Arab Association for Human Rights

HRA ARTICLE2^nd May 2002

“Our visit to the refugee camp in Jenin”

I am still working as an intern with the HRA in Nazareth, and I never expected to visit something as painful or difficult to understand as the damaged refugee camp in Jenin this Monday the 29^th. After a month of thinking about Jenin I expected some sort of catharsis or shock when I visited it this week, and I did not expect to find it so difficult to write about.

I took pictures until my camera broke, and I wrote notes which, when I read them now, do not remind me effectively about the emotions I felt when I wrote them. I remember that the mayor of Jenin, and the director of the hospital on the edge of the camp, spoke very quietly – so quietly it could not have been possible for everyone in the room with loud air-conditioning to hear. The mayor’s voice got louder for emphasis: “they killed children, they killed women” and the hospital director’s voice got quieter. 

I sat underneath two bullet holes in the inside wall of the hospital director’s top floor office, and only noticed them and the two holes in the window when he pointed them out. He said that the bullets came just immediately after one of the many reasonable phone calls of negotiation he made, and this sense of juxtaposition and inversion – like war novels like Catch-22 – is all through his speech: how he said hello to the soldiers every morning through the siege; how he pleaded for a car to move corpses – “take the car number plate – take the driver details – I’ll drive it myself – oh Red Cross oh world its forbidden to enter”. He keeps mentioning water over and over again – how they carried blocks of ice around for the corpses, how he locked a door on a room of corpses and then had to get ice in – how there was never any water.

I have avoided writing this piece until today, and I have avoided mentioning the middle of the camp itself. I have the pictures, and I remember what it was like, but I haven’t really ordered my thoughts. The area was so big, maybe two and a half big football pitches, and the destruction was so complete – like WW2 pictures of blitzed or bombed houses. I forgot almost the whole time I was there that this was the site of the fighting, and the killing in the siege, and the uncertainty that we read about for so long. I just kept thinking about the refugee camp I briefly taught in two summers ago in Lebanon, where the street layout and the type of concrete houses, and the clothes people wore were all the same, but there was no big vast open space of destroyed homes in the middle of the camp. I didn’t think when I was there that there might be corpses under where I walked – I only remembered when I got back to Nazareth.

No-one is frightened about finding out about a massacre any more – the confused and jumbled information doesn’t seem to point to a large number of people being missing. The large scale of the event is in the breaking down of many many homes of refugees, and the horror is the small but painful and deeply significant number of people who were too frightened, or disabled, or old, or young to get out – and were left crushed under the concrete houses.

It is incredible that people are still living there, and impressive that they are not more angry. I stopped to look at the remains of a house and lost the delegation I was with. After wandering around on my own, when standing in the middle of the dusty street a family offered me help, and let me use their phone, and gave me coffee. The grandmother was from Shafa’umr, a town near Nazareth where we had a lawyers meeting last week, and her brother lives in Nahr al-Bared – a refugee camp in North Lebanon where I lived for two months while I taught in Bedawwi. Both refugees, one closer to Turkey than Palestine for 54 years, and one in the middle of a bloody battle in Jenin. “Do you think, personally, frankly, that anyone will build up those buildings in the middle of the camp again?” her son asked me.

The other two times I lost the delegation were at the beginning, when I was looking at the big open space and the group went round the corner, and on the middle floor of the hospital when a man with a sickly looking child smiled back at me, and then lifted up the child’s jumper to show big bandages round his stomach to a friend he was talking to. He said something had fallen on the child, I presume in the attack, but the group had gone down the stairs and I followed.

Our delegation was the Arab Association for Human Rights initial fact-finding visit to the camp, both to show solidarity and sympathy and to decide on a course of action. We were 9 lawyers from the Association, our director, education coordinator and me. The HRA hopes to work in documentation and the collection of affidavits, which it sees as a task Palestinian lawyers inside Israel are in a unique position to do effectively

The director of the hospital said that they were out of the camp completely from the 15^th to the 17^th, and that when they went back in, where there had been corpses there was just skin and the old ladies who had stayed could remember who had been where. This is the information that the office here in Nazareth imagined horrified for three weeks -the director said there were 10 corpses every 10 metres or so. I almost wrote a sentence estimating numbers, but I feel guilty both writing my opinion, and not having taking down everything he said effectively.

Representing the mayor of Jenin was Riyad al-Adar, a Council Member

The director of Jenin hospital is Doctor Muhammed Abu Ghali

The HRA delegation on 29^th April 2002 included:

HRA Chairperson, lawyer Khalid H Zoabi, HRA director Muhammed Zeidan, Education Coordinator Bilal Ibrahim, HRA Board Member Hussein Abu Hussein, HRA Member Walid Fahoum, HRA Member Sulma Wakeem, HRA Member Abid Zoabi, lawyer Khalid A Zoabi, lawyer Walid al-Salia, lawyer Ayash Jabarin, and lawyer Salah Jabarin.

Alexander Key, HRA intern ‘Fundraising and Public Relations’.