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4/13/2002 (22:39) |
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April 14, 2002
Refugee Camp Is a Scene of Vast Devastation
By JAMES BENNET
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
After Israel's biggest ground operation in 20 years, the Jenin refugee camp is a scene of vast devastation. Above, two Palestinians who said they hid in a cave for two days.
Jenin Refugee Camp's Dead Can't Be Counted or Claimed (April 13, 2002)
Arafat Condemns Terror Attacks; Powell Meeting Is On (April 14, 2002)
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
A burned Hamas fighter hid in a home in the camp. He said he fought alongside three others, who were killed.
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Palestinian women picked their way through the rubble of their homes in the Jenin refugee camp on Saturday. Fighting in the camp lasted 11 days.
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ENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank, April 13 — On the second floor of a house here, a few children played today on a striped swing set while Israeli snipers fired solitary blasts into the shattered camp outside.
In a dark corner of the room, leaning against the cinder-block wall and silently watching the children play, sat a surviving fighter of the Palestinian resistance, in hiding.
His face was a web of black burns. Blisters the size of quarters dotted his blackened left hand. His left leg was scorched. He had watched three comrades die in the grenade attack that wounded him, he said. 'We didn't expect them to use such military force,' he said, though insisting he had no regrets.
A three-hour tour here today, made with local guides who picked paths around Israeli tanks, showed destruction on a scale far greater than that seen in the other Palestinian cities that have fallen before Israel's offensive, its biggest ground operation in 20 years.
Israel says Jenin was a center of terrorism, which it is determined to weed out. Israeli officials have spoken of 100 to 200 dead here, and Palestinians have estimated two, three, or four times that number. No one yet knows how many were killed in fighting that has lasted 11 days, and is now all but over, but already the battle here seems certain to be argued over in the contest between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Palestinians described hiding in caves, hearing a neighbor's handicapped son crying out as a house was demolished on top of him, piling mattresses over children so that Israeli patrols would not hear them wail. They rushed up to strangers to tell their stories.
'My father, my brother, my son I have no one!' wailed a woman in a pink housecoat and pale blue head scarf, standing on the debris in the midday sun. 'There are many bodies, many bodies, under the stones, under the sand!'
Along what were once tight alleyways, bulldozers have plowed lanes 25 feet wide through the camp, taking the faces off houses on either side, and exposing their sofa sets, pictures of smiling children, and roses made of cloth to the boulevards of rubble.
The trivia and treasures of people's lives litter the wasteland: a torn Koran among the crushed cinder blocks; a page from an English-language schoolbook with the words 'In which country is the Taj Mahal situated?' in a room missing a wall; a picture of the actor Leonardo DiCaprio under a hole left by a missile.
Palestinians said they had removed some of the dead, and the Israeli Army said it had also begun removing bodies, respectfully.
Israel says that its soldiers were careful to avoid shooting civilians, and that most of the dead were fighters. Residents of the camp said many civilians were killed.
Two bodies were seen here today, both found on the second stories of bullet-riddled and scorched houses, both charred beyond recognition.
One was a male, just over five feet tall. Part of a sneaker remained on the right foot. The left foot and hand were cinders.
A woman dressed in black wailed over the body, as flies buzzed in air rotten with the stench of untended death. She pulled away the bit of shoe, in hopes of using it somehow to identify the body.
The other body, a few doors away, was buried beneath a crushed wall. Only the blackened, featureless face was visible.
A child's cleated sneaker, with a green Nike swoosh, lay nearby.
In both cases, no weapons were seen, but one clip from a Kalashnikov rifle, dropped or placed there, lay to each body's right.
A public relations struggle is under way over this ruined place. The battle for the Jenin camp is already becoming another significant, harshly contested episode in the history of both peoples.
The Israeli government has feared that pictures of the dead will be used by Palestinians to make claims of a massacre. Israeli officials accuse the governing Palestinian Authority of refusing to take the bodies in hopes of embarrassing Israel, while Palestinian officials accuse Israel of bulldozing and hiding the dead.
The evidence of the fighting was everywhere. Children had collected spent cartridges, some, from helicopter machine guns, the size of cans of frozen juice concentrate.
A grenade pin lay in the dust, not far from a missile's steel fins.
Palestinians displayed 18-inch rockets, marked in English as Tow missiles, that they said were fired into their homes. The slender filaments used to guide rockets hung from buildings and power lines.
Israeli soldiers and Palestinians said Palestinian fighters had salted the camp with booby traps.
From the second floor of one home, Palestinians pointed to an area, by a blackened building and a palm tree, where they said 13 soldiers died in an ambush. The area is now leveled. In all, 23 soldiers died in the fighting.
Beneath one house, its second floor pierced by a missile, was a dark cave. It was carved from the rock and it smelled of damp earth. Thirty-five people hid here for at least two days, according to Fatmeh Ahmed, who said she had stayed there with her four children.
'Whenever we wanted to go out of the cave to bring water or food for the children, they opened fire on us,' she said.
Finally, she said, soldiers found them. Another woman, Nahla Abid, said she called out in Hebrew that those in hiding wanted only peace, and that the soldiers ordered them to come out and stand by a tank.
The soldiers took the men away, she said.
Amini al-Damaj, 60, said that 80 relatives and neighbors crowded into a similar cave beneath her house. 'We were putting mattresses over the heads of children so that the soldiers would not hear them crying,' she said.
Another resident of the camp, Umm Samir Sabbagh, said that a neighboring family escaped to her home when a bulldozer approached their house. They left behind a handicapped son, she said. She said she returned with his mother to retrieve the man, Jamal, but arrived in time only to hear him crying out as the house collapsed.
The term refugee camp conjures images of tents and transience. But, as in other such camps for Palestinians refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and their descendants, people were planted here, even as they longed for homes — homes that were experienced or merely described by elders — in the land that is now Israel.
The buildings were made of cinder blocks, typically of two or three stories, with floors of crushed-gravel tile. Some had satellite dishes. The United Nations agency administering the camp said it has about 10,000 resident.
Today there were signs of people coping in the chaos.
'He's the father of three children,' began Ali Damaj, 45, telling the story of a friend who died. 'Two years ago he had a mental problem. When the bulldozer came and destroyed the house of his uncle, he was inside with his father. He was an abnormal person, and when everyone escaped he stayed in the house. They thought he was a fighter and they opened fire at him.'
The body remained in the house for six days, Mr. Damaj said.
Mr. Damaj, like most Palestinians and Israelis, can speak with great fluency about the Oslo peace process, in which, he said, he once believed.
'After 50 years of fighting, we reached the conclusion that there is a chance for coexistence,' he said. Now, he said, 'We cannot live together in one place. This is the simple fact.'
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