topic by
John Calvin
5/21/2002 (19:15) |
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Le Monde diplomatique
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May 2002
PALESTINE FROM NEAR AND FAR
Target area
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The true death toll in the rubble of the Jenin camp will
never be known even if Israel were to admit the United
Nations investigation team. The events of spring 2002 are
already legends with terrible power on both sides.
by AMNON KAPELIOUK *
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Jenin looks as if a hurricane has hit it houses totally
or partly destroyed, rubble of concrete and reinforcing
rods, tangles of electric wires. Cars crushed by tanks or
shattered by missiles. The stench of death hangs in the
air. No infrastructure remains. A rectangle in the middle
of the camp is all that remains of the Hawashin district,
which once had 150 houses (the camp had 1,100). Giant
bulldozers have completely levelled it.
Women, the elderly, children wander through the ruins
looking for buried relatives. A man digs the ground with
a spade while his son pulls at debris with his hands.
They are hoping to find some of their family who were
buried alive. Three men pull the mutilated corpse of
their father from the remains of their home in one of the
poorest places in the West Bank. In the corner of a
half-ruined building a woman is crying: 'God, avenge us
and kill Sharon.' She says members of her family lie
buried under the rubble. Children stare, stunned, no
smiles on their faces.
'Sharon has turned all these children into potential
suicide bombers. He'll force us to respond with
everything we've got, to drive his army and settlers out
of our land,' said a young woman whose family was saved
by fleeing to the nearby village of Rumaneh the first day
of the attack.
'The destruction was carried out to a detailed plan.
Sharon wanted to terrorise us,' explains Muhammad Abu
al-Hija, a dentist whose family, like many others, was
expelled from the Haifa region in 1948. Up to 90% of the
houses are uninhabitable. On the east and in the centre
the devastation is total. The Commissioner General of the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian
Refugees (UNWRA), Peter Hansen, said the camp was a
disaster area.
Jenin was invaded on 3 April, the fifth day of the
onslaught against Palestinian towns in the West Bank.
Sustained fire, tank shells and helicopter missiles
signalled the start of the attack. A curfew was ordered
and the inhabitants took refuge in their homes. Since the
tanks were too wide for the narrow streets, giant
bulldozers knocked down the houses. Four days later a
second destruction began, targeting the centre with its
houses two to four storeys high, where Palestinian
fighters armed with kalashnikovs and explosives faced one
of the most modern armies in the world. The battle was
hard and unequal. The Palestinians suffered very heavy
losses; the wounded, most of them civilians, died because
the army refused access to Palestinian Red Crescent
ambulances.
On 9 April the Palestinians ambushed Israeli soldiers and
killed 13. The army then gave orders to avoid further
losses at any price, so the soldiers fired on sight at
anything that moved. They had been told the camp was full
of Hamas and Jihad terrorists, which justified collective
punishment; so more houses were dynamited. In the camp,
as in all the Palestinian towns, anything belonging to
the Palestinian Authority was destroyed. The aim was to
obliterate its symbols and resources.
Every home was searched. After first locking the family
in one room, the soldiers overturned furniture, opened
cupboards, threw everything on the floor in disorder.
Many households had money, jewellery and cigarettes
stolen. To open doors soldiers used a human shield: an
inhabitant of the camp went ahead of them (this is
considered a war crime). If there was no answer, they
blew the door open with explosives. In one incident among
many, a shield told the soldier he had heard a noise
inside, but he blew the door open anyway, seriously
wounding a woman. 'Sorry,' the soldier said and moved on.
What about Jenin's victims? The camp was home to 14,500
people. A thousand fled to neighbouring villages the day
before the attack. The day after the tanks arrived, army
loudspeakers called on the Palestinians to leave the
camp. The curfew in force was lifted to ease their
departure. That day and the days that followed, several
thousand people left on foot for seven small villages.
Four thousand remained in their homes without water, food
or electricity, unable to go to hospital, with firing,
shelling and explosions going on around them day and
night.
Helicopters sprayed the camp. Only Cobras, familiar from
the Vietnam war, were deployed. One Cobra pilot said:
'Our squadron launched an enormous number of missiles
into the camp every day of the fighting. Hundreds of
missiles. The entire squadron was mobilised, including
reservists. There were two Cobras in the air above Jenin
all the time, ready to launch a missile at any building
indicated from HQ on the ground. They can't swear their
missiles didn't hit civilians.'
A four figure number
When asked whether firing TAW missiles at men armed with
kalashnikovs was like a video game, he said 'Yes. It's
not an equal fight and that's just as well. I've never
fired on women or children. If you mean didn't I shorten
human lives, then yes. There's nothing I can do about it'
(1). Deploying Cobras required hundreds of hours of
preparation. The camp had been photographed by satellite
and each house given a four figure reference number; the
two pilots had a map and when they received an order with
a number, a missile was immediately fired at the house.
Nobody knows how many people those missiles struck, how
many victims there were among the fighters and how many
among civilians.
'It's not hard to imagine what happens inside those
houses after everything that's been fired at them,' said
a reservist who asked to remain anonymous. 'After our
company commander was killed in the first minutes of the
battle, our orders were clear. We had to shoot at every
window, strafe every building whether or not we were
being fired on. We were clearly told to break them. From
then on, we fired everything the army had except
artillery. We fired tens of missiles into houses and used
heavy submachine guns against every window. We even
killed a horse in the street. Every night our orders were
to rouse the camp. The idea was to fire on them and
provoke them to respond, then fire where their fire was
coming from. But we fired enormous quantities of
munitions in all directions. During the curfew there were
'violent patrols'. A tank would race through empty
streets, crushing everything in its path and opening fire
on anyone who broke the curfew.'
Had he seen any victims?
'Personally, no. They were in their houses. The last few
days, most of those who came out were old men, women and
children. We didn't give them any chance to leave the
camp. There were a lot of them. One night I was on guard
in a flat where we were based. All night I could hear a
little girl crying. It was dehumanising. It's true we've
been under constant fire, but we wiped out a town' (2).
On 11 April the last Palestinian fighters stopped their
resistance.
In Israel, the many Palestinian victims shocked not only
all those who deplore the government's policy of force,
but also all those who fear that the state's image will
be tarnished. Pacifists demonstrated in every large town,
even trying to get humanitarian aid through to the
stricken population. The daily Ha'aretz reported that
even the foreign minister, Shimon Peres, was alarmed at
the 'hostile international reaction once the scale of the
battle in the Jenin refugee camp, where over 100
Palestinians were killed, became known. Behind closed
doors, Peres described the operation as a massacre' (3).
When the prime minister called his remarks irresponsible,
Peres said he had been misquoted. But the number of
documented Palestinian victims continues to rise. Zeev
Schiff, defence correspondent for Ha'aretz, who has links
with the military establishment, reported that '80 bodies
were found during the first searches after the fighting
was over. The number of victims is estimated at 200
Palestinians, including civilians, some of them buried
under the rubble of collapsed buildings' (4). Two hundred
dead seems to be the correct figure; army spokesman
colonel Ron Kitri also uses it (5).
The camp's inhabitants consider it an under-estimate. But
the defence minister, Benjamin Ben Eliezer, says the true
figure is only in the tens, not the hundreds. An Israeli
leaderwriter asks: 'Is it possible that in such severe
fighting, that cost 23 Israeli soldiers their lives and
wounded 60, in which assault helicopters, tanks and heavy
bulldozers were involved and where the destruction was so
heavy, the number of (Palestinian) dead can have been so
small? It does not add up' (6).
The secret of the death toll, which must be high, lies
under the rubble, in the Palestinian graves and the pits
dug by the army. During the fighting 15 victims were
buried by local people, eight of them in front of the
camp hospital. East of the camp is a patch of waste
ground where witnesses claim to have seen Israeli
soldiers with a bulldozer, 'burying bodies'. A small
number of victims were buried near the cemetery. The
health services were also holding bodies and 48 had been
buried.
The greatest mystery surrounds the corpses picked up in
the camp and taken first to the Saadeh woods north of the
town. There the military rabbinate wrapped them in black
plastic bags and they were transported in refrigerated
lorries to the cemetery created by the Israeli army for
Palestinian activists near Damiah bridge in the Jordan
valley (the terrorist cemetery to the Israelis, the
numbers cemetery to the Palestinians, because numbers are
all that appear on the tombs). Israeli human rights
groups went to the Supreme Court to get these burials
stopped, but most of the work had already been done. How
many bodies were taken there is unknown.
This means that the commission set up by the UN Secretary
General to investigate the events in Jenin faced a
difficult task. Sharon raised objections to its
membership and terms of reference, and it was repeatedly
denied access to Jenin. Investigation was needed into why
the Red Cross, Red Crescent and other humanitarian
organisations were kept out of the area for 11 days in
defiance of international law.
The Palestinians asked for heavy equipment to be sent
urgently to clear the rubble. Israel has such equipment
but refused. It is unusual for the local and
international press to be kept out of an area for so
long, and there are many doubts about the army and
government versions of events; it was felt that they had
something to hide. Apart from a few journalists, the
Israeli press failed to keep up with events.
The Jenin Palestinian refugee camp is the latest in a
long list of crimes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
from the Qibya massacre of 1953 through Sabra and Shatila
in 1982. What is common to them all? Ariel Sharon.
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* Journalist, Jerusalem; author of Sabra et Chatila,
enquête sur un massacre, Seuil, Paris, 1982
(1) Yediot Aharonot, Tel Aviv, 19 April 2002.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ha'aretz, Tel Aviv, 9 April 2002.
(4) Ha'aretz, 12 April 2002.
(5) Ibid. 15 April 2002.
(6) Yediot Aharonot, 19 April 2002.
Translated by Malcolm Greenwood
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