Sunday, April 28 2002 @ 05:36 AM GMT
The army — realizing that many journalists will not bother, or are unable, to go to Jenin — has even made an Orwellian attempt to alter the hard, physical facts on the ground
By Justin Huggler & Phil Reeves
In the first of this article published yesterday we described how even children were not immune from the Israeli onslaught. Faris Zeben, a 14-year-old boy, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in cold blood. The soldiers in the tank gave no warning, said Faris’ eight-year-old brother Abdel Rahman. And after they shot Faris they did nothing.
Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Hawashin was shot dead as he tried to walk through the camp. Aliya Zubeidi told us how she was on her way to the hospital to see the body of her son Ziad, a fighter from the Al-Aqsa brigades, who had been killed in the fighting. Mohammed accompanied her. "I heard shooting," said Ms Zubeidi. "The boy was sitting in the door. I thought he was hiding from the bullets. Then he said, ‘Help.’ We couldn’t do anything for him. He had been shot in the face." In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the flattened remains of a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon. In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag. Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.
Zughayer, who was 58, had been shot and wounded in the first Palestinian intifada. He could not walk, and had no work. Hassan showed us the pitiful single room where his friend lived, the only furnishing a filthy mattress on the floor. Zughayer used to wheel himself to the petrol station where Hassan worked every day, because he was lonely. Hassan did his washing; it was he who put the white flag on Zughayer’s wheelchair.
"After 4 p.m. I pushed him up to the street as usual," said Hassan. "Then I heard the tanks coming, there were four or five. I heard shooting, and I thought they were just firing warning shots to tell him to move out of the middle of the road." It was not until the next morning that Hassan went to check what had happened. He found the flattened wheelchair in the road, and Zughayer’s mangled body some distance away, in the grass.
The Independent has more such accounts. There simply is not enough space to print them all. Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch researcher, who is preparing a report, said the sheer number of these accounts was convincing.
"We’ve carried out extensive interviews in the camp, and the testimonies of dozens of witnesses are entirely consistent with each other about the extent and the types of abuses that were carried out in the camp," said Bouckaert, who has investigated human-rights abuses in a dozen war zones, including Rwanda, Kosovo and Chechnya. "Over and over again witnesses have been giving similar accounts of atrocities that were committed. Many of the people who were killed were young children or elderly people. Even in the cases of young men; in Palestinian society, relatives are quite forthcoming when young men are fighters. They take pride that their young men are so-called ‘martyrs’. When Palestinian families claim their killed relatives were civilians we give a high degree of credibility to that." The events at Jenin — which have passed almost unquestioned inside Israel — have created a crisis in Israel’s relations with the outside world. Questions are now being asked increasingly in Europe over whether Ariel Sharon is, ultimately, fighting a "war on terror", or whether he is trying to inflict a defeat that will end all chance of a Palestinian state. These suspicions grew still stronger this week as pictures emerged of the damage inflicted by the Israeli Army elsewhere in the West Bank during the operation: The soldiers deliberately trashed institutions of Palestinian statehood, such as the ministries of health and education. To counter the international backlash, the Israeli government has launched an enormous public-relations drive to justify the operation in Jenin. Their efforts have been greatly helped by the Palestinian leadership, who instantly, and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in which as many as 500 died. Palestinian human-rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories.
No holds are barred in the Israeli PR counterattack. The army — realizing that many journalists will not bother, or are unable, to go to Jenin — has even made an Orwellian attempt to alter the hard, physical facts on the ground. It has announced that the published reports of the devastated area are exaggerated, declaring it to be a mere 100 m square — about one-twentieth of its true area.
One spokesman, Maj. Rafi Lederman, a brigade chief of staff, told a press conference on Saturday that the Israeli armed forces did not fire missiles from its Cobra helicopters — a claim dismissed by a Western military expert who has toured the wrecked camp with one word: "Bollocks." There were, said the major, "almost no innocent civilians" — also untrue.
The chief aim of the PR campaign has been to redirect the blame elsewhere. Israeli officials accuse UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, for allowing a "terrorist infrastructure" to evolve in a camp under its administration without raising the alarm. UNWRA officials wearily point out that it does not administer the camp; it provides services, mainly schools and clinics.
The Israeli Army has lashed out at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Palestinian Red Crescent, whose ambulances were barred from entering the camp for six days, from April 9 to 15. It has accused them of refusing to allow the army to search their vehicles, and of smuggling out Palestinians posing as wounded. The ICRC has dismissed all these claims as nonsense, describing the ban — which violates the Geneva Convention — as "unacceptable".
The Israeli Army says it bulldozed buildings after the battle ended, partly because they were heavily booby trapped but also because there was a danger of them collapsing on to its soldiers or Palestinian civilians. But after the army bulldozers withdrew, The Independent found many families, including children, living in badly damaged homes that were in severe danger of collapse.
The thrust of Israel’s PR drive is to argue that the Palestinians blew up the neighborhood, compelling the army to knock it down. It is true that there were a significant number of Palestinian booby traps around the camp, but how many is far from clear. Booby traps are a device typically used by a retreating force against an advancing one. Here, the Palestinian fighters had nowhere to go.
What is beyond dispute is that the misery of Jenin is not over. There are Palestinians still searching for missing people, although it is not clear whether they are in Israeli detention, buried deep under the rubble, or in graves elsewhere.
Suspicions abound among the Palestinians that bodies have been removed by the Israeli Army. They cite the Israeli Army’s differing statements about the death toll during the Jenin operation — first it said it thought that there were around 100 Palestinian dead; then it said hundreds of dead and wounded; and, finally, only dozens. More disturbingly, Israeli military sources originally said there was a plan to move bodies out of the camp and bury them in a "special cemetery". They now say that the plan was shelved after human-rights activists challenged it successfully at the Israeli Supreme Court.
Each day, as we interviewed the survivors, there were several explosions as people trod on unexploded bombs and rockets that littered the ruined camp. One hour after Fadl Musharqa, 42, had spoken with us about the death of his brother, he was rushed to the hospital, his foot shattered after he stepped on an explosive.
A man came up to us in the hospital holding out something in the palm of his hand. They were little, brown, fleshy stumps: The freshly severed toes of his 10-year-old son, who had stepped on some explosives. The boy lost both legs and an arm. The explosives that were left behind were both the Palestinians’ crude pipe bombs and the Israelis’ state-of-the-art explosives — the bombs and mines with which they blew open doors, the helicopter rockets they fired into civilian homes.
These are the facts that the Israeli government does not want the world to know. To them should be added the preliminary conclusion of Amnesty International, which has found evidence of severe abuses of human rights — including extra-judicial executions — and has called for a war crimes inquiry. At the time of writing, Israel has withdrawn its cooperation from a fact-finding mission dispatched by the UN Security Council to find out what happened in Jenin. This is, given what we now know about the crimes committed there, hardly surprising.
(The Independent) Arab News