Controversy swirls over Jenin battle
You have to wonder why the Israelis have refused to allow journalists, representatives of aid organizations or residents to enter the devastated core of the camp where most of the casualties occurred...
msnbc.com
JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank, April 12 — As Israeli helicopters fired missiles on the jumble of cinder-block houses around her, Tamam Raja said, she cowered in terror under a blanket, listening to the anguished screams for help from neighbors as their homes collapsed on top of them.
WHEN A sniper round tore through the window and hit her son-in-law in a room above her, she and other family members sobbed helplessly as he bled and pleaded, “Rescue me, rescue me.” Fifteen minutes later, she recounted, new barrages from the U.S.-supplied gunships entombed him alive in the rubble. Soon she could no longer hear his cries.
DISPUTED BURIALS
The Israeli assault on Jenin refugee camp has been the most intense and sustained of the 15-day-old offensive against what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon calls a Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. Palestinian fighters here put up the fiercest resistance of the campaign; Palestinian officials have said hundreds of people were killed, some massacred. Their rage was further inflamed when the army announced today it would take away corpses of Palestinian gunmen slain here and bury them at a special cemetery — an “enemy’s cemetery,” the army called it — more than 25 miles to the southeast in the Jordan Valley.
The army denied Palestinian reports that prisoners were killed and buried in common graves inside the camp. Military spokesmen estimated that between 150 and 200 people were killed — nowhere near the tolls described by Palestinians — and insisted that the bodies have not yet been buried.
Despite the Israeli denials, the rumors circulated fast among Palestinians talking of atrocities in the camp, including the killing of Palestinian prisoners. But there was no firsthand substantiation of the reports and few credible witnesses who said they had seen prisoners shot.
The controversy nevertheless remained heated, in part because the military refused to allow journalists, representatives of aid organizations or residents to enter the devastated core of the camp where most of the casualties occurred. In the swirl of accusations and denials, Palestinians charged that the plan to prevent fighters’ families from claiming their corpses was designed to cover up the extent of the killing.
Against that poisonous background, Arab members of the Israeli parliament and other opponents of the army’s plan went to an Israeli appeals court tonight to prevent the burials. A military spokesman said the court would rule by Saturday.
ALLEGATIONS OF BRUTAL TREATMENT
Whatever the final casualty count, Palestinians who have fled the camp or were evicted in the last two days described scenes of horrific devastation, terrifying attacks and brutal treatment by soldiers. The Israeli soldiers, they said, randomly shot at people through the windows of their homes, used residents as human shields during house-to-house searches and, in one case, decapitated the canaries of a local bird breeder.
“They haven’t spared anything,” said Raja, a 44-year-old mother of 10 who frequently clutched her forehead with shaking hands as she recounted her experiences. “Not children, nor a tree, nor a cat. . . . Even if the curtain was moved by a slight wind they would shoot us.”
The attacks on Jenin refugee camp, a slum of 13,000 residents that Israeli officials have called a headquarters for suicide bombers who have terrorized Israel in recent weeks, began at 3:30 a.m. April 3 and continued nine days with heavy shelling ending Thursday afternoon, according to residents.
“When they started shelling, all the glass in our house shattered,” said Mohammad Ali, a slight 17-year-old with patch of fuzz for a mustache. “After that, we thought we were in hell.”
Day after day, he and his family hid in their kitchen, the sturdiest room in the house, as neighboring houses were pulverized by attacks from the air and voracious bulldozers on the ground. After one rocket attack, Ali said, he heard the rumble of a bulldozer out his window.
‘A LITTLE CHILD ... ’
“I risked my life and stuck my head through the window to see what was going on,” said Ali, the son of an unemployed construction worker. “I saw parts of five bodies under a building that collapsed. A little child was among them. I think they were dead from the bulldozer knocking the building down.”
Mahmoud Abu Samen, 40, said that after helicopter gunships launched 14 rockets into his house, soldiers moved through the streets, ordering all men 15 years of age or older to strip off their vests and shirts. “They handcuffed me and blindfolded me,” Samen said, adding that later, “They took me and put me in front of them and ordered me to open doors and ask people to leave their houses.”
Samen said that when he was released and allowed to return to his house he discovered soldiers had plucked off the heads and feathers of many of his prized canaries and finches. “Even the birds did not survive,” he said sadly.
As the fighting wore on, some residents — like Raja — attempted to escape. Raja said that on Wednesday night she and her husband and some of her children left with a group that included someone holding a white flag on a stick. “Everyone knew we were civilians,” she said. “Then they started bombing us and everybody took their own path to escape for their lives.”
EVICTED
She became separated from her husband and still has not found him, she said.
Rabia Nijem was one of three women in their twenties walking south along a dusty road with four small children and a 3-month-old boy. She said she was evicted from her house in the camp on Monday and, with the other women and the children, has been sleeping in an olive grove since then.
“Our husbands were arrested by the army,” she said. “They took us all out of our houses and took guns and dogs and expelled us. They were beating our husbands in front of us. They told us to leave and said that if we stayed there, our houses would be shelled with us inside of them.”
Nijem said she saw Israeli soldiers arrest nine men from the camp, force them to strip to their shorts and lie on the street in front of a tank. “The soldiers told them, ‘We’re going to kill you.’ We started crying and screaming. Then they took 150 of us women and children and put us in two small rooms. We don’t know what happened to the arrested men.”
Israeli army officials have acknowledged that troops destroyed houses to clear a path for tanks to attack buildings in the center of the camp, where Palestinian fighters were holed up. But the army denied reports of atrocities and random killings in the camp.
‘WE DON’T JUST SHOOT FOR NO REASON’
“We wanted to get the terrorists. That’s all that happened,” said an Israeli tank commander who evicted a group of Western journalists from Jenin today. “We went one house at a time. Another army, like the American army, you saw what they did in Afghanistan. They just bombed and that’s it.
“Never, never do we shoot for no reason,” he continued. “If we shoot in the house it’s because someone’s shooting from the house. We don’t just shoot for no reason. You think we are animals who just do whatever we want?”
The Israeli military lost 23 soldiers during the offensive, 13 of whom were killed in an elaborate ambush this week in Jenin — the largest number of casualties suffered in a single incident during hostilities in the past two decades.
But many Palestinians in and around the camp said they saw noncombatants killed during the fighting. “Yesterday I saw with my own eyes a 70-year-old man who was killed by a sniper,” said Asaad Hashash, 37, a nurse who lives on the edge of the refugee camp. “The man was sitting in front of his own house. He went outside for the first time in days to see the sun.”
Hashash, who has been unable to reach his job at a Jenin hospital in 10 days, said he also saw a shepherd shot by an Israeli sniper. In both cases, he said, no ambulance could reach the victims.
‘THERE’S NO EVACUATION’
“There’s no evacuation of the wounded or the bodies to the hospital,” he said, confirming accounts by other hospital workers and doctors. “If a person is bleeding they let him bleed to death.”
Israeli military officials spent much of today trying to exercise damage control over the growing perception among Palestinians that Israeli officers were attempting to hide the grimmer details of what occurred during the siege of Jenin.
The army’s chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ron Kitrey, told Army Radio this morning that “there were apparently hundreds of people killed in the Jenin refugee camp.” A few hours later the military issued a statement said, “The Israel Defense Forces spokesman wishes to clarify that comments made this morning regarding Jenin refer to casualties — those killed and wounded. There is no clear number of those killed.”
Nevertheless, even before the operation finished, Jenin entered Palestinian lore. In the Gaza Strip, hundreds of Palestinians demonstrated in support of the gunmen who died during combat in the camp. Palestinian news media reported that doctors in Gaza City said three babies they have delivered over the past three days have been named “Jenin.” |
