Was it a massacre? in the ruins of the refugee camp found cold comfort for propagandists on either side

THE first medical teams allowed into the Jenin refugee camp last week followed the chickens. Human senses were overwhelmed by the devastation and the stench of death, but the birds were not distracted. They were hungry. Two rusty-coloured fowl pecking away at a bundle in the street drew a Red Cross team to the remains of Jamal Sabagh.

He wasn't really recognisable to an untrained eye. His body had been lying there for more than a week. The Israeli army had banned ambulances from the camp for 11 days, and neighbours were too terrified to go to him.

Tank tracks led to his body, over it and onwards through the mud. What had once been a young man was rotting flesh mingled with shredded clothing, mashed into the earth. One foot was all that looked human.

Sabagh was no fighter, his brother and friends say. He was 28 and a father of three. His wife and children had fled on the first day of the Israeli invasion, Wednesday, April 3, but he stayed because he was diabetic and was too ill to run away. He was also afraid he would be mistaken for a fighter.

Two days later, he left his house when the Israelis yelled over megaphones that they were going to blow it up. He walked, directed by soldiers in armoured personnel carriers, with other men to Seha Street at the centre of the camp, carrying his bag of medicines. He joined the crowd. Soldiers yelled at him to take off his shirt, then his trousers. He clung to his bag of medicine as he tried to unbuckle his belt, and he was slow. The soldiers shot him, friends say.

Medical workers shooed away the chickens, wrapped Sabagh's remains in a rug, then lifted them into the back of a small open-bed truck. It drove off, past burned and shell-holed buildings, looking like a medieval plague wagon.

Across the narrow street was a forlorn pile of men's jeans, polyester tracksuit tops and cheap shoes - left by those who had got their clothes off in time, to prove they had no bombs strapped to their bodies, and had been taken to the Israeli army base at the nearby village of Salem.

As the rescue teams spread out over Jenin camp last week, after the Israeli army claimed victory in its battle against several hundred armed Palestinian radicals, it was clear something cataclysmic had occurred.

Instead of the Hawamish neighbourhood -previously a jumble of mismatched cinderblock homes - a vista lay open to the hills beyond.

Stunned and dusty in this new world, returning Palestinians wandered around a moonscape the size of two football pitches. It was littered with the detritus of human life - blankets, a little girl's tartan skirt, a child's orange boxing glove, shoes, a musical keyboard. Women in hijab headscarves dug at the crushed rubble with buckets and bare hands. Five-year-old Ahmed Hindi cried: "I want to go home." He didn't know he was standing on it.

Images of this man-made earthquake zone have flashed around the world as evidence that the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is responsible for another war crime in Jenin on a par with the massacre of Palestinians in the Chatila and Sabra refugee camps in Beirut 20 years ago.

Israel has responded that the devastation was the consequence of a pitched battle against entrenched terrorists.

What really happened? Tragedy doesn't necessarily breed truth. The propaganda war had begun before the white dust settled over Jenin.

Rafi Laderman, a personable Israeli reserve major, emerged from the battlefield and made the rounds of the media in his rumpled green uniform. His clear plastic spectacles signalled his real job as a marketing consultant.

Laderman insisted that all the buildings in the refugee camp had been destroyed by explosive booby traps set by the terrorists, or levelled by Israeli bulldozers because they "presented additional engineering difficulties" that could endanger civilians. He himself had stopped the fighting to lead Palestinian civilians to safety.

All that seemed disingenuous. Equally unlikely were Palestinian claims that the Israelis had killed 500 Palestinians in cold blood, most civilians, and buried them in mass graves under the rubble after running them over with tanks. Israel said about 70 had been killed.

Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations envoy to the Middle East, cut through the propaganda by stating the obvious: "No military operation can justify this scale of destruction. Whatever the purpose was, the effect is collective punishment of a whole society."

He and his family received telephone death threats from Israeli callers for his pains.

Under pressure from many sides - including the United States, Britain, the United Nations and the European Union - Israel has agreed to a UN fact-finding mission. The trouble with such missions, however, is that they become bogged down by obfuscation while evidence goes cold.

To get an objective idea of what happened in Jenin requires an almost forensic investigation, weeding out lies and half-truths and the rumours that a stunned and terrified population has come to believe are true. By doing so, I have come to conclusions that are unlikely to satisfy the propagandists of either side.

Jenin was bound to be a prime target for the Israeli military backlash after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 28 Israelis as they sat down to dinner in Netanya on Passover eve three weeks ago.

There has been a refugee camp in Jenin since the foundation of Israel in 1948 when Palestinians fled there from the Haifa area. The first residents worried only for their next rations and fretted impotently as their rich orange groves in Haifa were rebranded Jaffa oranges by Israel and exported around the world.

Since then, Jenin has become a stronghold of radical Palestinian nationalism with a population of 11,000 refugees. The Israeli defence force (IDF) believes half the suicide bombers who have struck Israel in the past year were trained in the Jenin refugee camp.

When the Israelis invaded Ramallah on March 29, in retaliation for the suicide bombings, radicals in Jenin knew they would be next. Sources there said local leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, including its militant Tanzim and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades offshoots, organised small fighting cells that included members from each group.

At 2am on Wednesday April 3, five days after the invasion of Ramallah, Merkava tanks and armoured personnel carriers rumbled through Jenin and headed for the refugee camp on the edge of the city.

The Namal brigade and commandos entered from the west; the Golani brigade from the south; and the Fifth Brigade, a unit of reserve troops called up from their day jobs, went in under the command of Laderman.

The odds were far from equal. The Israelis had tanks, armoured personnel carriers and rocket-firing helicopter gunships. Its soldiers were in full battle gear with bulletproof vests, helmets and M-16s. Against them was a guerrilla force of several hundred men armed with Kalashnikovs and home-made bombs called kuwa - Arabic for elbow - manufactured from pieces of plumbing.

The two sides faced each other in a camp about 21/2 miles long by 1/2 mile wide. In this tiny battlefield the radicals not only resisted the might of the Israeli army longer than the combined Arab armies did in the 1967 six-day war, but turned themselves and their militant cause into the stuff of instant Palestinian legend.

"The fighting was the fiercest urban house-to-house fighting Israel has seen in 30 years," said Laderman.

The narrow dirt alleys provided perfect ambush hides for Palestinians who grew up in this maze. The Israelis tried to keep off the streets, progressing from house to house by breaking through the walls with explosives and hammers.

On the first night of the invasion, Israeli soldiers blew out the yellow metal door of Ismael Khatib’s home in the Hawamish district and hauled him out to act as a human shield as they knocked on his neighbours' doors.

As they did so, two gunmen across the alley opened fire. Hugging Khatib in front of him with his left arm, an Israeli soldier balanced his M-16 on Khatib's right shoulder and fired back wildly.

Kuwa bombs were hurled by Palestinians. Khatib threw himself on the ground and crawled away, only to circle around and climb in his back window. "I felt like I died and came alive again," he says.

The next day another Israeli patrol crashed through the wall into his living room. They stayed, keeping him, his wife and children hostage in a room.

A far more serious ambush sealed the Hawamish area's fate. By Monday, April 8, most of the surviving gunmen had been forced into this neighbourhood. Early next day, 16 reservists of the Fifth Brigade moved into an alley in Hawamish, searching for a house to use as a lookout post. Their leader, Major Oded Golomb, set charges to blow the door.

As he did so, a Palestinian bomb exploded and gunmen began firing from the opposite roof. Thirteen Israelis were killed.

Israel's retribution was swift. Armoured bulldozers, two-storey behemoths as impregnable as a tank, began knocking down houses in Hawamish.

Hurriya Kreini was in her home with her family when an Israel bulldozer began destroying the house without warning. She and her husband managed to push their children out of a window before the house tumbled down.

By Thursday, April 11, Hawamish had disappeared. That was the day the Israeli operation officially ended, but hours after the Israelis announced that the last 35 fighters had surrendered (they ran out of ammunition) I stood in a village called Borqin looking down into the camp. The sound of heavy machinegun fire still rose from the valley. Helicopter gunships shot bursts of heavy-calibre bullets. Explosions sounded and white puffs rose above the camp.

The Israelis let in the outside world slowly and grudgingly. The camp was finally opened to international aid agencies on April 14, but journalists were barred. Until only two days ago, Israeli soldiers shot at journalists they spotted trying to slip through the olive groves that slope up from the camp, or along a back dirt road.

The obstruction fuelled speculation that the Israelis were trying to hide something. There were mass graves, some said; bodies had been hauled off in refrigerated trucks; others swore hundreds of bodies were under the bulldozed homes.

Israelis bridled. "Our mission was to penetrate into Jenin area and dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and we did that," insisted the ubiquitous Laderman. "I have a five-year-old daughter and now I feel I can let her out in the playground."

I eventually gained access last Tuesday, walking in with as open a mind as I could muster.

Late in the day, when all was quiet, I was walking past the Jenin hospital. Nearby, women and children were slowly making their way back to temporary lodgings after a day trying to find their homes and relatives. An armoured personnel carrier pulled up at end of street behind us. The Palestinians took no notice - until the soldier in the turret opened fire straight down the street with his machinegun.

I dived for shelter. Children cried in terror. The soldier initially fired over our heads, but now bullets flashed by at chest height. The screams turned to moans as the APC headed towards us down the street.

It rolled into sight, stopped the gunfire and swivelled the huge barrel to point directly at us. Then the soldier waved his hand in anger, yelling: "Go, go." I think he just wanted everyone off the streets.

If I was now convinced by claims Israelis opened fire indiscriminately on civilians, weighing up the truth of other allegations would be much more difficult. Even what can seem obvious is not necessarily true.

From a house hit by a missile in the centre of what the Palestinians now call their own Ground Zero, rescue workers pulled human remains that people said were of a small child. They lay on a rug and seemed indeed very small to the eye. But when I found a doctor, he was dubious.

"This person has been reduced; I think in a fire," the doctor said. "See that bone?" He poked around and found a large thigh bone. Not a child.

When I tracked down the owner of the house, he said that four fighters had been holed up in his house firing on the Israelis when a missile hit it.

Scores of interviews in the camp did show consistency, however. Story after story - from people who had not yet met one another since they fled - indicated the Israelis had used Palestinians as human shields and had taken families hostage to protect their makeshift posts set up in their houses.

In a house overlooking Hawamish, the Sabagh family were sweeping out after having Israeli soldiers there for eight days. Trying to scrub off Hebrew slogans, Jamili Sabagh, 52, said the family were held in a tiny room upstairs.

"They gave us no food, no water. The room they put us in was too small for 13 people. They fed our dog to torment us, and not the children," she said. "Our home was a garbage heap when they left."

It is one of the few on the block untouched by missile strikes, a sign that it was indeed used as a post by the Israelis.

Ismahan Stati is a pretty, shy university student. Israeli soldiers came to her house on the third day and blew open the door, she said.

They knocked on a nearby house, and when nobody answered they blew open the door with a grenade fired from a gun. In fact, Afaf Dusuqi, 52, had been slow coming to the door and was killed instantly by the shrapnel.

Afaf's mother held her body, covered in blood, and screamed for an ambulance but the soldiers fired into the house to drive her back. "I was shaking with fear," Stati recalled.

Outside the Dusuqi house, there is still blood on the concrete stoop, and there is a 6in hole in the yellow door where the lock used to be.

Afaf's body stayed in the house for five days until the family could smuggle it to the cemetery for burial in a hurried mass grave. I found her name scrawled on a stone where she will lie until her family can give her a proper burial. Doctors at the Razi hospital have her death certificate.

There is a bizarre twist to this story. A rumour began that Stati was a suicide bomber. The story started, her family believes, when a neighbour saw her standing in the group of soldiers, heard an explosion and ducked, then looked again to see the body of a woman.

The rumour is still around the camp, illustrating why every fact must be tracked down here.

Stories of cold-blooded executions were told to me in detail but could not be substantiated. A woman said she saw "with my own eyes" the execution of eight Hamas members and a 16-year-old boy who was the son of one of the men but had nothing to do with politics.

It sounded difficult to believe of the IDF, but she had a name. In the end, I found the true story; an awful tale, but not a cold-blooded assassination.

Fathi Chalabi, a bird-like elderly man, showed me where the Israelis had blown a hole in his door to enter his home at night. About 30 soldiers had forced their way in and separated out Chalabi, his son Wada'a, 32, and another man, Abed Sa'adi, 27, in the courtyard.

"They told us to face the wall and take off our shirts," Chalabi said. "They were looking for suicide bombers. But we were not. My son was the caretaker at school. He was one month from getting his university degree."

It was dark, and as Wada'a picked up his shirt, the Israelis spotted an elastic bandage he wore for back pain. Someone shouted in Hebrew. Chalabi remembers the officer's name was Gabi. They opened fire, hitting the two younger men, who fell on Chalabi.

The last he remembers is some kind of argument between the soldiers. Then they shone lights on the bodies and he played dead. "I was covered in Wada'a's blood," he said. The Israelis left up the alleyway. Dark dried bloodstains still marked the concrete when Chalabi spoke to me.

Equally callous was the shooting of Omar Nayel, a shop owner. "I was in my house looking out, trying to see what was happening," said Fathi Abu Aita, a neighbour. "I saw him walk across his courtyard, I think going to the loo." Two shots rang out and he fell. Nayel's body lay in the garden for days.

My conclusion after interviewing scores of refugees is that there is no evidence Israeli troops entered the camp aiming to "massacre" Palestinian civilians. But in many cases they shot first and did not take much care to find out if the target was a civilian or not.

Under the fourth Geneva convention, they are required to protect the civilian population, and wilful killing of a civilian is a potential war crime.

I am also certain that numerous Palestinians were held hostage in their homes while Israeli troops used the building as a base or a firing post, and that others were taken door to door as a human shields, sometimes thrown into rooms ahead of Israeli troops.

As for the bulldozing of the Hawamish area, this seems to have been out of a combination of fear and revenge rather than premeditated.

I asked Laderman how he felt now. He said he was satisfied that the "nest of snakes" has been snuffed out. As for the new generation of suicide bombers the military operation has probably created, he said: "They would have become suicide terrorists anyway."

The Palestinians and the Jews were radicalized 5000 years ago. Gods people were comanded to kill all of the inhabitents. They disobeyed. The Palestinians have been a thorn in their side ever since. God know what he was doing.

The Palestinian press radicalizes people. They wouldn't be any more radical if Sharon had massacred thousands. The Palestinians and the Arab world will believe he did anyway so he might as well. Isreal and the world would be safer.

Speaking of England. The English were much more brutal in their responce to Palestinian terrorists than the Isrealis are. The US would be also. Isreal lost 28 men because they were trying to prevent civilian casualies. The US wouldn't have done that. We'd give the civilians time to leave then level the whole place from 30,000ft with no American casualties.

Some yearned for peace and wished to reach a settlement

I agree that there are some in the Palestinian community that do yearn for peace but if they say that they are murdered. A very much larger percentage of the Isreali population yearns for peace and they have proven it time and again. It's not just to compare the two. The Isrealis have tried and tried even if they have to be pressured by the US to do it. They do it. They make peace whenever an Arab state is agreeable to peace.

His brutal methods radicalize the people more and more until peace is impossible.

The Arab press radicalizes the Arab people more and more until peace is impossible. What Sharon actually does can't radicalize them any more than the propaganda does.

Peace must be imposed by outside parties and monitored.

The Isrealis are the only ones that can impose peace. No other country is going to do it. We need to step back and let them do it , after we remove Sadam and force the other Arab states back in line.

It may be possible for an Arab state to control the Palestinians but they won't do it and Isreal would be affraid to let them in to do it. That mightbe a solution eventually though.

I don't believe people need brutal, repressive rule

The evidence would suggest otherwise. They have never had any measure of peace or stability without it.

To think this suggests because you have the power you have the right

Unfortunately it's more of a duty than a right. The last thing that I would want to do is ride rouphshod over the Arabs but it must be done for the sake of civilization.

Then you build the case for his inferiority to prove to yourself you have the right to use your weapons to subjugate him and kick his a** and before you know it you've got yourself a slave--or a dead man.

I don't want Arab slaves but I don't want them to blow up the world either. We do have the right to defend ourselves whether or not their culture is inferior.

don't think of Arabs as inferior. I went to school with a bunch of Palestinians. Palestinians and Lebonese Arabs have been among my best freinds over the years. They are intelligent interesting loyal people. I do think of the society that they escaped from as inferior. Looking at the evidence it is difficult not to draw that conclusion. We must protect ourselves from it because of weapons of mass destruction. If it weren't for nukes and chem and bio weapons I'd say let them rot in their own feces. It's their bed they can lay in it.

If you want to talk about evil and barbaric you needent look much further than Arab culture.

When in doubt, cut-and-paste.

However, all your article has in it is people of dubious histories doing a lot of handwaving and saying that, despite the fact that there are very few corpses, we just KNOW there was a massacre.

Although there is an interesting quote:

"Amnesty said it had found no evidence of mass graves or any support for allegations that women had been raped by troops."

Weak, very weak.

How about this:

U.N. envoy: 'I cannot judge if there was a massacre' in Jenin - "I have been misquoted"

or this:

Peter Bouckaert, a researcher at Human Rights Watch in New York who sneaked into Jenin on Thursday, told the Washington Post, "It's been incredibly difficult to tell the difference between fighters and civilians. If a combatant uses the civilian population as a shield in this way, the deaths incurred are the moral and legal responsibility of those who are hidings out in this grotesquely cowardly fashion.

And you STILL haven't explained away those pictures.

Palestinians say several hundred people may have died during the Jenin offensive, part of an assault on the West Bank launched after scores of Israelis died in a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings.

Wow, you're back! So how was Idaho, eh? Still using the thin reeds of Pallie testimony to buttress your blood libel about a Jenin "massacre"?

Let's take a look at some salient facts in the story. Amnesty, an outfit not known for its friendliness to the State of Israel, sends its people into a combat zone after the IDF has pulled out its troops. They then interview Palestinian residents of Jenin, who, to a man, claim the Israelis conducted a massacre. Yet they offer no proof, no bodies, no mass graves. Where are the mass graves, anyway, my friend?

Could it be that they don't exist? Well, let's see, the Israelis would have had to cart 1600 bodies (that appears to be the accepted number that the National Socialist press is peddling. Oh, I'm sorry, you call it "The Guardian") away to a mysterious "mass grave" somewhere. Then each member of the disposal team would have had to remain silent about the massacre and subsequent removal of the bodies. Ooops! That reservist brigade was made up of guys who a week before were selling insurance and fixing up plumbing. Regular people. This might come as a shock to you Jethro, but Jews are regular people. Even Israeli Jews.

Unless of course, you believe that they make hamentashen using the blood of Arab infants during Purim. But let's go on....

Now at least one of these reservists would have had to have a pang of conscience and would have gone to Ma'ariv or Ha'aretz by now. Uh oh....no Israeli whistleblower. But you said there was a massacre!

But only Palestinians are crying "massacre", and they have a motive to cry massacre. No Israelis have come forward from the combat units and have confirmed the stories.

The fantasy that you are peddling would have had a leak by now. The story, complete with pictures, would have been out. Instead, you have massacre fantasies being peddled by left-wing Eurotrash terrorist sympathizers, and you expect us to treat it as fact? You expect us to buy into every piece of yellow journalism peddled by the likes of John Pilger and Robert Fisk? American overhead satellites, picket ships, and AURORA aircraft have been blanketing the West Bank with coverage. We have picked up and decrypted every bit of Israeli commo traffic.

Surely there would have been massive destruction. And yet...

....destruction seems to have been limited to an are about one to two football fields in size. While the rest of Jenin appears to have been left standing. They didn't bring in the bulldozers until the IDF troops approached the Palestinian last stand area in the circle. Yet you're peddling the lie that massive numbers of people were buried here or carted away, when in point of fact the IDF, at great cost to itself, took Jenin in house to house combat. Yet even the photographs expose the Pallie story for the lie that it is.

Jeez, don't you think that if Sharon had presided over a massacre, and the NSA found out about it, that Bush wouldn't be demanding his resignation by now and throwing his support to Netanyahu? Instead, Bush has reiterated his support for Israel and Sharon. Why would Bush want to saddle himself with a man who presided over a massacre?

I'm sure you have an answer for all these questions, don't you?

.....sound of crickets.....

Oooops! Guess not! I suppose we'll have to put up with more accusations of "neocon nazi", supplemented by the latest Jew-baiting articles from The Independent.

Your story is thin, watery beer. So watery that the various articles you offer as "proof" don't stand up to even the most basic, least intrusive forms of criticism. Nope, you peddle the claims of a bunch of prejudiced left-wing Eurotrash whose sympathies lie with the Palestinians, but who never said a word while Israelis were dying from terrorist bombs. And you peddle them as fact. And that is why you fail, and fail ingloriously, at that.

By the way, your idea of summerweight clothing might be a little standoffish, dontcha think?

Be Seeing You,

Chris

Putz....
What's with your obsession with posting cartoons???

That's it? That's all you've got? That's effing it?

Well I oughta peepee in your cereal! I spend all this time putting up a reasoned, cogent response, complete with before and after pics of the rather minor,

minor

, damage to the Jenin refugee camp and all you have, ALL YOU HAVE, is "Putz".

You sir, are an intellectual Thunderbird Puppet.

You specialize in posting the propagandistic equivalent of Three Card Monte that is published in the Fleet Street Dailies, and expect not to be called on it. Then when rightfully exposed as the rhetorical carjacker that you are, you complain that I post a pic of Major Kusanagi as my signature masthead. That's it! This is your entire response; and you call me a "putz", to boot, as if that stands as a Quod erat demonstratum to your fatuous "arguments", such as they are.

Well, my friend, the Party Day Rally is over for you and your fellow Sturmabteilungen on this forum.

No more unanswered Jew-baiting allowed, pal. No more peddling of Pallie propaganda and blood libel without so much as an answer. Those days are gone. Soon, your buddy Arafat will be as well, along with his patron, Saddam.

As to my anime images, well, you just knew I couldn't let that go unanswered....

KUSANAGI: "Hey, Colonel Aramaki, what's with all the Jew-baiting going on around here?"
ARAMAKI: "Nothing new, Kusanagi. Intelligence reports from Section Six indicate that they've all gotten together on their own thread and they're reading the latest Justin Raimondo column. I'm sending your team in to intercept them before they start burning down synagogues."

Be Seeing You,

Chris

You are mistaken about the derivation of the term "Palestine". It from the Latin, not Hebrew. (Philistia.)

No, I SAID it was a Latin word. However, the Latin word was derived from the Hebrew word in the Bible, "Peleshet." By the time the Romans came to the area, the Philistines were long gone. They learned about the Philistines from the Jews.

It designates not an Arab people, but the Philistines who inhabited another corner of the region that was ancient Judea. That said, this does not mean the Palestinans do not have their own distinctive identity as a people. After all, before Israel existed, there were Jews. Before there was a Germany or Italy, there were people called Germans and Italians, based on a regional inhabitation.

You are ABSOLUTELY wrong. People were called "Germans" and "Italians" (and Irish) NOT because of the territory in which they lived but because of things like shared ancestry, language, a distinctive style of clothing, and other things cumulatively called "culture."

A Englishman could live in Ireland and not be Irish. A German could live in Russia and still be a German.

In the case of the "Palestinians," they have NONE of the characteristics of a nationality group. They have no distinctive language, religion or culture. They are simply Arabs living in the region that the European powers drew borders around and labeled "Palestine." Many of them have cousins on the other side of the Jordan river in Jordan. A Muslim "Palestinian" in Ramallah might very likely have more in common with Muslims in Amman, Jordan than with Christian "Palestinians" in Bethlehem.

Besides, Arabs had always inhabited the region, even in the days of ancient Judea, as we know from ancient sources. When the Jews were dispersed by the Romans, the Arabs remained till modern times.

Yes and no. There were always Arabs in the region but their numbers fluctuated. There were many reports from the region in the 19th Century that Palestine was almost deserted. There was definitely a large influx of Arabs into Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries when the arrival of the zionists created job opportunities there.

Most of the "Palestinian" Arabs are probably no more ancient in the region than most of the Jews.

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