Toll of the bloody battle of Jenin
Suzanne Goldenberg in the West Bank town that has
seen a 'victory' for militiamen bought at the terrible price
of 13 Israelis and 100 Palestinians dead.
Wednesday April 10, 2002
The Guardian
The ferocious battle for Jenin camp - a square kilometre housing
16,000 people - last night entered the bloody lore of the Middle
East: a fiasco for Israel, an immensely costly victory for the
Palestinians, who reportedly suffered as many as 100 dead, with
corpses rotting in the lanes of the camp for days.
Israeli military officials said 13 reservists were dead, eight of
their comrades wounded - a toll far outstripping any other day of
military casualties during the 18-month uprising. They come
from among the 31,000 civilians called up for the sweeping
military offensive launched by the prime minister, Ariel Sharon,
12 days ago. The call-up was sold to the Israeli public as the
only way of providing security after a relentless wave of
Palestinian suicide attacks. That argument will be more difficult
to swallow now that so many part-time soldiers are dead. Israel
made a vow of vengeance.
"This group of suicide bombers has refused to surrender, and
still refuses to answer all our calls to surrender. We will continue
to fight as long as necessary despite this loss," said the army's
West Bank commander, General Yitzhak Eitan. "We will
continue until we make this camp submit."
Bombardment
As night fell, Israeli helicopter gunships and tanks resumed their
bombardment of the camp. Palestinians will mourn their losses,
too. As many as 100 people have been killed in the camp since
the start of the invasion. Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres
yesterday rejected Palestinian claims that they had been
massacred.
"There was no massacre. There was a very tough war there and
I can tell you there were many people [Palestinians] who wore
explosives belts to kill our soldiers," he said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent yesterday warned of the dangers
of an epidemic because of the corpses decomposing in the
narrow lanes of the camp. Israel has refused for days to allow
ambulances in to collect the wounded and the dead.
But yesterday's events will also deepen the conviction of a
younger, more radical, generation that they can achieve a state
through military means, and that even the Israeli army is
vulnerable.
Because of Israel's hostility to media coverage of the offensive,
only sketchy details were available of what really happened
inside Jenin. In the village of Burkin, which nestles beside the
camp, residents said they had heard a massive explosion soon
after 7am. But the fighting has raged so intensely around the
camp since last week that they did not immediately realise its
significance.
Israeli military officials gave confused reports of a bomb which
caused one of the clutter of breezeblock homes in the camp to
collapse on a unit of reserve paratroopers. When their comrades
came to their assistance, Palestinian snipers opened fire from
the rooftops, inflicting further casualties.
It was unclear what caused the blast or, indeed, if there was
more than one explosion. Israeli officials spoke variously of a
suicide bomber, a booby-trapped building, or a sophisticated
device which set off a chain of explosions.
Yesterday, as on the past few days, Israeli helicopter gunships
were a constant presence over the refugee camp, but they did
not open fire or unleash rockets, prompting speculation from the
Palestinians that the army was trying to evacuate wounded,
several hours after the explosion. It was the disaster critics of
Israel's offensive had been predicting for some time. The
crowded confines of Jenin refugee camp are a stronghold of
Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, and the army's
progress had been slow, and bloody. Nine soldiers were killed
here before yesterday's fiasco.
The army descended on the camp last Thursday, bulldozing
houses on its perimeters to clear a path for its tanks, and
hacking through the walls with sledgehammers to form tunnels
for ground troops.
"They came with giant sledgehammers, and they destroyed the
walls from one side to the other," said a metal worker who lives
in the camp, but did not give his name for fear of reprisal.
The soldiers then hauled men out of the captured homes, beat
them, bound their hands and blindfolded them, stripped them to
their underwear, and shipped them off to an Israeli military base
for questioning, said the metal worker, who was detained for 24
hours. "They beat my brother - 100 times they hit him with their
batons, on his shoulders, his stomach and his back," he said.
They met fierce resistance every step of the way from the
Palestinian gunmen hunkering down in narrow alleys, and from
the master bomb-makers in the camp, who rigged up an
elaborate system of tripwires all over the camp, with exploding
houses, skips, sewage covers, and even trees. They also
handed out belts of explosives to would-be suicide bombers -
Israel's chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, said this week that five
Palestinians, including a woman, had blown themselves up while
pretending to surrender to the Israeli forces.
"It was really dangerous because every metre we advanced we
came across bombs and were fired on," a soldier told the Ma'ariv
newspaper yesterday.
Amid such close confines, the reservists - who had just four
days retraining before going in to the camp - began to crack,
one Palestinian said. On Sunday, the fourth day of fighting in the
camp, the mosques remained in Palestinian hands, and the call
for prayer from the minaret seemed like a taunt.
"The Israelis would go crazy when they would hear the sound of
the azaan ," the metal worker said. "They would just start
shooting."
Israeli military officials said the fierce battles should have been
expected. In Jenin, the Palestinians had a week to prepare for
battle - far longer than Ramallah or the other West Bank cities.
The militants here are also hardened by experience: this was
the army's third attempt to invade and conquer the camp since
last summer.
But much of this can only be guessed at. Israel's siege of
Palestinian cities and camps has proved most impenetrable in
Jenin, a market town which lies at the northern edge of the West
Bank, surrounded by flat open fields.
Siege
What little independent information has trickled out of the camp
has arrived through the accounts of Palestinian men, who were
detained and released by the invading Israeli forces, or through
sporadic telephone phone calls with residents of Jenin camp and
town.
By yesterday, however, even that point of contact was vanishing.
After seven days without electricity, mobile phone batteries had
run dry.
People in the camp were switching on their phones only at the
top of each hour for emergency calls. There was no water, and
food was running out.
"I am 200 metres away as the crow flies from the refugee camp,
and I do not know what is happening inside," said a Palestinian
Red Crescent official in Jenin town. "We have not entered the
refugee camp in eight days. We don't know how many dead are
lying there, or how many injured. We only hear the sounds of
gunfire and war."
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