|
'There have been widely divergent accounts of what happened in Jenin.
A U.N. fact-finding mission could contribute significantly to the search for the truth in Jenin,' Bouckaert said. 'Israel should cooperate fully with whatever new U.N. fact-finding mission might be established, and there should be no immunity for persons implicated in the most serious violations of the laws of war.'
On April 3, 2002, the IDF launched a major military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, home to some fourteen thousand Palestinian refugees.
An estimated eighty to one hundred armed Palestinians took part in the fighting. Israel claims the camp had been the launching ground for many of the suicide bombings that have killed and maimed over one hundred Israeli civilians in recent months.
Human Rights Watch has repeatedly condemned this deliberate killing of civilians.
Palestinian armed militants had also planted many explosive devices in the camp prior to and during the IDF incursion.
Among the twenty-two civilian deaths documented during this investigation were the following:
Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man who was shot and then run over by IDF tanks on April 10 as he was moving in his wheelchair equipped with a white flag down a major road in Jenin.
Thirty-seven-year-old Jamal Fayid, a paralyzed man, who was crushed in the rubble of his home on April 7 after IDF soldiers refused to allow his family the time to remove him from their home before a bulldozer destroyed it;
Fourteen-year-old Faris Zaiben, who was killed by fire from an IDF armored car as he went to buy groceries when the IDF-imposed curfew was finally lifted on April 11.
Fifty-two-year-old 'Afaf Disuqi, who was killed on April 5 by an explosive charge that IDF soldiers had placed at her front door as she went to open it for the soldiers.
In one case involving a wounded Palestinian militant, IDF soldiers for several hours prevented medical help from reaching him. The soldiers then killed the man, who had been left close to a hospital near the camp and was no longer armed or taking active part in the fighting.
Human Rights Watch also found evidence of indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force by the IDF. U.S.-supplied helicopters fired antitank missiles and other ordinance into the camp, in some cases making insufficient efforts to identify legitimate military targets and avoid hitting civilian houses. The helicopters struck many houses in Jenin refugee camp that were inhabited only by civilians, and where no Palestinian fighters were present. In one of many such cases, a tank shell and two helicopter-fired TOW anti-tank missiles hit the house of Kamal Tawalba, a father of fourteen children, on April 6.
No fighters were present in the home. When Tawalba and his family tried to leave their burning home, IDF soldiers in the vicinity shot at them.
In another case, a sixty-year-old woman was killed when a helicopter fired a missile directly into her top-floor apartment although there were no armed Palestinians in the building or the immediate vicinity.
The IDF's campaign caused extensive and disproportionate destruction of the civilian infrastructure of the camp, particularly in the Hawashin district following an April 9 ambush of Israeli soldiers there.
In contrast to other parts of the camp where armored bulldozers were used mainly to widen streets, in Hawashin they razed the entire district. Throughout the camp, at least 140 buildings were completely leveled, many of them multi-family dwellings, and more than 200 others were severely damaged, leaving an estimated 4,000 people, more than a quarter of the population, homeless. More than one hundred of those buildings were in Hawashin district.
The extensive, systematic, and deliberate leveling of the entire district was clearly disproportionate to any military objective that Israel aimed to achieve.
Establishing whether this devastation so exceeded military necessity as to constitute wanton destruction-a war crime-should be one of the highest priorities for any future U.N. fact-finding team, said Bouckaert.
Human Rights Watch also documented cases in which Israeli troops used Palestinian civilians as human shields, a practice prohibited under international humanitarian law.
In one case, IDF soldiers forced eight civilians to shield them by making them stand on a balcony while the soldiers fired at Palestinian gunmen.
Kamal Tawalba and his fourteen-year-old son were among them. Tawalba described how the soldiers kept them for three hours in the line of fire, and used his and his son's shoulders to rest their rifles as they fired.
'Even accepting the Israeli charge that Palestinian groups who used the refugee camp as a base were responsible for attacking Israeli civilians,' said Bouckaert, 'this does not excuse the IDF violations documented in this report.' Bouckaert added that Human Rights Watch found no evidence that Palestinian gunmen forced civilians to serve as human shields during the battles in the camp, and no indication that Palestinian gunmen had prevented Palestinian civilians from leaving the camp.
'As in our prior investigations of IDF operations, we also found numerous cases where the IDF coerced Palestinian civilians to take part in military operations,' Bouckaert said. 'Palestinian civilians were forced, sometimes at gunpoint, to accompany IDF troops during their searches of homes and to carry out some of the most dangerous tasks during these searches.'
During most of 'Operation Defensive Shield,' the IDF blocked emergency medical access to Jenin camp. Soldiers repeatedly fired on Red Crescent ambulances, and in one case shot to death a uniformed nurse, twenty-seven-year-old Farwa Jammal, who had come to the assistance of a wounded man. In another case, fifty-eight-year-old Mariam Wishahi died in her home thirty-six hours after she was injured by shrapnel; IDF soldiers repeatedly prevented ambulances from reaching her home, located just a few hundred meters from Jenin's main hospital.
During the period the IDF had control of the camp, the Israeli authorities had responsibility under international humanitarian law for the welfare of the civilian population. Yet Israeli authorities denied humanitarian organizations access to the camp during their offensive, and continued to prevent humanitarian access to the refugee camp for days after military operations had ceased, despite great need.
Human Rights Watch has investigated and reported on violations of international humanitarian law by governments and armed groups in conflict situations around the globe, including most recently in Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, eastern Congo, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Colombia.
Human Rights Watch is preparing a separate report on those responsible for suicide bombings directed against Israeli civilians.
Amid the ruins of Jenin, the grisly evidence of a war crime
Phil Reeves in Jenin
16 April 2002
INDEPENDENT NEWS, UK
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!'
TAC, well folks, when we hear the ADAMS and SoulJah's and all the other Zionist low lives and Israel apologists on this site say: 'Oh but the Palestinian's kill innocent Jews!'
Surely, you will know what to tell them, huh?
TheAZCowBoy,
|
|