April 18, 2002
Back in Jenin, Refugees Hope to Find Survivors
By DAVID ROHDE
ENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank, April 17 — Thousands of Palestinians poured back into this demolished refugee camp this afternoon when Israeli forces briefly seemed to have withdrawn. Under a blazing sun, they began clawing at mounds of rubble with backhoes, shovels and their bare hands.
Some searched for people they thought might be buried alive beneath buildings flattened by Israeli bulldozers. Others simply hoped to bring dignity to the dead.
Among them was Muhammad Abu Khurj, 75, who had returned to look for the remains of his sister, who had been killed in their house on April 5 in an Israeli missile attack. He himself had been ordered to leave the camp two days later by Israeli troops. Now he walked into his bullet-pocked home and forced his aged legs up four flights of stairs. Entering a room on the top floor, he looked panicked.
"They moved her! They moved her!" he said. "Do you see her blood?" he said, frantically pointing at the blood stain. "This is her blood!"
Then he spotted something in the corner and lifted up a piece of carpet covering it. Underneath was the body of a woman. Her curly gray hair teemed with maggots. Mr. Khurj left the room in silence.
As he searched for someone to help him with the fetid body, he seethed. "Sharon will regret this," he said referring to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Sharon will regret this."
Today's digging did little to clear up the dispute over how many fighters and civilians lie entombed in Jenin. About 6:45 p.m., Israeli armored vehicles re-entered the area, firing machine guns in the air and sending people running for cover. The bodies of five fighters were found by Palestinians today, as well as body parts of civilians.
Frustration among Palestinians is soaring over the slow pace of international and Israeli efforts to recover bodies in this camp, which to Palestinians has rapidly become hallowed ground.
Teams from the International Committee of the Red Cross have removed only 14 bodies in the last three days and say they are hampered by a lack of bomb-disposal and search-and-rescue teams. Israeli officials, who have tightly restricted access to the site since fighting ended eight days ago, say military search-and-rescue units are at work there, but none were seen today during a six-hour tour of the area.
Palestinians took matters into their own hands this afternoon.
Municipal work crews used backhoes to tear into a mound of rubble that was believed to lie on top of a cave sheltering Palestinian fighters and possibly civilians. Nearby, a group of Palestinian Red Cross workers formed a line where people passed chunks of concrete from a collapsed house hand to hand. In one spot, a woman pawed through the pile of rubble that was once her home, wailing as she pulled bits of clothing from the dirt.
The decaying body of Mr. Khurj's sister appears to be one of the clearest examples to date of a civilian having been killed in an Apache helicopter missile attack. There is an enormous hole in the wall of her bedroom and a two-foot-wide crater in the floor. Shards of a missile, including one with labels in English describing "firing temperature" and "cooling temperature," littered the floor. Near the hole in the wall was a pool of dried blood. Mr. Khurj said the missile struck in the middle of the night on the third day of the attack. It killed his sister instantly. Israeli soldiers who later occupied the house ordered him to leave.
At dusk, a group of boys who were part of the throng made another discovery that suggested civilians died in the attacks. They walked through the crowd cradling an object they said they had pulled from the rubble of a house struck by a missile. Wrapped in a black cloth was the charred remains of a foot so small it appeared to be that of a child.
This morning, two Palestinian men covered their mouths as they dug out body parts from the rubble of a house bulldozed by the Israelis. They hoisted them in the air to make their point that people had been in the buildings, showing what appeared to be a foot and a leg. An hour later, a Red Cross team removed several crushed body parts from a nearby street.
Just after 1 p.m., a Palestinian ambulance driver working with the Red Cross emerged from a building carrying an elderly woman on his back.
The woman, Afifeh Suleyman Daoud, lived alone only 20 yards from houses that had been bulldozed. She said she had been in her house for the last 15 days and survived on food and water from neighbors.
Palestinians fleeing the camp have said that a paralyzed young man and a handful of families hiding in their houses were buried alive by Israeli bulldozers. Israeli officials say they issued clear and repeated warnings over megaphones to residents to leave the camp, particularly in areas where houses were bulldozed. But Ms. Daoud, who is blind and partly deaf, said she had never heard any Israeli orders to leave the camp, or the bulldozers flattening houses nearby.
Frightened and disoriented, her blank eyes stared at the ambulance's ceiling this afternoon as she muttered a single phrase.
"Take me back to my house," she said. "Take me back to my house."
