|
Picking through fact and fiction after Israel's assault on Jenin
MANY facts are known, others are still contested. On April 2nd the Israeli army invaded Jenin as part of its military operations to root out the Palestinian "terrorist infrastructure" which, in Israel's mind, now includes the Palestinian Authority. The conquest took three days. Then the army laid siege to the refugee camp just outside the town.
The camp had been among the prime targets of Israel's assault on the West Bank, along with the casbah in Nablus and the Palestinian gunmen sheltering in churches in Bethlehem's old city. Huddled on a northern mountain-side lush with cypress trees, it has long been a bastion of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and, recently, of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Of the 100 Palestinian suicide bombers in the 18 months of the intifada, 23 were bred in its warren of poverty, breezeblock shelters, sloping lanes and a militant brew of Palestinian nationalism and radical Islam. "The Palestinian Authority doesn't really exist here. It's the fighters who run things," said a camp resident, before the invasion.
For five days Israeli helicopters and tanks relentlessly rocketed the square kilometre of the camp to soften the resolve of the 160 Palestinian militiamen holed up within it. Men aged 15 to 45 were ordered by loudspeaker to surrender. Hundreds did so. They were stripped to their underwear, manacled, hooded, beaten and finally dumped in neighbouring villages. Some were used as human shields in front of the army as it pushed its way into people's houses. Women and children were told to flee to Jenin town.
By April 8th a UN official estimated that perhaps half of the camp's 13,000 refugees had gone. The army then tried to breach the camp's interior with infantry. "We figured it would be a breeze," one reservist told Haaretz newspaper. It wasn't. Instead, 23 Israeli soldiers were killed, including 13 on April 9th from an elaborate ambush involving a suicide bomber, a booby-trapped house and a hail of gunfire.
It was then that the army took the decision to crush the resistance once and for all. There was an intensive blitz of shelling into the camp's heart, followed by an invasion of tanks and bulldozers, tearing down everything that stood in their way. The army insists civilians were given fair warning that the thrust was coming. Palestinians say it was a massacre, with anywhere between 100 and 500 Palestinians killed, most of them buried beneath the razed buildings.
Neither claim can be proved or refuted. What is beyond doubt is that the camp one week on from the invasion is a scene of devastation that has had no equal throughout Israel's 34-year conquest and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
There is literally no house without bullet marks. Some have had lower floors sheared away by the blades of bulldozers or tracks of tanks. From one three-storey house all that is left is a stairwell, hanging in the ether, descending into nothing.
This is the lesser destruction. The camp's residential core—the last redoubt of the fighters—resembles an earthquake. Vast craters have been ploughed, girdled by shored-up mountains of earth, topped by concrete avalanches of houses, offices, a restaurant. It is a massive furrow the size of three football pitches.
There is a mass grave beneath it, insist Palestinians. Or, rather, say many, there was before the Israelis collected the corpses and sped them away while keeping the Red Cross, the UN and other independent witnesses firmly at bay. "I saw the soldiers dumping the dead in trucks...I saw this with my own eyes," says a woman from the camp.
Less disputable acounts of horror are legion. A man describes what happened to his neighbours, the Fayed family. "We heard the bulldozers coming. Jamal told the soldiers they couldn't evacuate so quickly because of his disabled son. The soldiers suspected he was a wounded fighter. They pulled down the house with the son inside. That's where he's buried." He points to a mound of earth.
Other Palestinians describe how, in the chaos of the assault, they had no idea whether they were supposed to stay in their homes or flee. "The orders were confused," says one. "Some soldiers told us to get out, others told us there was a curfew. We decided to run and were immediately fired upon by the army. I have a wife, four daughters and three sons. I haven't seen them since that moment. I don't know if they're alive or dead."
Whether there was a warning or not, the evidence of the Israeli army's absolute negligence in trying to protect civilian life is everywhere. One man describes how his elderly father was shot in the head while getting water from his kitchen, six metres from the room in which his family was sheltering. The son could not reach his father for six days because of the intensity of the shelling.
Nearby is the shell of another family home. Flies hover. There is the sweet, acrid stench of human decomposition. Three corpses lie inside. They might have been fighters or civilians. It is impossible to tell. Flesh, skulls and clothes have been burnt to a blackened pulp.
The army says the dead were left for so long because Palestinians refused to gather them, "for propaganda purposes", a brigadier told Haaretz. A Palestinian doctor seethes with rage. "We could not leave our homes and the army refused to let any medic, Palestinian or foreign, into the camp for five days. How on earth could we remove them?"
On April 16th refugees in the camp picked through the detritus of their lives. A woman trips over a house reduced to a petrified mess of glass, crushed stone and tangled wire. Others are frantic for news about sons, daughters, husbands and wives missing in battle or in flight. Hundreds gather in a mosque used by the army as an observation post: there are torn Korans on the floor, piles of cigarette butts and empty vodka bottles.
"My husband was a fighter from Hamas," yells a woman at a gaggle of journalists. "And I am proud he was a martyr...Where were you when the Jews were killing us?" Alone, she mellows a little. She looks out from a home without walls above a lake of sewage that was once the camp's main street. Two of her sons are missing. Her daughter's eyes are blank. "I know I will see him again in heaven," she says. "But I would have liked to have his wedding ring...it's under the rubble."
|
|
THE stinking ruins of the refugee camp in Jenin are a grotesque spectacle whose consequences will long be felt by all parties to the Middle Eastern tragedy. Ghastly enough as it was in reality, the story of Jenin will be retold, and distorted, in the lore of Jews and Arabs for generations to come.
Some will cite the events there as evidence of the hypocrisy of a West which wants Serbia, as the price for economic aid, to co-operate with a war-crimes tribunal whose jurisdiction covers the "wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages". Others will point to the killing of 7,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica as the kind of atrocity to which words like "massacre" properly apply—and say that using such words of killing on a much smaller scale, however ugly, distorts and misleads.
To begin settling this argument, it is worth asking whether the actions which led to the wreckage of Jenin were technically war crimes—in other words, a gross violation of the laws of war. These laws try to sharpen two distinctions which are never entirely clear: between peace and armed conflict, and between soldiers and non-combatants. Once a conflict starts, the parties are entitled to kill combatants (even those not engaged in fighting), but they must spare and succour non-combatants and wounded fighters. When non-combatants die, that is not proof that their killers broke the law, but the onus is on the attackers to show that they tried to spare civilians.
The fighting between Israelis and Palestinians does meet the definition of armed conflict, one in which both sides have organised structures and control certain places. So it was not illegal for Israel to seek out and kill members of the Palestinian militias, or for the Palestinians to hit back. Palestinian attacks on army checkpoints are an act of war, not a war crime, whereas blowing up buses and restaurants grossly flouts the law. Still, the fact that Israel has suffered criminal attacks does not remove its own duty to observe humanitarian norms.
Any army fighting a popular militia has hard choices. Guerrillas blur the line between combatants and non-combatants. At best this will force the other side to hold back; at worst it will tempt the stronger party into over-reacting. Were the Israeli army's choices technically legitimate? Can there be any ground, under the laws of war, for flattening people's homes, without waiting, as alleged in some cases, to warn the residents? It is not yet possible for outsiders to assess the scale on which homes were destroyed with civilians inside; or to assess the claims by Jenin's residents that their town is a "mass grave". The Israelis certainly have a case to answer. They will defend their legal corner by saying that homes in Jenin became fair targets when fighters started firing from them. What seems clearer is that the Israeli authorities did breach those laws of war which require them to care for non-combatants and the wounded. The plight of women, children and the elderly in Jenin has been gravely exacerbated by the denial of access to medical workers, food and water. There is a terrible cruelty in the way many combatants and non-combatants alike died slowly of their wounds, in Jenin and elsewhere. The world does not yet know what horrors remain to be uncovered. By itself, the fate of the wounded and the helpless in Jenin undermines the Israeli claim that it scrupulously observed the laws of war. It is a tribute to Israel's democracy that some Israelis are saying so too.
|
