Les dette.
Trond Andresen
______________________
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=288592
>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
>
>25 April 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.
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