Ten-day ordeal in crucible of Jenin
Peter Beaumont in the West Bank meets eyewitnesses who accuse Israel of massacre
Sunday April 14, 2002
The Observer Worldview
The Israeli soldiers are pulling out in dribs and drabs from the West Bank city of Jenin. Yesterday their tank transporters were lined back-to-back along the road, awaiting their cargoes.
The guns have fallen silent. The helicopters that swarmed angrily above the city's roofs, firing indiscriminately into the city's crowded refugee camp, have been reduced to a single intermittent aircraft on patrol.
There are still Israeli soldiers in the city. Still tanks. But the last Palestinian gunmen surrendered two days ago, among them men who were on Israel's 'most wanted' list. The city's men have been rounded up for screening. The battle of Jenin is over: in fact, if not in memory.
The battle of Jenin will be remembered as the most bitter of Ariel Sharon's short, vicious war on terrorism - the campaign he has called Operation Protective Wall. More than 100 Palestinians died, perhaps twice that number, many of them civilians. Israel saw its greatest combat loss in a single incident in years, when 13 soldiers were lured into a deadly ambush.
Only now is the nature of the battle becoming clear, redefining the mutual animosity of Israeli and Palestinian.
The Palestinians have called it a 'massacre', alleging that their houses were bulldozed with families still inside, that helicopters fired indiscriminately on a civilian area, and that ambulances were prevented from reaching the wounded in a calculated policy that meant they would bleed to death.
Israeli soldiers contend that their colleagues were lured to their deaths, their units were attacked by suicide bombers, and that militants they have captured were behind suicide and gun attacks on Israel's cities. They charge that the camp at Jenin was a cancer that needed to be cut out.
What is clear, however, is that between these two positions it is the civilians of Jenin who have suffered the most. Israelis may talk of punishment and retribution for the militants' attacks. But if a crime has been committed, it has also been against the ordinary people of Jenin.
The doctor pulled off the bandages that swathed the knee of Ali Mustapha Abu Sani to show us the damage. Ali Mustapha winced with pain in his hospital bed. Drilled into his knee was a large hole where the bullet had smashed into his kneecap, shattering two bones.
The point of showing us this was not to see the bullet hole, the doctor said, but the first signs of gangrene within the knee, swollen to twice its normal size. They had caught it just in time.
Ali Mustapha had been shot six days before. He says Israeli soldiers who took him from his house used him as a human shield. As they walked him down the street in front of them another Israeli fired the shot that wounded him. The soldiers left him to be taken in by neighbours, who called the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. They tried to call the local offices of the UN. But no one could reach him where he lay.
So he stayed there for six days until his friends could load him on a ladder and carry him to where they flagged down a lorry outside the camp. Only then did he reach the hospital.
The 42-year-old teacher tells us other stories of his days trapped in the camp before and after he was wounded. He tells us of the wholesale bulldozing of homes to open avenues of attack. He says many were killed, some hiding in their basements, refusing to come out when the bulldozers came.
It is a story we have heard several times before, but without detail. I ask him to tell me the names of those who died in this way. 'The household of Abu Naif Zagrah,' says Ali Mustapha with certainty. Who else? 'The households of Mazen al-Ghul and Abura al-Ghul.' He continues: 'Abu Jawad Narseh and Abu Jawad al-Asmar.'
On Friday, even as the fighting had died down, it was still impossible to enter Jenin camp to check the stories we had heard. The Israeli army was blocking all entrances.
As Ali Mustapha is speaking, Dr Mahmud Abu Isleih enters the ward. He tells us of the houses destroyed in 10 days of heavy fighting. 'Hundreds of families were obliged to leave the camp,' he says. 'They called to them: "Get out of your homes".'
He says they are sheltering in Jenin city, in the municipality building, in people's homes, in the headquarters of the Red Crescent and in the local schools.
A young man in a red sweatshirt, adds his voice. A resident of the camp, he gives his name as Maaz Staty, aged 22. He says some people were too afraid to leave their basements. They died in their homes.
He says his mother died in this way. So too did someone he calls Isa Weshaky. He mentions his cousin, Ataf Dasouki, aged 52, who opened the door when bid to by the soldiers and was shot down.
Isleih says he has been trapped in the hospital for 10 days. 'On the first day of the fighting a young man of 30 years or so was shot a few metres from outside our door, near the entrance to the mosque.
'We wanted to help him, so we called to the Israelis to let us approach him. They refused. Two of the staff went out, but there was a large explosion near by, so they fled back to the hospital. Finally two nurses went out under a white flag. They took him in, but he was already dead.' His name, he tells us, was Monzer al-Haj.
The ferocity of Israel's attack upon this little city and its small refugee camp of just 13,000 among the hills requires explanation.
For Israelis, Jenin is the 'cobra's head' in Palestinian terrorism. It is from here, they will tell you with some justification, that a large number of the suicide bombers have come.
They will tell you that among the senior terrorists captured are Sheikh Ali Safuri of Islamic Jihad, who sent suicide bombers to Hadera, Afula, Haifa and Binyamina. Captured, too, was Thabet Mardawi, one of the sheikh's colleagues responsible for the deaths of 16 Israelis in a slew of attacks. The suicide bomber behind last Wednesday's bus bombing near Haifa came from Jenin. But should even their presence permit the wholesale assault on a largely civilian area that resulted in such heavy loss of life?
The man in charge of the operation is Brigadier-General Eyal Shlein. Shlein, like Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, denies the Palestinian claims that a 'massacre' took place. Their version is that those who died were combatants in very heavy fighting. Shlein believes few civilians were killed, despite the claims of those at the hospital and the evidence of the dead and wounded we see there.
Shlein believes too that the Israeli army showed restraint while operating in Jenin. 'There would have been no problem completing the operation immediately,' he told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on Friday. 'But we are a humane army.'
Other Israeli officers, also interviewed by Ha'aretz, do not seem so certain about the humanity of some actions. They admit the Palestinian claims of extensive damage, including the bulldozing of houses. They admit too that Israeli soldiers fired on ambulances to drive them away from recovering the wounded.
'The IDF bulldozed all houses from which shooting was coming,' said one officer, 'especially after the 13 reserve soldiers were killed. We did not allow the Red Cross to come to the camp to treat the wounded. Shots were fired at some ambulances that tried to enter.'
So what of Shlein's other claims? In particular about Israeli restraint in the use of airpower?
We had driven to the outskirts of Jenin a week ago for the first time. It was strange how small the city seemed, set among the green hills of the West Bank, surrounded by rich farmland and thick olive groves.
A resident pointed out the camp itself. It is built on a low ridge that sticks out from the neighbouring mountain like a finger. The white tower of a mosque protrudes from the line of roofs. On one side it is bounded by an open field.
By then the fighting had been raging for five days. We watched the Israeli armour pouring in, and from a rooftop in the adjoining village of Wad Burqin, we watched the fighting.
But fighting is the wrong word. It suggests a parity of violence.
Instead, what we could see was a long-range assault, unequal in every part. We could see the tanks manoeuvering and shelling houses from the plain. We could hear them firing from the ridge behind us. Most shocking, however, were the Apache helicopter gunships that hovered like an angry swarm above the city, approaching, often in pairs, and firing bursts of cannon-fire every five minutes into the camp. Every now and then they would fire a pair of missiles which would explode and send a plume of darker smoke above the white haze of gunsmoke already hanging above the camp.
We learn the consequences of these strafing runs five days later. Dr Zaid Ayasi, director of the hospital, tells us that many of the civilian victims that he knows of were hit by helicopter fire in those few days.
But the violence is not the end of the story in Jenin. It appears not to be enough that the gunmen of Jenin have been defeated, but that every man in the city should share in that capitulation.
Slipping deep into the city on Friday, despite a curfew and its designation as a closed military zone, we are surprised to encounter large groups of Palestinian men all heading in the same direction.
Following them discreetly, we are approached by a man who will only give his name as Hussam. He calls us to accompany them and talks rapidly at us as we walk.
An hour earlier, Hussam tells us, the Israelis had come with their armoured personnel carriers and loudspeakers and ordered every man who was between the age of 15 and 55 to gather in a central location.
The men are too scared to disobey. And so we watch them leaving their homes and gathering in their hundreds, snaking in a long line towards a pale blue arch across the highway, where they are being gathered forscreening by soldiers.
Among them is a local journalist. I do not have time to get his name before the Israelis chase us away. He asks us to intercede on his behalf and shows us his press card to prove his bona fides . We are forced to tell him that we are as much in danger of being arrested as he.
And what will happen to them has already been described to me by Azz Bassam, whom we meet the evening before entering the city proper on our second visit in a neighbouring village. It is a wholesale and humiliating process of filtration.
We meet Azz in Wad Burqin in the house of a relative where he has fled, not long after he has been released from detention by the Israelis. Azz is 14. He lived inside the camp.
He shows us his wrists, bruised and cut where the Israelis taped his hands with plastic after forcing him to undress. He says the soldiers were looking for his father, although he avoids explaining why.
His house, he says, is burnt. He has no news of his brother Abdul Karim. Another brother, Ibrahim, was shot in the leg by an Israeli sniper. His father, he says, is missing too.
Azz has a Polaroid taken during his detention, as he has no papers. It is crumpled but he produces it from his jeans pocket. When we meet him he is elated with relief at being released. The Polaroid shows a different picture. It bears a number on the back - 850230976 - and shows a miserable and terrified child wearing only a blanket.
The soldiers told him that if he was captured again he should show the picture to prove he has been questioned and processed.
'They kept me half-naked in the cold, without food or water for two days,' he says. 'Then they questioned me for half an hour. They asked me what I knew about Islamic Jihad and the Tanzim mili tia. Then they let me go.' But others have not been so lucky.
Azz tells us too about the beginning of the Israeli assault. 'They surrounded the camp at first. They had tanks to prevent anyone escaping. Everyone who tried to leave ran the risk of being shot.
'We stayed there for three days trapped in our house,' he says. 'Then the Apaches came. After that they began firing from the air.' He tells us that he heard of many people shot in their homes by the Apaches.
I think of Azz when I see the line of Jenin's men waiting to be processed. There will be suspected terrorists among them, and their presence will be used by Israel to justify its actions.
For the rest, Friday's mass round-up will be a symbol not only of their city's capitulation but the continuing humiliation of their people. On Friday night a young woman from Jenin, strapped explosives around her waist and blew herself up beside a Jerusalem bus.
This is not how terrorism is defeated.
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