WHAT
HAPPENED IN JENIN REFUGEE CAMP?
James Ron
Toronto Star, 4/19/02
(excerpted)
MORE THAN two weeks after the battle for the Jenin refugee camp first began, Israeli troops are troops are finally allowing international observers into the area. Palestinian fighters in the camp, home to 13,000 persons, fought Israeli troops for 12 days, surrendering only last Friday.
Reports of severe human rights abuses have been seeping out from the sealed camp. Israeli Spokesmen deny the allegations, saying their forces waged a clean fight.
The International Committee of the Red Cross visited the camp for the first time Monday, reporting that conditions were appalling.
Yesterday, a senior U.N. envoy said that devastation in the densely populated camp was "shocking and horrifying." Amnesty International representatives say many Palestinian corpses may be buried under piles of rubble.
As the driving force behind the newly created International Criminal Court, Canada is in a position to push for an international, impartial, and thorough investigation of the Jenin events. Meaningful peace negotiations will have a better chance of succeeding if an internationally respected team of investigators is empowered to probe contradictory Israeli and Palestinian claims.
SHARON’S
RECORD IS CAUSE FOR CONCERN
A leading cause for concern is the personal record of the man setting
Israeli policy, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In his 50-odd years as general
and politician, Sharon has co-ordinated some of Israel's most controversial
military activities. Consider, for example, one of Sharon's earliest
command roles, a 1953 raid on the West Bank village of Qibya. According
to Israeli historian Benny Morris, Israeli generals ordered troops to retaliate
for a Palestinian terror attack by carrying out "destruction and maximum
killing" in the village.
Time magazine wrote that Israeli soldiers "shot every man, woman and child they could find," and then "dynamited 42 houses, a school and a mosque," while Morris wrote that Palestinian villagers "who tried to flee their homes were gunned down in the alleyways." All told, Sharon's troops killed 60 Palestinians, including women and children.
Or consider Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when Sharon was minister of defence. During an armoured thrust up Lebanon's coastal road, Israeli troops encountered stiff resistance in the Ein Hilwe refugee camp, responding with a prolonged artillery and air barrage.
A Jerusalem Post reporter wrote that Israeli fire transformed the camp into "two square kilometres of twisted broken rubble, putrid rubbish and torn and shattered personal belongings." Israeli forces killed some 600 persons, and, according to U.N. reports, destroyed the camp entirely.
The next chapter came shortly thereafter during Sharon's siege of West Beirut, where 20,000 Palestinian fighters were dug in among 300,000 civilians. Israeli troops began by firing on the capital's southern neighbourhoods, home to some 85,000 Palestinian refugees.
After pounding the southern neighbourhoods, Israeli gunners directed their fire elsewhere. According to a Washington Post correspondent, Israeli forces "subjected West Beirut to punishment so intensive and indiscriminate that terror was the result."
Lebanese officials say that Israel's Beirut shelling killed 5,525 persons and wounded 11,139, and the International Red Cross said 80 per cent of those were civilians.
All these incidents were carried out by Israeli troops under Sharon's military or political command. As such, they resemble last week's events in the Jenin refugee camp, but differ substantially from the infamous September, 1982 massacre in Sabra and Shatila, when anywhere from 700 to 3,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel's Lebanese militia allies.
IN
JENIN, as was true for Ein Hilwe and West Beirut,
Israeli forces were operating
entirely on their own.
Palestinians from Jenin allege that last week, Israeli helicopter gunships repeatedly pounded the densely populated camp with missiles and cannon, and that tanks did the same with their heavy guns. They also allege prisoners were tortured and shot; civilians were buried alive by Israeli bulldozers; children were reduced to drinking sewage; and that health workers were deliberately targeted.
Israel vehemently denies these claims, saying its forces did everything possible to preserve civilian life. The Israeli army says that 23 soldiers were killed and that most of the Palestinian casualties -- they estimate in the dozens -- were gunmen who were holed up in hideouts in the camp, known as a hotbed of militant activity.
Both sides have reason to shade the truth. Palestinians want to dramatize their plight under Israeli occupation, while Israelis want sympathy for their effort against suicide bombers. An accurate picture of the Jenin events can only be established by an impartial inquiry under United Nations auspices.
(James Ron is Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Human Rights at McGill University. An Israeli and U.S. citizen, he often works as a consultant to international human rights organizations.)
ACTION
Please contact the following persons immediately and push for an impartial
probe into battle at Jenin refugee camp.
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvanian Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
Phone: (202) 456-1111 -- Fax: (202) 456-2461
president@whitehouse.gov
Vice President Dick Cheney
(The White House, as above)
Condoleezza Rice
National Security Advisor
(The White House, as above)
Secretary of State Colin Powell
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20520
Phone: (202) 647-6575 -- Fax: (202) 261-8577
secretary@state.gov
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
For phone numbers, addresses, Websites and other information about
each
Representative, click on http://www.congress.org
U.S. SENATE
For phone numbers, addresses, Websites and other information about
each Senator,
click on http://www.senate.gov/senators/senator_by_state.cfm
FIRST
HAND REPORT
Dear family and friends,
I have just returned from three days in Jenin. I want to write
but I just freeze up. I am tired. I
have seen parts of people blown apart and smelled rotting corpses trapped
beneath rubble. I
have seen stone-faced children stand by and stare as their relatives
and neighbors buried other
relatives and neighbors in a mass grave.
Jenin looks as if it were hit by an earthquake. It is amazing
what a few thousand men with the
right machines can do. I told a group of soldiers in Jenin that
they had committed a war crime.
They told me to watch my language. War crime doesn't really say
it. What the Israeli Army did
in Jenin is a crime against humanity.
Our small group of internationals was the first to enter the camp. Getting
there was not easy.
Two of us (Scott Schaeffer-Duffy and I) were arrested and kicked out
of the West Bank and had
to navigate two small mountains (or big hills) to sneak back in past
the Israeli army and police.
Then, with the help of a local family who drew us a map (complete with
tank locations) and
loaded us up with water, we made our way back to the main road to Jenin
where we connected
with the women in our group who had avoided arrest by sitting down
and refusing to move.
We were in Jenin city by sundown. We stayed at a school with 800
refugees, mostly women and
children, from the Jenin refugee camp. The next day we walked
to the camp.
There are many stories I would like to share. Maybe tomorrow.
The Phil Reeves article below
is really good. He arrived one day after we did.
My best to you all and thanks for the many words of support!
Love,
Jeff (Guntzel) jguntzel@yahoo.com
AMID
THE RUINS OF JENIN, THE GRISLY EVIDENCE OF A WAR CRIME
Phil Reeves in Jenin
The Independent
April 16, 2002
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.