Israelis Forbid War Crimes Investigation in Jenin

The nation founded on exploitation of a martyr complex over war crimes, now blocks investigation of its own crimes against humanity

Compiled by Michael A. Hoffman II

Worried that a UN investigation could form the basis for war crimes prosecutions against Israeli soldiers, the Israeli government announced April 30, 2002 that it wouldn't allow a U.N. investigation in Jenin, a Palestinian refugee camp that is overseen by UN agencies, within occupied territory that by treaty is controlled by the governing Palestinian Authority. Nonetheless, the Israeli security Cabinet--led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon--voted against letting the investigation proceed.

The UN investigators were to be led by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari. The 20-member UN commission was charged with assessing the civilian death toll from the April 2002 Israeli attack on Jenin, where hundreds of civilians were killed during three weeks of assaults by jets, helicopters and bulldozers in a "zone" closed to the media by the Israeli army.

April 18, 2002

A Palestinian boy who was wounded by Israeli troops, stands downcast amid the ruins of the Jenin refugee camp, April 18, 2002

"There are lots of accusations, lots of rumors, and we don't know what is true and what is not, and I really thought it was in everyone's interest to clarify this matter as soon as possible," said UN Secretary General Koffi Annan.

John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the world body, said the United States is opposed to the Jenin war crimes inquiry. Though the United States was the original sponsor of the Security Council resolution endorsing the Jenin investigation, American diplomats had come to view the UN inquiry as "a divisive and potentially dangerous distraction."

From the Israeli viewpoint, cancellation of the U.N. investigation would be preferable to an investigation it feared would reveal the extent of the war crimes committed by Israeli forces while the media and aid groups were banned from the area.

"Whatever penalty Israel will pay (in terms of lost prestige) is less than the cost of a report that is one-sided and uses terms such as 'war crimes," said Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

April 17, 2002

April 17: Red Cross workers cover the remains of a Palestinian woman killed by Israeli soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp

An Israeli soldier fires on a church in Bethlehem, April 17, 2002

Annan sent a letter to the Israeli government April 27 assuring the Israelis that their soldiers and others interviewed by the fact-finding team would be guaranteed anonymity, and that there would be no transcripts that might be used in war crimes prosecutions.

In recent weeks the Israelis also refused entry into Jenin by a team of U.N. human rights investigators led by former Irish President Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, and Felipe Gonzalez, a former Spanish prime minister.

The Israeli cabinet decision reflected a consensus among Israelis that the United Nations is biased against the Jewish state and that any U.N. inquiry into war crimes in the Jenin camp would inevitably end badly for Israeli public relations and Israel's image. One senior Foreign Ministry official said Israel had been wary of the war crimes investigation from the start. "We have every right in the world to be extremely suspicious about anything that comes out of the U.N.," said the diplomat. "We may be paranoid, but we have good reason to be."

As the U.N. undersecretary-general for political affairs, Kieran Prendergast, noted to the council April 30, the investigation was originally endorsed "on the basis of assurances of full Israeli cooperation" from the Israeli foreign and defense ministers. But when the UN named a team dominated by specialists in international law and war crimes, the Israelis retracted their promise of support. Israeli officials were also outraged by the remarks of Terje Roed-Larsen, the U.N. envoy to the Middle East, who described "horrifying scenes of human suffering" at the Jenin camp. Prendergast said that "with every passing day it becomes more difficult to determine what took place on the ground in Jenin."

In Jerusalem, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said he feared that the UN Security Council would "interpret our refusal as if we were scared that they might discover something." In an interview with Israeli radio, Peres said he told Secretary of State Colin Powell by telephone on April 29: "Our army is still fighting....What do you want, for us to put them on trial? Tell our soldiers that they should show up [to testify] with a lawyer?' We have no intention of letting [Israeli] soldiers be investigated or even give testimony..."

April 16, 2002

"A Form of Ethnic Cleansing"

"Whatever is ultimately discovered about the carnage committed by Israel's forces, enough is known to implicate Sharon for a form of ethnic cleansing--purposefully destroying the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves. The systematic destruction of the signposts of nascent Palestinian statehood--statistics bureaus, education ministries, electricity and water supplies--is aimed at further uprooting a refugee population." Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times, April 16, 2002

April 16, 2002: A Palestinian survivor sits in what used to be her living room, before her home in the Jenin refugee camp was destroyed by the Israeli army. Using helicopter gunships, F16 fighter jets, tanks, and bulldozers, Israeli forces launched a pogrom against Arab villages on the West Bank beginning March 29, as part of a policy of collective punishment of the Palestinian people

In Jenin, amidst the shattered apartment houses and wreckage of a hellish, Israeli-bombed landscape, Palestinian women ford a stream, created when a watermain was smashed by rampaging Jewish soldiers

Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian official said, "I think this is equivalent to giving Sharon the license to do it again, to kill again and to commit slaughter again." On April 30, the group Physicians for Human Rights issued a preliminary forensic assessment of Jenin's dead and wounded, referring to the deliberate targeting of Palestinians civilians and blocked access to medical care.

Sharon, who was found by an Israeli commission to have been "indirectly responsible" for a 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp, took a defiant tone. To him and other senior Israeli officials, the United Nations inquiry is a case of selective investigation, to be followed by spurious prosecution. "No attempt to tarnish our name or to put us on trial before the world will succeed," Sharon said.

The Israelis sought to have American Major-General William Nash, of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), appointed to head the U.N. probe. The position of the CFR is that the Israelis should have been allowed to determine the make-up of the commission: "There should have been more consultation with the host government (Israel) before appointing the members," said David Philips, Nash's deputy at the CFR. "The composition of the initial group created the impression that the mission was being politicized."

Numerous war crimes investigations were conducted in Germany, Poland and Japanese colonies after World War Two, and more recently in the Balkans with regard to ethnic cleansing; and in Rwanda where genocide was determined to have been committed. War crimes investigations held in Germany and Japan after World War II set the standard for such proceedings, establishing the principle that soldiers must be held responsible for atrocities committed during war. Since then, a series of Geneva conventions have defined violations in three categories:

WAR CRIMES, such as mistreatment of prisoners and targeting civilians.

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, such as deportation and murder of civilian populations, and racial, ethnic and political persecution.

GENOCIDE, defined as "deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Several Western governments have also established permanent tribunals for the investigation of elderly persons, many of them refugees from Communism, accused of having committed war crimes against Jews 60 years ago. For example, in the US, the Office of Special Investigation (OSI), was established in 1979 as part of the Department of Justice to investigate "war criminals living in the United States."

The OSI drove Andrije Artukovic, former minister of the interior of Croatia back to Communist Yugoslavia. The OSI deported Catholic Bishop Valerian Trifa back to Communist Romania. Arthur Rudolph, the distinguished NASA rocket scientist, was also investigated and driven out of the US as a "war criminal." In the cases of Alfred Deutscher and Michael Popczuk, the men committed suicide after being targeted by the OSI.

Claims that these war crimes investigations were politicized and tainted by pro-Communist or Zionist bias were dismissed out of hand as an obstruction of human rights and humanitarian and international law.

The traditions about war crimes committed against Jews is central to the maintenance of the Israeli state, a sly tool for obtaining Palestinian land and for portraying a nuclear power with a penchant for pulverizing dark-skinned civilians as a "victim of intolerance." Billions of dollars have been paid by Europeans--and continue to be paid-- to the Israeli government and its agencies as "war crimes reparations."

The Israelis, however, regard themselves as immune from international prosecution for war crimes or responsibility for reparations to Palestinians. On April 28, 2002 the Associated Press reported Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as declaring, "Israel won't sit in the place of the accused. Israel will sit in the place of the accuser."

The AP dispatch added that the Israeli foreign minister described charges of Israeli war crimes in Jenin as,"baseless blame, almost a blood libel, on Israel."

Very few Americans would support "incursions" into the predominately black ghetto of Los Angeles by tanks, helicopter gunships, D-9 armored bulldozers and F-16 jet fighters if a minority of African-Americans were planting suicide bombs in white areas. If the US military were to bulldoze and bomb black ghettos into a moonscape of rubble, with whole families buried beneath the wreckage, as collective punishment of all blacks for the actions of a few terrorists, most Americans would revolt at the injustice and virtual genocide such attacks would represent.

But so warped is the distorting prism of Jewish supremacy in the American media, that the monstrous Israeli policy of collective punishment of the entire Palestinian people is repeatedly upheld by Congress and the White House, in defiance of the Geneva Convention and the definition of war crimes imposed by the Americans themselves after WWII.

The current propaganda line describes a war against the Palestinian people in terms of a struggle against "terrorists," with the racist implication that all Palestinian people are terrorists, men, women and children. A similar racist innuendo was maintained by the American media with regard to the Vietnamese people during the early days of the American war in Southeast Asia.

Israeli Ethic Cleansing Practices

The monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the center of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins. A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shoveled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. 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.

In one nearby half-wrecked building, gutted by fire, lies the fly-blown corpse of a man covered by a tartan rug. In another we found the remains of 23-year-old Ashraf Abu Hejar beneath the ruins of a fire-blackened room that collapsed on him after being hit by a rocket. His head is shrunken and blackened. In a third, five long-dead men lay under blankets. A quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland, littered now with detritus of what were once households -- foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes, tin cans, children's toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing. 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.

Until two weeks ago, there were several hundred tightly-packed homes in this neighborhood called Hanat al-Hawashim. They no longer exist. Around the central ruins, there are many hundreds of half-wrecked homes. Much of the camp - once home to thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war - is falling down. Every wall is speckled and torn with bullet holes and shrapnel, testimony of the awesome, random firepower of Cobra and Apache helicopters that hovered over the camp.

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 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 with Merkava tanks, army Jeep patrols, and armored 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 sanitized 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.

We were led in by hands gesturing at windows. Hidden, whispering people directed us through narrow alleys they thought were clear. When there were soldiers about, a finger would raise in warning, or a hand waved us back. We were welcomed by people desperate to tell what had occurred. They spoke of executions, and bulldozers wrecking homes with people inside. "This is mass murder committed by Ariel Sharon," Jamel Saleh, 43, said. "We feel more hate for Israel now than ever. Look at this boy." He placed his hand on the tousled head of a little boy, Mohammed, the eight-year-old son of a friend. "He saw all this evil. He will remember it all." So will everyone else who saw the horror of Jenin refugee camp. Palestinians who entered the camp yesterday were almost speechless.

Rajib 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 but I have found nothing but devastation. Just look for yourself." All had the same message: tell the world.

Source: The Independent (U.K.) April 16, 2002

Inside the Camp of the Dead

"Rarely...have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life"

Bashir died in agony. The hands of the 23-year-old Palestinian are clenched into tight fists, his body charred. He lies buried under rubble and cement, his head twisted towards the door as if crying out for help. His tomb is a wasted house that crashed around him after the Israelis tried to bulldoze it to make a road. Next door, up a blackened stairway and across shards of glass, is the body of Ashran Abu Hadel, also 23. Someone tried to pull him out of the rubble but gave up. His arm lies straight out, as though he tried to push himself away from the cement as he lay dying.

Elsewhere in the Jenin refugee camp I saw bodies of men who were clearly fighters, replete with ammunition belts and other paramilitary trappings. Bashir and Ashran had nothing. The refugees I had interviewed in recent days while trying to enter the camp were not lying. If anything, they underestimated the the carnage and the horror. Rarely, in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.

This was not only a town of fighters, as Israeli soldiers told me. It was a town of women, children and old men, who have seen the camp grow into a warren of ramshackle homes over half a century. Amnesty International called for an immediate investigation into "the killings of hundreds of Palestinians", saying crucial evidence may be destroyed as Israel "continues to impede access".

Throughout the camp, which the Israelis called a production line for terrorists, there is the stench of death, of bodies that have been rotting in the sun for days. Everyone who survived the fiercest battle of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield has a terrible story to tell. They take your hand and lead you into their houses across bulldozed mounds of rubble including photo albums, clothing, toys and pillowcases. There, there are more bodies, burnt or twisted grotesquely, caught off guard by sudden death. Nothing prepares you for the smallness of a dead body.

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.

"We have passed dark days," says Aisha, whose house was turned into a snipers' nest and base for 50 soldiers. "What we have passed through, I cannot describe to you but I will remember all of my life."

"What my son told me is that when they get older, they will resist occupation because they have seen this," says Aisha, a mother of five. For five days since the last Palestinian fighters surrendered the Israelis have prevented us from entering this camp, saying it was booby-trapped. Thirteen Israeli soldiers died in an ambush in its narrow alleys last week. The Army is still seeking to keep us out. I write this, hiding from an Israeli tank 50 meters away, inside the home of a man called Jamal who, in a state of shock, shows the destruction of his once-grand home...

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 terrorized and living under siege. But what remains of Jenin camp is a wasteland of death... "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 laborer.

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." Ramsey, 28, who returned from Germany to be with his family, leads us to where five fighters lie dead inside a house, shot in the head. Flies swarm around and the smell is overpowering. For Muslims, whose custom dictates burial within 24 hours, this is the ultimate degredation.

"There is no justice, no ethics to this war," says Abu Bashir who is 70 years old. He points at a photo album heaped with the other trash. "This was someone's life, now it is gone, do you understand?" he shouts. Down the road, near Harat al-Hawashim, Abu Salim, who has passed 50 years in this camp, wanders though the rubble in shock. "What did they do?" he asks. "What did they do?"

Source: The Times (London), April 16, 2002

April 15

Arab cattle: Palestinian civilians, many of them women, some with infants, are herded through an Israeli army "checkpoint" at Kalandia, in the city of Ramallah, April 15, 2002. If Jews anywhere in the world were made to endure such conditions, there would be howls of outrage from the White House and media over the "Nazi-like" treatment. But when the Israelis herd the Palestinians like cattle, it's considered entirely fitting by Jewish supremacists such as "Holocaust Survivor" Elie Wiesel, who today, April 15, gave a speech in in Washington D.C., congratulating the Israelis on their pogram.

April 15

UN Commission on Human Rights Condemns Israeli Mass Killings in Palestine

On April 15, the United Nations human rights commission condemned "mass killings" of Palestinians and demanded the end of "acts of mass killings perpetrated by the Israeli occupying authorities." The Geneva-based Commission on Human Rights ruled that the Israelis were guilty of "gross violations" of humanitarian law and the commission upheld the "legitimate right of Palestinian people to resist." The Commission on Human Rights expressed grave concern at "the killing of men, women and children" in West Bank refugee camps, among them Jenin, where Israeli troops of massacred Palestinian women and children.

"A United Nations vehicle with supplies of flour and sugar had been denied access to the (Jenin) camp, as well as the Red Cross. 'For over a week now,' one senior UN official said, 'the Red Cross and the UN have made strenuous efforts to receive permission to enter the camp. Especially for the Red Cross, this is an unheard-of situation for a government to refuse access in this way. The only assumption that we are making, regrettably, is that someone had something abominable to hide.' An Israeli soldier told a journalist that the Red Cross had been granted access to the camp but had refused. The UN official responded: 'This is a blatant lie." Source: "The Times" (London), April 15.

April 15: Neighbors extract the body of a Palestinian woman, Zoha Ifreiteh, from the rubble of her bulldozed home, after discovering the body of her sister, Rasha, yesterday. The two sisters were killed by the Israelis on April 3, in Nablus.

There is a growing body of testimony that since April 3, the Israeli army's rampage at the Jenin refugee camp, was marked by massive war crimes. Eyewitness Baha Awad, a paramedic with a the local ambulance, saw soldiers go ahead and bulldoze a house in Jenin with a retarded Palestinian man inside. His parents ran out, screaming that their mentally handicapped son was still stuck inside the structure. He was buried alive by the Israeli bulldozer anyway. Kamel Ali testified that his 20 year old son and his son's friend, were struck by an Israeli rocket April 5, killing both young men. Ali said neither was armed. On April 8, Ali himself, and four other men, were rounded up by Israeli troops. One of the four Palestinian captives was fluent in Hebrew. He said that he overheard the Israeli soldiers talking about whether to execute the Palestinians in a shop or in the street. Mai Ziat told how a refugee from the Jenin camp had arrived at her doorstep describing how he had seen seven captive Palestinian men executed at close range by Israeli troops.

A Palestinian resident of Jenin, Luka Tomei, saw a Palestinian man shot down in the street by Israelis. "He had no guns. He said: 'I want a doctor. I want to go to the hospital. They shot him." She also testified that an Israeli sniper shot down an elderly Palestinian lady.

Palestinian officials and aid workers have testified that many Palestinian civilians were slaughtered by the Israelis in Jenin. Some Jews have been determined to conceal the Palestinian casualty toll by any means necessary. The Israeli Supreme Court on April 14 denied a demand by human rights groups to stop the mass burial of Palestinian bodies in pits, which has been the practice of the Israeli army thus far.

April 14

Palestinian children desperate for water after the Israeli army intentionally smashed water tanks and supplies in their neighborhood, collect water from a broken pipe in the Palestinian village of Dhahreiah, near Hebron, April 14, 2002. Because of the Israeli siege and blockade, many Palestinian children had been forced to drink sewage water, or urine mixed with powdered milk.

April 14, 2002: In the Jenin hospital last week, two Red Cross officials were targeted by an Israeli sniper. One, a former British officer, testified that one of three bullets fired into the hospital passed between him and a Canadian assistant. He retrieved the bullet and identified it as Israeli army issue.

Hurriya Kureini heard the roar of a huge, armored, D-9 bulldozer smashing through the wall of her home in Jenin, just after hearing the sound of US-made "Hellfire" missiles streaking from an Apache helicopter gunship firing at Palestinian homes elsewhere in he rneighborhood.

Kureini managed to lead her children out a window before her house came crashing down. Once out on the street, the Israelis ordered her and the children to stand in front of Israeli tanks. Her three sons, the youngest 15, were blindfolded and kidnapped. She also spotted the bodies of two of her neighbors, Feridi Asaadi, 80, and her daughter Lena, 40, lying in the doorway of their home. As of April 14, 2002, two of her sons are still in Israeli "custody," meaning that the Jewish kipnappers are either still torturing them or that they have been summarily executed.

Ali Mustapha Abu Sani, a 42 year old Palestinian school teacher testified tohe wholesale bulldozing of Palestinian homes by Israeli tanks and D-9 bulldozers. He says many families were wiped out. He provided the names of those who died in this way: "The household of Abu Naif Zagrah," says Ali Mustapha with certainty. "The households of Mazen al-Ghul and Abura al-Ghul." He continues: "Abu Jawad Narseh and Abu Jawad al-Asmar."

Maaz Staty, age 22 , says his mother died in this way, her home bulldozed with her inside. Witness Isa Weshaky mentions his cousin, Ataf Dasouki, aged 52, who opened the door of his home when commanded to by Israeli soldiers, and was then shot down.

"Israeli officers...interviewed by Ha'aretz (Israeli newspaper)...admit the Palestinian claims of extensive damage, including the bulldozing of houses. They admit too that Israeli soldiers fired on ambulances to drive them away from recovering the wounded." Source:"The Observer," (U.K.), April 14, 2002.

Tanks and Apache helicopters are enforcing a round-the-clock curfew. The Israeli stranglehold on the town is not only complicating humanitarian efforts, it is preventing any detailed scrutiny of the Israeli massacre in Jenin, where at least 500 Palestinians were killed, according to eyewitnesses. Ahmad al-Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) said witnesses had seen Israeli army trucks bringing bodies to a mass grave near the Adam bridge across the Jordan river. According to the The Times (London): "The Israeli Army has acknowledged that bodies of 'terrorists' were removed for burial in unmarked graves at what General Ron Kitry, an army spokesman, referred to as 'the enemy cemetery' in the Jordan valley.' -The Times, April 14, 2002.

Israelis have paid no heed to international laws that ban collective punishment and provide for the protection of civilians. Instead, Palestinian civilians in Jenin were strafed by machineguns. Buildings sheltering Palestinian civilians were bombed from the air and shelled by tanks. "What would the world reaction be if an Arab army treated Israelis - or anyone else - like this?" said Palestinian Khaled Sala'am.

"...fighting is the wrong word. It suggests a parity of violence"

A reporter's testimony: "We had driven to the outskirts of Jenin a week ago (April 7) for the first time. It was strange how small the city seemed, set among the green hills of the West Bank, surrounded by rich farmland and thick olive groves. A resident pointed out the camp itself..By then the fighting had been raging for five days. We watched the Israeli armor pouring in, and from a rooftop in the adjoining village of Wad Burqin, we watched the fighting. But fighting is the wrong word. It suggests a parity of violence. Instead, what we could see was a long-range assault, unequal in every part. We could see the tanks maneuvering and shelling houses from the plain. We could hear them firing from the ridge behind us. Most shocking, however, were the Apache helicopter gunships that hovered like an angry swarm above the city, approaching, often in pairs, and firing bursts of cannon-fire every five minutes into the camp. Every now and then they would fire a pair of missiles which would explode and send a plume of darker smoke above the white haze of gunsmoke already hanging above the camp. We learn the consequences of these strafing runs five days later. Dr Zaid Ayasi, director of the hospital, tells us that many of the civilian victims that he knows of were hit by helicopter fire in those few days. Slipping deep into the city on Friday (April 12), despite a curfew and its designation as a closed military zone, we are surprised to encounter large groups of Palestinian men all heading in the same direction. Following them discreetly, we are approached by a man who will only give his name as Hussam. He calls us to accompany them and talks rapidly at us as we walk. An hour earlier, Hussam tells us, the Israelis had come with their armored personnel carriers and loudspeakers and ordered every man who was between the age of 15 and 55 to gather in a central location. The men are too scared to disobey. And so we watch them leaving their homes and gathering in their hundreds, snaking in a long line towards a pale blue arch across the highway...Among them is a local journalist. I do not have time to get his name before the Israelis chase us away. He asks us to intercede on his behalf and shows us his press card to prove his bona fides . We are forced to tell him that we are as much in danger of being arrested as he. --Peter Beaumont, The Observer (U.K.), April 14, 2002.

The Israelis last week ordered the Palestinian population to leave Jenin refugee camp, roughly half a mile wide and three miles long, now a moonscape of blood-soaked rubble. Of the 13,000 Palestinians crammed into Jenin before the Israeli "incursion," fewer than 5,000 are left.

Nablus. Israeli destruction inflicted on Nablus, the largest Palestinian city, with some 20,000 inhabitants includes the Shuabi family and the family home. Among the buildings destroyed by Israeli tank fire or bulldozers in Nablus was the ancient casbah home of the Shuabi family. The Shuabis were still inside their home when the Israelis attacked. On April 13, rescue workers who had been digging through the rubble for days, found the bodies of three of the Shuabi children and their mother. The body of their father, Samir Shobi, was found April 12. Three other family members also were killed. On April 13, rescuers found two other members of the Shuabi family still alive. Rescuers pulled Abdullah Shuabi, 68, and his wife, Shamsa--from their living room, which was under a mass of stone and dirt. Neighbors of the Shuabis said Israeli bulldozers came to the front of the Shuabi home and began attacking. The house collapsed, with the family inside. "They were shouting, 'Help us! Help us!' " neighbor Amani Ghanem said of the crushed family. Three generations of the Shuabi family were buried alive. The confirmed Shuabi dead include: Omar Shuabi, 85, his daughters, Fatima and Abir, and his son, Samir; Samir's pregnant wife, Nabila, and the couple's three little boys, Abdallah, Azam, and Anas.

Rev. Economus George Awwad, 56, pastor of Saint-Dimitrios church of Nablus, inspects damage to his church two days after it sustained an Israeli bombardment on April 14. The church's two prayer rooms were heavily damaged by fire and its windows smashed by the anti-Christian, Israeli forces

Rokaya Hinno said she saw Imad Kasua trapped under the ruins of his home, bleeding to death. The Kasua house was one of several private homes that had been hit by Israeli fire in Nablus. Catholic and Muslim shrines were also attacked by Israelis in Nablus. The local Muslim house of worship, the Saladin Mosque, was rammed. Two rooms of the 250-year-old St. Demetrius Catholic church were severely damaged by Israeli tank fire, said Father Economus George Awwad. The 56-year-old priest saved his own life by crawling out of the structure, as the barbaric Israelis bombarded it.

April 13

War Crimes Coverup Continues

The killings in Jenin ended on April 11, but the Israeli Army continues to bar the outside world from the scene of the carnage. Before Ali Khatib left Jenin on April 11th, he saw dump-trucks filled with the remains of the Palestinian houses bulldozed by the Israelis. Inside those houses, the Palestinian father of eight said, were dead Palestinians. Inside the trucks, mixed in with the rubble and the concrete, were their remains. "There were ten or fifteen trucks," he said. "After the Israelis bulldozed the houses, they scooped everything up. Then they drove away." One man spoke of receiving a call on his cell phone on April 11 from a Palestinian family trapped beneath the rubble of his bulldozed home inside the camp. On April 12 the family's phone went dead. On the morning of April 12, Israeli Army General Ron Kitrey confessed in a brief moment of candor: "very likely several hundred Palestinians were killed." His statement has since been withdrawn and "clarified" by the Israeli army. A combination of an Israeli ban on the media and the clever method the Israelis have devised for disposing of the bodies of hundreds of their victims, almost guarantees there will be no holocaust-like photos of mounds of Palestinian cadavers. The Palestinian people are so much rubbish in the view of the Americans and Israelis. It is fitting therefore that their remains should be disposed of in this anonymous and secretive manner, "mixed in with the rubble" of a demolished refugee camp. In this way the always media-savy Israelis spare themselves the kind of opprobrium their minions in media, government and education forever heap on the Germans.

Collective punishment: An Israeli tank rolls through the rubble of a Palestinian apartment house in Jenin, April 13, 2002, in the course of Israeli attacks on civilian homes in Jenin, part of the Zionist policy of collective punishment of "Amalek" -- the entire Palestinian nation

April 12

The "Incidental" Palestinians

Palestinians say that the United States has written off Palestinian civilian casualties as incidental: "You foreigners make much of Israeli civilian deaths,' said Bashir Abu Walid, a neighbor of Manal Sofran, a woman who was shot to death by Israeli soldiers April 10. 'Every Israeli death is a big event. But we are just statistics. Because an Israeli soldier does it, it is not terrorism. Why not?"

Manal Sofran, a Palestinian housewife, was shot twice in the head by Israeli soldiers in Ramallah on April 10, while calling her husband Sami and their four children to come in from the garden of their three-story apartment building. She leaned out from the window. She spied five soldiers by a nearby wall, the neighbors recalled, and feared they might shoot at moving objects. 'She was right,' said Tom Kay, one of the neighbors. 'But she was the object, and it was clear the soldiers could see her.' Her last words were 'Oh, Sami,' said grieving relatives who received visitors at a wake today. Israeli soldiers enforce a strict curfew, to the point where a Palestinian mother or child who sticks his or her head out a window risks losing it.

Palestinians cite examples of the kind of attacks Ramallah residents believe exemplify the Israelis wanton killing of civilians--people who were shot the week of April 8---one died in a taxi after delivering a female relative to Ramallah Hospital to give birth. Soldiers shot another in the chest as he stood in front of his home; a third was killed trying to drive relatives out of Ramallah to their home villages; a Palestinian paraplegic in a wheelchair was shot.

Ramallah city hall was ransacked and its second floor burned. Deeds, tax receipts, building permits and other documents important to governing a city disappeared. The possibility that deeds were destroyed is particularly important in an area where successive Israeli governments have confiscated property on the grounds that the owner possessed no documents. 'You will have to kill every one of us,' shouted Umm Khaled Yahya, an old woman in a scarf who shouted at Israeli soldiers for 10 minutes without letup.

Israelis shelter bloodiest battlefield from eyes of media and aid groups

"...countless dead bodies"

"Israeli troops continued their strenuous efforts to prevent independent witnesses entering the bloodiest battlefield.... With Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, arriving in Jerusalem last night the soldiers blocked the United Nations, the Red Cross and the media from entering the 'closed military area' (Jenin)...Some journalists were detained. One had his press card ripped up. Footage filmed by a television cameraman was confiscated. The few pictures that did emerge from the camp showed scenes of devastation. Refugees leaving the northern West Bank city talked of misery, horror and death inside the camp which formerly housed 13,000 residents. They spoke of 'countless dead bodies' and men being executed at close range...An international group representing the UN, the Red Cross and the Norwegian Government, who were given assurances by the Israeli Defense Force that they would be allowed inside the camp, were turned away. Their cars were illegally searched and their cameras confiscated...one member of the group said... 'I asked one commander what exactly it is that they want to hide as I have never known of UN people not being allowed in before.'

"There are still several thousand people inside the camp, with no communication with the outside world....Latest reports from refugees include stories of executions of civilians and bulldozers piling dead bodies into a pit. The city is destroyed, damaged even more than other West Bank cities...In a white villa in Yaomu, a village outside of Jenin, hundreds of refugees have arrived in the past few days, white-faced, tearful, and clutching cheap plastic suitcases. Inside are remnants of their pitiful lives. Most of the residents of Jenin camp are children and grandchildren of those Palestinians who lost their properties after the war of independence and as a result, they know no other way of life than the squalor and poverty of a refugee camp. Now they are refugees once again, this time from the teeming camp that they call home."

--TheTimes (London), April 12, 2002

Israeli Army Brig Gen Ron Kitrey admitted that "hundreds" had been killed in Jenin. --"Breaking News," The Times (London), April 12, 2002 16:08

Israeli Terror in Jenin

Tanks and bulldozers attacked inhabitated homes

Palestinian civilians were used as human shields

"Israel's fiercest assault of its 2-week-old West Bank operation dealt systematic destruction and random death to civilians as well as fighters in this militant Palestinian stronghold (Jenin), according to displaced residents of the camp and relief workers in Jenin...the Israelis fired on unarmed civilians, used them as human shields and obstructed medical workers trying to save the wounded. One camp resident, Ali Ramile, a 40-year-old truck driver, said he watched Israeli soldiers kill seven or eight disarmed Palestinian fighters execution-style and dump several loads of bodies in a mass grave within 100 yards of his home...interviews with more than a dozen Palestinians from the Jenin camp indicated a heavy loss of civilian life there. Nearly everyone interviewed said they had watched neighbors die from Israeli shelling or sniper fire, or at least seen bodies in the street....

"Ten days ago, we hoped someone could do something to save the refugee camp, but now the camp is gone,' said Dr. Ziad Ayaseh, the hospital's director. Israeli missiles took out several water tanks on the roof, threatening the hospital's water supply, he said. The army siege blocked fuel supplies that power the hospital's generator--the only source of electric power. The staff pharmacologist and urologist were slightly wounded by apparently stray army gunfire. A 16-year-old boy was shot dead Thursday on a street in Jenin, half an hour after the army had lifted a curfew to allow the city's residents to move about for the first time in five days, hospital officials say. A 52-year-old woman wounded Monday inside her home in the refugee camp bled to death before relatives could get her to the hospital Thursday, they said. Sameh Abazeineh, an aide to Jenin's mayor, said his 70-year-old neighbor died waving his arms in the air in a futile effort to stop an Israeli bulldozer from destroying his home in the camp. Other residents reported seeing a tank round kill a neighbor who was recharging his cellular phone with his car battery and finding the body of a mentally disabled neighbor who had been shot and run over by a tank. Riad Ghaleb, a 28-year-old produce merchant, said the Israelis targeted his entire camp neighborhood...Helicopter gunships fired on rows of densely packed homes, killing two young boys in their home, he charged. 'After that, I saw five bulldozers and three tanks come in,' said Ghaleb, who walked out of the camp into central Jenin on Thursday. 'Now there are no more houses in my neighborhood. It's all a big highway now.'..

"News agency reporters Thursday (April 11) managed to tour a small corner of the camp, which had been off limits to journalists during eight days of combat. They saw widespread devastation--homes flattened by bulldozers, walls blackened by fire and the streets chewed up by armored vehicles... Roughly one-third of Jenin's 40,000 people lived in cinder-block houses on the refugee camp's narrow streets. The army used bulldozers to knock down homes and clear the way for its tanks...One bulldozer also wreaked destruction in the center of Jenin as it moved behind a tank along Old Castle Street toward the refugee camp. Just before Ahmed and Bassam Fashafsheh's stone home, the street narrowed and the tank couldn't squeeze by. Issam Fashafsheh, a relative, said he watched early this week as the tank fired ...into the house, backed up and moved aside so the bulldozer could advance. The bulldozer knocked in the wall of the living room, killing the middle-aged couple and their 9-year-old son, Samira.

"When Israeli troops entered the camp on foot to search homes for armed militants, they sent captive Palestinian men ahead of them at gunpoint to knock on the doors or break through the walls. The army has acknowledged the practice, saying it discourages armed resistance. Ali Mustafa Sireh, 42, said he was working as such a door-to-door human shield in the refugee camp when, at the 10th house, he was shot in the knee by Israeli snipers who apparently did not see his captors. At that point, he said, the Israelis abandoned him, and it took four days for relatives to get him to the hospital.

"But few experiences capture the terror of the assault like that told by Khadra Samara, 33, whose husband, Hisham, 40, is the Al Razi hospital's cook. She first noticed a tank outside her home at 11 p.m. Sunday (April 7), she said. At 11:30, it knocked down the front gate. 'We screamed and lighted candles to make the Israelis aware that people were in the house,' she said, but the tank kept coming. It fired a missile into the second and third floors, she said, causing a bright flash, shattering the windows and sending all 15 people in the home to the ground floor. The demolition halted until 5 a.m., when the household was awakened by the sound of a bulldozer outside. It slammed into the front of the house, crashing into a large bedroom in which the family had been sleeping, she said. Houses in the camp abut each other, so Samara and her relatives hammered a hole in a side wall and broke in next door, where her sister-in-law's family lives. Less than an hour later, she said, that house came under attack, and 30 people crawled through to the next house in line, which had been abandoned. That refuge stood up until 3 p.m. Monday, when it fell after a three-hour bulldozer assault, she said. 'We moved from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen--wherever we thought was safest,' Samara said. 'The children started vomiting. I phoned the hospital. My husband said to leave the camp immediately. I demanded an ambulance. He said the Israelis won't let one through.' It took them five more hours to talk their way through Israeli checkpoints and reach the hospital, waving white prayer scarves and dodging stun grenades from helicopters that followed them."

--L.A. Times, April 12

Trails of Destruction, Tales of Loss

"There is the Fashafsheh family. According to their relatives, the mother, father and 9-year-old son were killed when an Israeli tank fired a shell through their living room in downtown Jenin and an Israeli bulldozer plowed into the thick walls of their home, smashing it down on top of them. There is Rina Zayyed, 15, who said she was struck in the chest by a bullet as she sat at home with her father and brother. An Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery, she recounted, and a fragment hit her....'There are uncountable numbers of houses that have been destroyed,' said Riad Ghaleb, 28, a produce seller from the camp. 'When you see them, you go crazy. The helicopter fired so many rockets at our neighborhood because three soldiers were killed there in a house near where I live.'

...Shortly after 10 a.m. (April 11) an Israeli tank opened fire with its heavy machine gun on a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, Fares Einad Zaben...The boy was hit in the chest and died...On Old Castle Street, where the Fashafsheh family lived, their corner house, with its walls three feet thick, was a wreck, half of it shorn away and turned to rubble. In the crater that was once the family's living room, the stench of death hung in the air. About 9 a.m. one day last weekend, an Israeli tank fired a shell into the house without warning, according to neighbors. The