I wonder who was behind this lie?  


JENIN, West Bank — Palestinian officials yesterday put the death toll at 56 
in the two-week Israeli assault on Jenin, dropping claims of a massacre of 
500 that had sparked demands for a U.N. investigation. Top Stories  

     The official Palestinian body count, which is not disproportionate to 
the 33 Israeli soldiers killed in the incursion, was disclosed by Kadoura 
Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the 
northern West Bank, after a team of four Palestinian-appointed investigators 
reported to him in his Jenin office.
     [Two weeks ago, when European and particularly London newspapers were 
reporting estimates of "hundreds" massacred, Israeli sources in Washington 
said they expected the Palestinian toll to reach "45 to 55."]
     U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggested yesterday, in the wake of 
the Palestinian body count, that he may disband a U.N. fact-finding team that 
was to visit the camp to determine whether a massacre had taken place.
     Mr. Annan was responding to a decision by the Israeli security Cabinet 
earlier in the day not to cooperate with the U.N. team.
     The U.N.-Israeli dispute appeared unrelated to the Palestinian admission 
there had been no massacre.
     The Palestinians had suggested that most of the bodies were buried 
beneath the rubble of houses bulldozed by Israeli troops. No digging for 
bodies was taking place here, and there was no stench that could have come 
from decaying human flesh.
     The earlier Palestinian claims had sparked international outrage and 
prompted the Bush administration to press Israel to accept a fact-finding 
mission by the United Nations, an organization that the Jewish state regards 
as having a pro-Palestinian bias.
     Mr. Kadoura yesterday showed a reporter for The Washington Times the 
official Palestinian list of those who died. It contained 50 names. Six 
additional bodies, he said, had not been identified.
     He no longer used the ubiquitous Palestinian charge of "massacre" and 
instead portrayed the battle as a "victory" for Palestinians in resisting 
Israeli forces. "Here the Israelis, who tried to break the Palestinian 
willpower, have been taught a lesson," Mr. Kadoura said.
     He insisted that Israel had tried but failed, thanks to the heavy 
fighting, to destroy the entire warren of homes in the camp that had housed 
11,000 people.
     The destruction, pictured graphically on television, appeared linked to 
Israeli bulldozing of the houses from which the remnant of the resistance 
forces were firing.
     In fact, it covers the size of a large football field and constitutes 
only about 10 percent of the housing in the camp, and a far smaller 
proportion of the housing in the city, which was largely left untouched by 
the Israeli incursion.
     The figures shown to The Times included 233 injured persons, mainly men. 
The figures revealed that 18 persons had been injured and one had died after 
the fighting had ended, the result of accidentally detonating either shells 
left after the fighting, or booby traps that were set by Palestinian gunmen 
throughout the camp.
     A British expert attached to the International Red Cross said these 
booby traps were almost identical to those used by the Irish Republican Army.
     The British claim suggested to analysts that IRA guerrillas were 
schooled in terrorist weaponry and irregular warfare, as were many radical 
guerrilla movements, in Palestinian, Syrian and Iranian training camps in 
Lebanon.
     From behind a desk bedecked by portraits of Mr. Arafat, a string of past 
"martyrs" and of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Palestinian chief 
official in the city, who is also the Fatah leader, portrayed in an interview 
the events as another chapter in a long saga of resistance to foreign 
invaders — from Crusader times onward — that, he said, had made Jenin "the 
heart of Palestine" for centuries.
     The propaganda war continues, meanwhile, in the refugee camp itself. 
Families whose homes had been destroyed were ordered to sit and lie inside 
tents pitched near the destruction, to be available for interviews and 
filming with foreign reporters and photographers. At dusk, with the press 
opportunities concluded, they returned to houses offered to them in the 
undamaged city or in the rest of the refugee camp.
     Other young men, members of various factions, have been on duty in the 
camp's narrow streets, eager to conduct foreign correspondents to places 
where they say Israelis killed militants after they surrendered or had been 
captured.
     Others in the city say the resistance to the Israeli incursion had been 
carried out by only about 10 percent of the militants who had originally been 
in the area. Most had retreated into the hills or into city back streets as 
the Israelis entered the area, they said.
     Families living in houses directly opposite the destroyed area have told 
The Washington Times that Israeli soldiers, who temporarily occupied their 
houses just before the final battle began, treated them without violence and 
assured them: "You will not be harmed."
     They confined the 36 members of the Abu Khalil family to two rooms, 
allowing them out one by one, and set up a snipers' point upstairs through 
two holes in the wall — under a family framed message in Arabic: "There is No 
God but Allah and Mohammed is His Messenger."
     They confiscated identity cards but left them on the table before 
slipping out during the night.
     At the United Nations in New York, Undersecretary-General Kieran 
Prendergast said "a thorough, credible and balanced report on recent events 
in Jenin refugee camp would not be possible without the cooperation of the 
government of Israel."
     "Since it appears from today's Cabinet statement by Israel that the 
difficulties in the way of deployment of the fact-finding team will not be 
resolved anytime soon, the secretary-general is minded to disband the team," 
he told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council.
     Diplomats said Mr. Prendergast told council members that Mr. Annan was 
leaning toward disbanding the three-member team, which has been joined by 
numerous advisers. The team, which was to have arrived in Jenin on Saturday, 
remained in Geneva yesterday.
     The Security Council is to take up the issue of whether or not to 
disband the mission at a meeting today.
     The United States put forward the resolution adopted by the Security 
Council welcoming the dispatch of a U.N. team to find out what happened in 
Jenin during the Israeli military's attacks.
     Israel initially agreed to the idea, but subsequently raised questions 
over the composition of the team, its scope of inquiry, who could be called 
as a witness and what documents would be presented to the panel.
     Mr. Prendergast said that "with every passing day, it becomes more 
difficult to determine what happened" in Jenin. U.S. Ambassador John 
Negroponte said Mr. Annan was considering whether to let the fact-finding 
team begin its work in Geneva or "simply abandoning the mission on the 
assumption that satisfactory terms of reference could not be worked out."
     • This article is based in part on wire service reports.




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