUSTIN HUGGLER AND PHIL REEVES
HAVE UNEARTHED COMPELLING EVIDENCE OF AN ATROCITY
By
Justin Huggler And Phil Reeves
The Independent (UK), April 25, 2002
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 neighbourhood had been reduced to a moonscape, pulverised 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
suicide attacks on Israelis. It now says the dead were mostly fighters. And, as always -
although its daily behaviour in the occupied territories contradicts this claim - it
insists that it did everything possible to protect civilians.
But The Independent has unearthed a different story. We have found that, while the Israeli
operation clearly dealt a devastating blow to the militant organisations - 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 3 April. One
week earlier, 30 miles to the west in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, a Hamas
suicide 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 suicide bombers
had come out of the camp, which was a centre 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, armoured 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 10 April.
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 organisation. 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 Mr 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 5pm 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 4 April, 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 neighbour, 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 Mr Feyed saw
an Israeli bulldozer approaching the house where his nephew was, he ran to warn the
driver. But the bulldozer ploughed 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 Mr Tawafshi's eyes. Mr
Hamduni had sought shelter in Mr Tawafshi's house, but the Israeli soldiers had blown the
door open. Part of the metal door landed next to the two men. Mr Hamduni was hunched with
age, and Mr 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 11 April. 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 towards 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 80m
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.
Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Hawashin was shot dead as he tried to walk through the camp.
Aliya Zubeidi told us how she was on her way to the hospital to see the body of her son
Ziad, a militant from the Al-Aqsa brigades, who had been killed in the fighting. Mohammed
accompanied her. "I heard shooting," said Ms Zubeidi. "The boy was sitting
in the door. I thought he was hiding from the bullets. Then he said, 'Help.' We couldn't
do anything for him. He had been shot in the face."
In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the flattened remains of
a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon. In the middle
of the debris lay a broken white flag. Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal
Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must
have driven over the body, because when Mr Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were
missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.
Mr. Zughayer, who was 58, had been shot and wounded in the first Palestinian intifada. He
could not walk, and had no work. Mr. Hassan showed us the pitiful single room where his
friend lived, the only furnishing a filthy mattress on the floor. Mr Zughayer used to
wheel himself to the petrol station where Mr Hassan worked every day, because he was
lonely. Mr Hassan did his washing; it was he who put the white flag on Mr Zughayer's
wheelchair.
"After 4pm I pushed him up to the street as usual," said Mr Hassan. "Then I
heard the tanks coming, there were four or five. I heard shooting, and I thought they were
just firing warning shots to tell him to move out of the middle of the road." It was
not until the next morning that Mr Hassan went to check what had happened. He found the
flattened wheelchair in the road, and Mr Zughayer's mangled body some distance away, in
the grass. The Independent has more such accounts. There simply is not enough space to
print them all. Mr Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch researcher, who is preparing a
report, said the sheer number of these accounts was convincing.
"We've carried out extensive interviews in the camp, and the testimonies of dozens of
witnesses are entirely consistent with each other about the extent and the types of abuses
that were carried out in the camp," said Mr Bouckaert, who has investigated
human-rights abuses in a dozen war zones, including Rwanda, Kosovo and Chechnya.
"Over and over again witnesses have been giving similar accounts of atrocities that
were committed. Many of the people who were killed were young children or elderly people.
Even in the cases of young men; in Palestinian society, relatives are quite forthcoming
when young men are fighters. They take pride that their young men are so-called 'martyrs'.
When Palestinian families claim their killed relatives were civilians we give a high
degree of credibility to that."
The events at Jenin - which have passed almost unquestioned inside Israel - have created a
crisis in Israel's relations with the outside world. Questions are now being asked
increasingly in Europe over whether Ariel Sharon is, ultimately, fighting a "war on
terror", or whether he is trying to inflict a defeat that will end all chance of a
Palestinian state. These suspicions grew still stronger this week as pictures emerged of
the damage inflicted by the Israeli army elsewhere in the West Bank during the operation:
the soldiers deliberately trashed institutions of Palestinian statehood, such as the
ministries of health and education.
To counter the international backlash, the Israeli government has launched an enormous
public-relations drive to justify the operation in Jenin. Their efforts have been greatly
helped by the Palestinian leadership, who instantly, and without proof, declared that a
massacre had occurred in which as many as 500 died. Palestinian human-rights groups made
matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories.
No holds are barred in the Israeli PR counterattack. The army - realising that many
journalists will not bother, or are unable, to go to Jenin - has even made an Orwellian
attempt to alter the hard, physical facts on the ground. It has announced that the
published reports of the devastated area are exaggerated, declaring it to be a mere 100m
square - about one- twentieth of its true area.
One spokesman, Major Rafi Lederman, a brigade chief of staff, told a press conference on
Saturday that the Israeli armed forces did not fire missiles from its Cobra helicopters -
a claim dismissed by a Western military expert who has toured the wrecked camp with one
word: "Bollocks." There were, said the major, "almost no innocent
civilians" - also untrue.
The chief aim of the PR campaign has been to redirect the blame elsewhere. Israeli
officials accuse UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, for allowing a
"terrorist infrastructure" to evolve in a camp under its administration without
raising the alarm. UNWRA officials wearily point out that it does not administer the camp;
it provides services, mainly schools and clinics.
The Israeli army has lashed out at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and
Palestinian Red Crescent, whose ambulances were barred from entering the camp for six
days, from 9 to 15 April. It has accused them of refusing to allow the army to search
their vehicles, and of smuggling out Palestinians posing as wounded. The ICRC has
dismissed all these claims as nonsense, describing the ban - which violates the Geneva
Convention - as "unacceptable".
The Israeli army says it bulldozed buildings after the battle ended, partly because they
were heavily booby trapped but also because there was a danger of them collapsing on to
its soldiers or Palestinian civilians. But after the army bulldozers withdrew, The
Independent found many families, including children, living in badly damaged homes that
were in severe danger of collapse.The thrust of Israel's PR drive is to argue that the
Palestinians blew up the neighbourhood, compelling the army to knock it down. It is true
that there were a significant number of Palestinian booby traps around the camp, but how
many is far from clear. Booby traps are a device typically used by a retreating force
against an advancing one. Here, the Palestinian fighters had nowhere to go.
What is beyond dispute is that the misery of Jenin is not over. There are Palestinians
still searching for missing people, although it is not clear whether they are in Israeli
detention, buried deep under the rubble, or in graves elsewhere. Suspicions abound among
the Palestinians that bodies have been removed by the Israeli army. They cite the Israeli
army's differing statements about the death toll during the Jenin operation - first it
said it thought that there were around 100 Palestinian dead; then it said hundreds of dead
and wounded; and, finally, only dozens. More disturbingly, Israeli military sources
originally said there was a plan to move bodies out of the camp and bury them in a
"special cemetery". They now say that the plan was shelved after human-rights
activists challenged it successfully at the Israeli supreme court.
Each day, as we interviewed the survivors, there were several explosions as people trod on
unexploded bombs and rockets that littered the ruined camp. One hour after Fadl Musharqa,
42, had spoken with us about the death of his brother, he was rushed to the hospital, his
foot shattered after he stepped on an explosive.
A man came up to us in the hospital holding out something in the palm of his hand. They
were little, brown, fleshy stumps: the freshly severed toes of his 10-year-old son, who
had stepped on some explosives. The boy lost both legs and an arm. The explosives that
were left behind were both the Palestinians' crude pipe bombs and the Israelis'
state-of-the-art explosives: the bombs and mines with which they blew open doors, the
helicopter rockets they fired into civilian homes.
These are the facts that the Israeli government does not want the world to know. To them
should be added the preliminary conclusion of Amnesty International, which has found
evidence of severe abuses of human rights - including extra-judicial executions - and has
called for a war crimes inquiry.
At the time of writing, Israel has withdrawn its co-operation from a fact-finding mission
dispatched by the UN Security Council to find out what happened in Jenin. This is, given
what we now know about the crimes committed there, hardly surprising.
(c) Independent
Amid the ruins of Jenin, the grisly evidence of a war
crime
by
Phil Reeves in Jenin
16 April 2002
Ann Clwyd MP: "Europe must show its mettle and punish Israel A monstrous war crime
that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops
have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The
Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins."
A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been
reduced to dust. Rubble has been shovelled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. The sweet and
ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The
people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets
pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of
debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks.
In one nearby half-wrecked building, gutted by fire, lies the fly-blown corpse of a man
covered by a tartan rug. In another we found the remains of 23-year-old Ashraf Abu Hejar
beneath the ruins of a fire-blackened room that collapsed on him after being hit by a
rocket. His head is shrunken and blackened. In a third, five long-dead men lay under
blankets. A quiet. sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland,
littered now with detritus of what were once households, foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes,
tin cans, children's toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing.
We stared at a mound of debris. Here, he said, he saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies
beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building,
bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank. We could
not see the bodies. But we could smell them.
A few days ago, we might not have believed Kamal Anis. But the descriptions given by the
many other refugees who escaped from Jenin camp were understated, not, as many feared and
Israel encouraged us to believe, exaggerations. Their stories had not prepared me for what
I saw yesterday. I believe them now.
Until two weeks ago, there were several hundred tightly-packed homes in this neighbourhood
called Hanat al-Hawashim. They no longer exist. Around the central ruins, there are many
hundreds of half-wrecked homes. Much of the camp ? once home to 15,000 Palestinian
refugees from the 1948 war ? is falling down. Every wall is speckled and torn with bullet
holes and shrapnel, testimony of the awesome, random firepower of Cobra and Apache
helicopters that hovered over the camp.
Building after building has been torn apart, their contents of cheap fake furnishings,
mattresses, white plastic chairs spewed out into the road. Every other building bears the
giant, charred, impact mark of a helicopter missile. Last night there were still many
families and weeping children still living amid the ruins, cut off from the humanitarian
aid. Ominously, we found no wounded, although there was a report of a man being rescued
from beneath ruins only an hour before we arrived.
Those who did not flee the camp, or not detained by the army, have spent the bombardment
in basements, enduring day after day of terror. Some were forced into rooms by the
soldiers, who smashed their way into houses through the walls. The UN says half of the
camp's 15,000 residents were under 18. As the evening hush fell over these killing fields,
we could suddenly hear the children chattering. The mosques, once so noisy at prayer time,
were silent.
Israel was still trying to conceal these scenes yesterday. It had refused entry to Red
Cross ambulances for nearly a week, in violation of the Geneva Convention. Yesterday it
continued to try to keep us out. Jenin, in the northern end of the occupied West Bank,
remained "a closed military zone", was ringed Merkava tanks, army Jeep patrols,
and armoured personnel carriers. Reporters caught trying to get in were escorted out. A
day earlier the Israeli armed forces took in a few selected journalists to see sanitised
parts of the camp. We simply walked across the fields, flitted through an olive orchard
overlooked by two Israeli tanks, and into the camp itself.
We were led in by hands gesturing at windows. Hidden, whispering people directed us
through narrow alleys they thought were clear. When there were soldiers about, a finger
would raise in warning, or a hand waved us back. We were welcomed by people desperate to
tell what had occurred. They spoke of executions, and bulldozers wrecking homes with
people inside. "This is mass murder committed by Ariel Sharon," Jamel Saleh, 43,
said. "We feel more hate for Israel now than ever. Look at this boy." He placed
his hand on the tousled head of a little boy, Mohammed, the eight-year-old son of a
friend. "He saw all this evil. He will
remember it all." So will everyone else who saw the horror of Jenin refugee camp.
Palestinians who entered the camp yesterday were almost speechless.
Rajib Ahmed, from the Palestinian Energy Authority, came to try to repair the power lines.
He was trembling with fury and shock. "This is mass murder. I have come here to help
by I have found nothing but devastation. Just look for yourself."
All had the same message: tell the world.
Mr. Powell must see for himself what Israel inflicted on Jenin
by
Robert Fisk
The credibility of US policy on the conflict has been shattered
The Independent (UK) 14 April 2002
Why doesn't Colin Powell go to Jenin? What has happened to the world's moral compass -
indeed to the United States - when America's most famous ex-general, the Secretary of
State of the most powerful country on earth, on a supposedly desperate mission to stop the
bloodshed in the Middle East, fails to grasp what is taking place in front of his nose?
The stench of decaying corpses is wafting out of the Palestinian city. The Israeli army is
still keeping the Red Cross and journalists from seeing the evidence of the mass killings
that have taken place there. "Hundreds" - on Israel's own admission - have died,
including civilians. Why, for God's sake, can't Mr Powell do the decent thing and demand
an explanation for the extraordinary, sinister events that have
taken place in Jenin?
Instead, after joshing with Ariel Sharon after his arrival in Jerusalem on Friday, Mr
Powell is playing games, demanding that Yasser Arafat condemn Friday's bloody suicide
bombing in Jerusalem (total, six dead and 65 wounded) while failing to utter more than a
word of "concern" for the infinitely more terrible death toll in Jenin. Is Mr
Powell frightened of the Israelis? Does he really have to debase himself in this way? Does
he think that meeting Arafat, or refusing to do so, takes precedence over the enormous
humanitarian tragedy and slaughter that has overwhelmed the Palestinians? Is President
Bush -whose demand that Ariel Sharon withdraw his troops from the West Bank has been
blandly ignored - so gutless, so cynical, as to allow this charade to continue? For this
is the endgame, the very final proof that the United States is no longer morally worthy of
being a Middle East peacemaker.
Even for one who has witnessed so much duplicity in the Middle East, it is a shock to
reflect on the events of the past nine days. Let's just remember, as the Americans would
say, "the facts". Almost two weeks ago, the United Nations Security Council,
with the active participation and support of the United States, demanded an immediate end
to Israel's reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza. President Bush insisted that Mr Sharon
should follow the advice of "Israel's American friends" and - because our own Mr
Blair was with the President at the time - of "Israel's British friends", and
withdraw. "When I say withdraw, I mean it," Mr Bush snapped three days later.
But of course, it's now clear that he meant nothing of the kind.
Instead, he sent Mr Powell off on his "urgent" mission of peace, a journey to
Israel and the West Bank that would take the Secretary of State an incredible eight days -
just enough time, Mr Bush presumably thought, to allow his "good friend" Mr
Sharon to finish his latest bloody adventure in the West Bank. Supposedly unaware that
Israel's chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz, had told Mr Sharon that he needed at least eight
weeks to "finish the job" of crushing the Palestinians, Mr Powell wandered off
around the Mediterranean, dawdling in Morocco, Spain, Egypt and Jordan before finally
washing up in Israel on Friday morning. If Washington firefighters took that long to reach
a blaze, the American capital would long ago have turned to ashes. But of course, the
purpose of Mr Powell's idleness was to allow enough time for Jenin to be turned to ashes.
Mission, I suppose, accomplished.
As Israel's indisciplined soldiery yesterday continued to hide their deeds from the
outside world by preventing the Red Cross, aid workers, ambulances and journalists from
entering the rubble of Jenin, Mr Powell was sitting idly by in Israel, calling for the
"utmost restraint" from an army that has not yet finished filling the mass
graves of Jenin. That he should see a visit to Yasser Arafat - the grotesque, corrupt old
man of Ramallah - as the make-or-break issue of his "peacemaking" shows just how
skewed Mr Powell's morality has become. Mr Arafat's advisers (let's not give any credit to
the would-be "martyr-chairman" of the Palestinian Authority for this) shrewdly
announced that it is for Mr Powell to condemn the killings in Jenin, for Mr Arafat could
be expected to condemn the vicious suicide bombing in Jerusalem on Friday. And even though
Mr Arafat mouthed the relevant words of contrition and condemnation yesterday afternoon,
it makes little difference.
All last week, while Mr Sharon's soldiers were running amok in Jenin, White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer was playing the role of Mr Sharon's point man in Washington. When
Israel announced that its army was pulling out of three tiny West Bank villages - so tiny
that no one had ever heard of them before -Mr Fleischer announced that this was "a
step in the right direction". Then by Friday morning, when even the most dimwitted
observer had grasped that something was terribly wrong in Jenin, Mr Fleischer was telling
us that Sharon was "a man of peace". How much longer, one wonders, could this
nonsense continue?
Of course, the Palestinians - or whoever directs the sepulchral, nightmarish campaign of
suicide bombing, for it surely cannot be the preposterous Mr Arafat - are going for the
jugular. The Al Aqsa Brigades or Hamas or Islamic Jihad clearly intend to ensure that Mr
Sharon's ruthless operation fails (the Israeli reoccupation, after all, was supposed to be
preventing these wicked Palestinian crimes) and to ensure that Mr Powell is made to look
impotent. They seem certain to accomplish both goals. The Palestinian Authority, to all
intents and purposes, has for now ceased to exist. That was surely one of Mr Sharon's
intentions. And Mr Powell's weakness, his failure of nerve, his cowardice, are now likely
to set off an Israeli-Palestinian war even more terrible than what we have witnessed so
far.
But let's pause for a quick journey down memory lane; to September 1982, when Ariel Sharon
was "rooting out the network of terror" in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps
in Beirut. Before sending Israel's murderous Phalangist militia allies into the camps, Mr
Sharon told the world that the Palestinians had assassinated the Phalangist leader, Bashir
Gemayel. This was totally untrue, but the Phalange believed him. And evidence is now
emerging in Beirut that, long after the Americans had called for Israel to withdraw the
killers from the camp, the Israeli army, commanded by then Defence Minister Sharon, handed
more than 1,000 survivors over to those same murderers to be slaughtered over the
following two weeks. This, primarily, is why Mr Sharon is so worried by the attempts to
indict him for war crimes in Brussels.
Hasn't Mr Powell glanced through the State Department archives for 1982? Hasn't he read
what Mr Sharon said back then, the same ranting about "terror networks" and
"rooting out terror" that he employs today? A lexicon which Mr Powell himself is
now enthusiastically using? Has he forgotten that the Israeli Kahan commission held Mr
Sharon "personally responsible" for the massacre of those 1,700 civilians? Does
Mr Powell really think that Jenin, albeit on a smaller scale, is much different? Even if
we dismiss all the Palestinian claims of civilian butchery, extrajudicial executions and
the wholesale destruction of thousands of homes, what on earth does he think the Israelis
are hiding in Jenin? Why doesn't he go and look?
Yes, the Palestinians' suicide campaign is immoral, unforgivable, insupportable. One day,
the Arabs - never ones to look in the mirror when it comes to their own crimes - will have
to acknowledge the sheer cruelty of their tactics. They have not done this so far. But
since the Israelis never attempted to confront the immorality of shooting to death child
stone-throwers in the early days of the intifada or the evil of their reckless death
squads who went around murdering Palestinians on their wanted list, along with the usual
clutch of women and kids who got in the way, is this any wonder?
In the annals of war, the conflict in the Middle East has reached a new apogee, but the
story of the United States' involvement in the Middle East will never be the same again.
Thanks to Mr Powell, President Bush and Mr Sharon, America's credibility has been
shattered. Israel, it turns out, does indeed run US policy in the region. The Secretary of
State sings from the Israeli songbook. So when, oh when, will the Europeans screw their
courage to the sticking-place and become the peacemakers of the Middle East?
(c) 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
From the INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTRE IN ISRAEL
7 Days , a magazine of the prominent Israeli daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, discovered a
very colourful hero of the tragic days of April 2002. This hero is 40-year-old Moshe
Nisim, a military reservist and proud supporter of the Betr Soccer team (a sports club
supported by many right wing Israelis).
June 4, 2002
Confessions of a Bulldozer Driver
Subtitled: Where is The Hague?
In Jenin Nisim called himself Duby Al-Kurdi (Kurdish bear cub). I recommend to everyone
that they read the original interview which appeared under the title, I created for them a
Teddy Stadium[2] in the center of the camp , by Zadoc Yehezakli. The following is a
summary of the interview.
At the time of the Israeli invasion of the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, Moshe Nisim
was unemployed. He had recently been released from his position with the municipal
government under suspicion of taking bribes. Nisim doesn't normally do military service.
For the last 18 years his army unit has chosen not to call him to do his annual service.
But when he heard that his friends were being called up to serve in operation Defensive
Shield , he insisted, this time, on being called up.
Nisim's trade in the Army is vehicle electrician, but this time he insisted on driving the
armored bulldozer known as the D-9 . Usually you need a long course to become qualified to
operate the D-9, but from the information he provided, Nisim had only 2 hours of training.
He arrived at the site of the Jenin refugee camp at about the time 13 Israeli soldiers
were killed in an ambush. Nisim mounted his bulldozer from which he flew the flag of his
favourite soccer club and proceeded to bulldoze houses.
When asked by the reporter, What part of your work was difficult ? Nisim responded,
Difficult, what difficult, you must be joking. I was always begging the officers to give
me another house to destroy. And believe me we destroyed too few. For 3 days I just erased
and erased. I erased every house they (Palestinians) were shooting from and others in the
neighbourhood. The officers warned them to leave before I entered, but I didn t give
anyone a chance to escape. I would come and give a big hit, the hardest I could, so that
the house would fall immediately. Some Israelis were telling stories that they restrained
themselves, but these are only stories. There were many people in the houses when we began
to destroy them. I didn't see people amid the ruins, but if there were any, I wouldn't
care. I am sure that people died in these houses, but it was very difficult to see. There
was a lot of dust and we worked mainly at night.
I got great pleasure out of every house I took down. I know they (Palestinians) don t care
if they live or die but losing their home really hurts them. If I have any regret, it is
because we didn t destroy the entire camp.
Nisim continues, I derived great satisfaction from my role. I enjoyed myself. I couldn t
stop. I wanted to work all the time. I made the officer in charge crazy.
After the fighting was over, we were ordered to remove the D-9 because the army didn t
want reporters and photographers to see them working. I fought with the army because I was
getting great satisfaction from my work and wanted to stay. It was like putting the 18
years I didn t serve in the army into 3 days. The soldiers came to me and said Kurdi, your
OK&your OK !
When Nisim was asked by the reporter, How were you able to serve 3 days and 3 nights
without sleep? , he responded, I didn t feel tired at all. I drank whisky all the time.
Everyone else packed clothes, but I packed whisky and snacks. Jenin made me strong. Jenin
made me forget all my troubles
INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
Jenin, June 20 2002
Internationals in Jenin continue to report on the invasion of the camp launched at 1am on
June 19. It began with aerial bombing from Apache helicopters followed by shelling from
approximately 50 tanks that lasted until 7am June 19th.
The Israeli army proceeded from house to house, making arrests, looting and vandalizing
stores, and trashing and exploding houses. Caoimhe Butterly from Ireland saw injuries from
severe beatings, including of children as young as 13. Men were bound hand and foot.
Caoimhe herself was beaten twice, called a "Nazi Cow" and an "Arab
fucker" for "helping Palestinian terrorists."
Late on the 19th, the Army announced from the tanks that all men between 15-50 years of
age were to report to a school in Jenin. Between 2000-2500 men went to the school where
soldiers detained, strip searched, and left them under guard on the main street. Among
those detained were: a man in a wheelchair, a blind man, a man on crutches, a man with
severe mental illness, and several children under 15 years of age. Many detainees were
never given time to get their ID papers; they are in a very precarious situation as a
result.
Soldiers took these men to Salam military base and released some of them to Romnaneh and
Burkeen, telling them not to return to Jenin until Saturday.
The Army is still in Jenin destroying houses. They have exploded 12 houses after
evacuating the families. Five bulldozers are at the outskirts of the city and have already
damaged a school. The camp's population is now women, children, and elderly. Ambulances
are being blocked. The Israeli Army has cut water, electricity, and telephone lines in the
camp.
The Army is beginning to repeat in Jenin city what it has doen in the camp, going house to
house and rounding up the men as well as shelling sporadically. One soldier is walking the
streets beating people with a baton.
The Army also invaded Bethlehem this morning at 4am, imposed a curfew, and is starting to
go house to house.
In Jenin:
Jim Davis 053-812874 Ireland
Caoimhe Butterly. 055-975374 Ireland
Juliana Friedman, US 067-373-467
Tubias Carlson, Sweden 067-362-344
Rick Rowley, US 067-456-158
Rebecca Murray, US 055-558-954
Hyung-mi Kim, Korea 067-373-467
INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
Friday, June 21, 2002 - 12:50pm
For Immediate Release
ISRAELI ARMY OPENS FIRE ON CIVILIANS IN THE STREETS
OF JENIN
[JENIN] The curfew in Jenin was lifted mid-morning today. Two hours later, with no warning
the army returned to the main city. The streets were still full of people trying to buy
supplies before curfew was reimposed. Israeli soldiers opened fire on the crowd of people
in the market and in the streets. Al-Razi Hospital has a dead 6 year old girl, Sujoud
Mohammad Turki - shot in the head, and several more wounded, including Sujoud's 12 year
old brother and 2 1/2 year old sister, who went out with their father to buy food from the
market.
The streets are still blocked by tanks, preventing people from moving back to places of
safety. There are several internationals in the city. Some are trying to get to other
hospitals in the area.
Contacts in Jenin:
Tobias (067 362 344)
Jim (053 812 874)
Rick (067-456-158)
Rebecca (055-558-954)
Dr. Ali Jabareen (Al Razi Hospital) - 04-250-2653
Dead:
Sujoud Mohammad Turki- 6 yrs old
Injuries:
Nael Mohammad Turki - 12 years old
Sheva Ahmed Turki Fahmawi - 2.5 years old
Hassan Amin al-Tamimi - 16 years old (bullet in head)
Khaled Taha Ahmed - 42 years
Diab Mahmoud Al-Staty - 20 years
Hassan Abu-Zaid (serious condition/shot in chest) - 27 years old
From: Huwaida Arraf <huwaidaa@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2002 00:36:21 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Jenin update: Arrests, searches and home demolititions
CNN carried virutally 24-hour coverage of the shooting attack at the LA airport yesterday,
repeating Israel's claim that it was a terror attack. Yet Israel's military attacks on
civilians has become so commonplace, it's not even reported anymore. And no major media
outlet would even dare suggest that blowing up civilian homes and shooting kids might be
acts of terror, as long as it is carried out by the Israeli army. ISM activists and
on-the-ground witnesses report below:
Arrests, searches and house demolitions continue in Jenin town and camp.
Just Another day.
June 3 2002
This was a heavy day of targeted house searches, arrests and demolitions.
At about five pm, during imposed curfew , two Israeli miliitary operations took place
simultaneously in the town and in the camp. In the city six jeeps and one intelligence
vehicle entered the old city followed closely by 3 tanks. The soldiers were doing a
targeted house to house search - using civilian Palestinian human sheilds - looking for a
`wanted' man whom they apparently did not find. Two female internationals from America and
Ireland approached and observed the military operation, concerned about the safety of the
civilians in the densely populated neighborhood of Jenin's Old City.
As the Israeli army prepared to blow up part of a house they claimed held a "bomb
factory", the international women asked permision to search the surrounding house for
residents. Their concern was heightened by the fact that about two weeks ago the Israeli
army detonated a house in Jenin killing 3 children when their neighboring house collapsed
from the blast. The army refused their request and the commanding officer shoved both
women repeatedly, referring to one as a` nazi dog'. The women remained and asked again if
the soldiers were sure that they had fully evacuated the area. Again the soldiers said
yes, but despite this affirmation, shouting was heard just moments before detonation . A
family that had been hiding, frightened, in a neighboring home came running out. The room
that was blown up was subsequently observed by the internationals as being completely
empty other than a chair. No explosives were found.
A tank guarding the street was manned by a soilder who had been observed by several
internationals the previous day firing live ammunition directly at children in the camp.
While the other tank fired in the air, this particular soldier fired at least 30 rounds,
narrowly missing several small children. When he pulled his tank away from yesterday's
operation, he forced a Isaeli-Palestinian truckdriver who was detained while trying to
pass the site with his potato truck, to walk in front of his tank as a human shield. An
international accompanied him. As this tank pulled out, this same soilder let out a spray
of bullets aimed directly at a crowd of neighborhood children.
Simultaneously in Jenin camp, the army conducted searches and arrested five men, including
a local sheikh. That night, the Israeli military operations continued. At around 10pm, the
soldiers entered a neighborhood next to Jenin Government Hospital and bordering the camp,
and set up their operations base at a private girl's school.
At around 11.30pm, prior to entering Palestinian homes, the soldiers fired numerous rounds
of live ammunition from tanks moving on the road. A seventeen year old girl was shot in
the thigh while in her home. At 12.15am, the Red Crescent Ambulance service received a
call from the Israeli army to come pick her up. However, when the ambulance arrived it was
fired upon and turned back. Two more ambulances were subsequently dispatched and turned
away. Finally, an Irish international was allowed to pass on foot, and found the girl
bandaged, wrapped in a blanket, lying between two jeeps. Although she had been stripped
naked, the army demanded their blanket and stretcher remain with them. Finally this was
negotiated, and the girl was taken to hospital with the blanket and stretcher.
In the course of last nights operations, despite a total absence of any resistance,
between 50 and 100 young men were taken from their homes and forced to lay on their
stomaches for the duration of the house to house searches, which continued until past 3am.
The army was looking for a local leader and his sixteen year old son. When they did not
find them, they vandalised their house and arrested 5 men in the neighborhood of the
leader's brothers. Previously, when unable to locate another local leader, the Israeli
army arrested his brother, sister and father in an attempt to make him turn himself in.
For further details of yesterdays events as well as live updates of the daily occupation
of Jenin, call:
Coihme Butterly , Ireland 972 055 975 374
Rebecca Murray, U.S.A 972 055 558 954/ 972 053 869 307
Juliana Fredman, U.S.A 972 067 373 467/ 972 053 812 874
For information on the ISM, please call Huwaida at 052-642-709
To join us, please see our website - www.palsolidarity.org
[see last item--Bill]