There is little reason to doubt any of the following account of the organized massacre in the West Bank Refugee camp called Jenin. This author did not see Jenin while in Israel, but I did see camps in Gaza that are much like it. Each is an island surrounded on every side by Israel, a part of the Gulag called Palestine. See a Short Walk Into the World’s Largest Prison.
There is reason to believe the result in Jenin will in the end be much worse than anyone on the outside knows. Those who caused the deeds have allowed those who performed them two weeks to cover up their acts with bulldozers. The Israelis no doubt hope the Palestinians will not dig fast enough or deep enough to find the bodies; only by finding the bodies they will find out who is missing. Some may never be found. But the Palestinians I met in Gaza love life. They are a life culture, and not those who abandon their dead. Out of respect, they will try to find and dig up every rotting hidden body and try to identify their fallen dead.
They must find out who is missing. The Israelis may have hidden the dead to hide the identity of their prisoners. This writer’s fear is for the captured. By hiding the dead, Israel has made it easier to hide the living, to torture, assassinate and dispose of the prisoners, if this hasn’t been done already. Once in my part of America it was said in “the only thing worse than being killed by an Apache is to be taken prisoner by one.” It would be a discredit to the Apaches not to observe that the Israelis are worse. For the Israelis are the ones who took the land from the victims by force, not the other way around, as the survivors of many Plains and Desert Indians might argue.
I am sorry I must ask you to read the following extracts from these horrible accounts of the first days when the international press had entered Jenin. But you must read it, for we Americans are involved. Every act by the Israelis is an act by the American government. Our leaders knew Jenin would happen somewhere and did absolutely nothing to prevent it. Years before Jenin they provided the equipment and weapons for it, as General James David stated in his January letter to Colin Powell. Ask yourself, could Secretary of State Colin Powell, himself a General officer, have ignored or not known what Brigadier General David wrote to him?
This writer expects Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to make a quick exit from public office, then all blame for the murders at Jenin can be shifted to him, and he will probably be proud to accept it. Who should share the guilt with Mr. Sharon? See our series, Inside the Gaza Strip. -Editor.
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Excerpts from:
INSIDE THE CAMP OF THE DEAD
Janine di Giovanni in Jenin Refugee Camp
“The dead are everywhere. Kamal Anis, a labourer, leads us to an area called Harat al-Hawashim, a mound of rubble the size of four football pitches where 200 houses once stood. He says the Israelis levelled the place; he saw them pile bodies into a mass grave, dump earth on top, then ran over it to flatten it. There are still bulldozers and tanks at work, sending us fleeing into destroyed buildings. There is the sound of children crying. There are people looking for survivors under rubble.”
“Yoni Wolff, 26, an Israeli lieutenant who has spent weeks here, told me that no deliberate destruction had taken place and that the soldiers had killed only terrorists. But the hundreds believed dead were not all fighters. Buried under the rubble are the bodies of women and children whose houses caved in around them.”
“We destroyed the infrastructure of terror,” Yoni boasted. He said the camp was empty, that civilians had fled and that it was booby-trapped. He said he saw no bodies of civilians, and that it was a successful operation. To reach this “successful operation” we had to run through olive groves, dodging from tree to tree because of an Israeli sniper. I have seen demolished houses before. I have seen wells stuffed with bodies. I have seen civilians terrorised and living under siege. But what remains of Jenin camp is a wasteland of death that once housed 13,000 people.
“I saw some children who were wounded take four days to die, bleeding to death because there was no one here to tend them,” says Fahdi Jamal, a 30-year-old labourer.
“Soraya and Harej, small sisters living in a ruined house with electrical wires hanging from the ceiling and a tank round through the living room wall, do not know their father is dead. Their mother does not know either but their aunt does; she heard it on the radio.”
“They stripped him and shot him,” she says. “We can’t tell his wife, she is too sick. She thinks he may still be alive.”
Read the full story
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Excerpts From:
AMID THE RUINS OF JENIN,
THE GRISLY EVIDENCE OF A WAR CRIME
By Phil Reeves in Jenin, 16 April 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.”
“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.
“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.”
“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.”
“ajib 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.”
Read the full story
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BLASTED TO RUBBLE BY THE ISRAELIS
By David Blair in Jenin refugee camp
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Excerpts From:
THE LUNAR LANDSCAPE THAT WAS THE JENIN REFUGEE CAMP
Suzanne Goldenberg in Jenin
Tuesday April 16, 2002
“A fortnight ago, before Israeli forces invaded, this was a crowded, bustling place. The narrow alleys between the cinderblock homes – spanning barely the width of outstretched arms – were packed with children.”
“In a ruined house, the charred corpse of a gunman wearing the green bandana of Hamas lay where it fell, beside his ammunition belt. Electric cables snaked through the ruins.”
“Alleys leading off the square deepened the image of wanton destruction: entire sides of buildings gouged out, stripped out to the kitchen tiles like discarded dolls’ houses. The scale is almost beyond imagination: a vast expanse of rubble and mangled iron rods, surrounded by the gaping carcasses of shattered homes.”
“Yesterday the first definitive accounts of the battle of Jenin began to emerge as journalists broke through the Israeli cordon and gained access to the heart of the refugee camp. Palestinians describe a systematic campaign of destruction, with the Israeli army ploughing through occupied homes to broaden the alleys of the camp and make them accessible to tanks and vehicles.”
‘But they also say the demolition campaign increased dramatically in the last two days of the battle for Jenin, with Israeli bulldozers exacting harsh retribution for the killing of 13 Israeli soldiers last Tuesday. “When the soldiers were killed, the Israelis became more aggressive,” said Ali Damaj, who lives on the eastern edge of the camp. “In one night, I counted 71 missiles from a helicopter.”‘
‘Ms Salah’s home was occupied by Israeli soldiers who entered her living room by punching a hole through the neighbour’s wall. Before they withdrew, one of the soldiers wrote a message on the wall in neat blue ink: “I don’t have another land”.’
“A week ago, one of the Israeli soldiers bedded down in Ms Salah’s house was shot in the face by a Palestinian sniper as he stood at the window. Two days later, 13 Israeli soldiers were lured to their deaths in a nearby alley by a series of booby trap explosives, and then picked off by Palestinian gunmen.”
“The systematic bulldozing of Palestinian homes began four days after Israeli forces blasted their way into the camp on the night of April 3, strafing houses from helicopter gunships, and pounding them with tank shells. Several civilians were killed in the initial assault, including Afif al-Dasuki. An elderly woman, who lived alone, she was evidently too slow when the Israeli soldiers pounded on her door and asked her to open up. Her neighbours discovered her body a week after her death, by the smell of decomposition, huddled behind the yellow-painted steel door, with the large hole in the middle.”
‘Israeli soldiers injured in Jenin describe this as the most nerve-wracking part of the battle. “They booby trapped every centimetre. In one metre you would find 20 small booby traps or a big balloon attached with a wire. Every metre was very dangerous,” said Dori Scheuer, who was shot in the stomach by a Palestinian gunman a week ago on Monday. “It was much more dangerous for us than it was for them because they knew the territory.”‘
“People in the camp say the capability of their fighters did not run much beyond pipe bombs packed with homemade explosives. However, the fighters were organised.”
“After the 13 soldiers were killed, Israel appears to have abandoned foot patrols. Instead, the army began knocking houses down indiscriminately, creating a vast plaza of rubble in the centre of the camp, a crossroads for the Israeli tanks.”
Read the full story
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