Once upon a time in Jenin



What really happened when Israeli forces went into Jenin? Just as the world 
is giving up hope of learning the truth, Justin Huggler and Phil Reeves have 
unearthed compelling evidence of an atrocity

25 April 2002 Internal links

<A HREF="http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=288683">Nurse shot through heart and man in wheelchair among Jenin dead </A>

<A HREF="http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=288592">Once upon a time in Jenin </A>

<A HREF="http://argument.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/story.jsp?story=288614">Leading article: Israel must not be allowed to upset the Jenin investigation </A>



The thought was as unshakable as the stench wafting from the ruins. Was this 
really about counterterrorism? Was it revenge? Or was it an episode – the 
nastiest so far – in a long war by Ariel Sharon, the staunch opponent of the 
Oslo accords, to establish Israel's presence in the West Bank as permanent, 
and force the Palestinians into final submission?

A neighbourhood had been reduced to a moonscape, pulverised under the tracks 
of bulldozers and tanks. A maze of cinder-block houses, home to about 800 
Palestinian families, had disappeared. What was left – the piles of broken 
concrete and scattered belongings – reeked.

The rubble in Jenin reeked, literally, of rotting human corpses, buried 
underneath. But it also gave off the whiff of wrongdoing, of an army and a 
government that had lost its bearings. "This is horrifying beyond belief," 
said the United Nations' Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, as he gazed at 
the scene. He called it a "blot that will forever live on the history of the 
state of Israel" – a remark for which he was to be vilified by Israelis. Even 
the painstakingly careful United States envoy, William Burns, was unusually 
outspoken as he trudged across the ruins. "It's obvious that what happened in 
Jenin refugee camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent 
Palestinian civilians," he said.

The Israeli army insists that its devastating invasion of the refugee camp in 
Jenin earlier this month was intended to root out the infrastructure of the 
Palestinian militias, particularly the authors of an increasingly vicious 
series of suicide attacks on Israelis. It now says the dead were mostly 
fighters. And, as always – although its daily behaviour in the occupied 
territories contradicts this claim – it insists that it did everything 
possible to protect civilians.

But The Independent has unearthed a different story. We have found that, 
while the Israeli operation clearly dealt a devastating blow to the militant 
organisations – in the short term, at least – nearly half of the Palestinian 
dead who have been identified so far were civilians, including women, 
children and the elderly. They died amid a ruthless and brutal Israeli 
operation, in which many individual atrocities occurred, and which Israel is 
seeking to hide by launching a massive propaganda drive.

The assault on Jenin refugee camp by Israel's armed forces began early on 3 
April. One week earlier, 30 miles to the west in the Israeli coastal town of 
Netanya, a Hamas suicide bomber had walked into a hotel and blown up a 
roomful of people as they were sitting down to celebrate the Passover feast. 
This horrific slaughter on one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar 
killed 28 people, young and old, making it the worst Palestinian attack of 
the intifada, a singularly evil moment even by the standards of the long 
conflict between the two peoples.

Ariel Sharon, Israel's premier, and his ministers responded by activating a 
plan that had long lain on his desk. Operation Defensive Shield was to become 
the largest military offensive by Israel since the 1967 war. Jenin refugee 
camp was high on the list of targets. Home to about 13,000 people, it was the 
heartland of violent resistance to Israel's 35-year occupation.

The graffiti-covered walls bellowed the slogans of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic 
Jihad; radical Islamists and secular nationalists worked side by side, 
burying differences in the name of the intifada. According to Israel, 23 
suicide bombers had come out of the camp, which was a centre for bomb-making. 
Yet there were also many, many civilians. People such as Atiya Rumeleh, Afaf 
Desuqi and Ahmad Hamduni.

The army was expecting a swift victory. It had overwhelming superiority of 
arms – 1,000 infantrymen, mostly reservists, accompanied by Merkava tanks, 
armoured vehicles, bulldozers and Cobra helicopters, armed with missiles and 
heavy machine guns. Ranged against this force were about 200 Palestinians, 
with members of the militias – Hamas, al-Aqsa brigades and Islamic Jihad – 
fighting alongside Yasser Arafat's security forces, mostly armed with 
Kalashnikovs and explosives.

The fight put up by the Palestinians shocked the soldiers. Eight days after 
entering, the Israeli army finally prevailed, but at a heavy price. 
Twenty-three soldiers were killed, 13 of them wiped out by an ambush, and an 
unknown number of Palestinians died. And a large residential area – 400m by 
500m – lay utterly devastated; scenes that the Israeli authorities knew at 
once would outrage the world as soon as they hit the TV screens. "We were not 
expecting them to fight so well," said one exhausted-looking Israeli 
reservist as he packed up to head home. Journalists and humanitarian workers 
were kept away for five more days while the Israeli army cleaned up the area, 
after the serious fighting ended on 10 April.

The Independent spent five days conducting long, detailed interviews of 
survivors among the ruins of the refugee camp, accompanied by Peter 
Bouckaert, a senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch organisation. Many 
of the interviews were conducted in buildings that were on the verge of 
collapse, in living rooms where one entire wall had been ripped off by the 
bulldozers and that were open to the street.

An alarming picture has emerged of what took place. So far, 50 of the dead 
have been identified. The Independent has a list of names. Palestinians were 
happy, even proud, to tell us which of the dead were fighters for Hamas, 
Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa brigades; which belonged to their security forces; 
and which were civilians. They identified nearly half as civilians.

Not all the civilians were cut down in crossfire. Some, according to 
eyewitness accounts, were deliberately targeted by Israeli forces. Sami Abu 
Sba'a told us how his 65-year-old father, Mohammed Abu Sba'a, was shot dead 
by Israeli soldiers after he warned the driver of an approaching bulldozer 
that his house was packed with families sheltering from the fighting. The 
bulldozer turned back, said Mr Abu Sba'a – but his father was almost 
immediately shot in the chest where he stood.

Israeli troops also shot dead a Palestinian nurse as she tried to help a 
wounded man. Hani Rumeleh, a 19-year-old civilian, had been shot as he tried 
to look out of his front door. Fadwa Jamma, a nurse staying with her sister 
in a house nearby, heard Hani's screaming and came to help. Her sister, 
Rufaida Damaj, who also ran to help, was wounded but survived. From her bed 
in Jenin hospital, she told us what happened.

"We were woken at 3.30 in the morning by a big explosion," she said. "I heard 
that one guy was wounded outside our house. So my sister and I went to do our 
duty and to help the guy and give him first aid. There were some guys from 
the resistance outside and we had to ask them before we moved anywhere. I 
told them that my sister was a nurse, I asked them to let us go to the 
wounded.

"Before I had finished talking to the guys the Israelis started shooting. I 
got a bullet in my leg and I fell down and broke my knee. My sister tried to 
come and help me. I told her, 'I'm wounded.' She said, 'I'm wounded too.' She 
had been shot in the side of her abdomen. Then they shot her again in the 
heart. I asked where she was wounded but she didn't answer, she made a 
terrible sound and tried to breathe three times."

Ms Jamma was wearing a white nurse's uniform clearly marked with a red 
crescent, the emblem of Palestinian medical workers, when the soldiers shot 
her. Ms Damaj said the soldiers could clearly see the women because they were 
standing under a bright light, and could hear their cries for help because 
they were "very near". As Ms Damaj shouted to the Palestinian fighters to get 
help, the Israeli soldiers fired again: a second bullet went up through her 
leg into her chest.

Eventually an ambulance was allowed through to rescue Ms Damaj. Her sister 
was already dead. It was to be one of the last times an ambulance was allowed 
near the wounded in Jenin camp until after the battle ended. Hani Rumeleh was 
taken to hospital, but he was dead. For his stepmother, however, the tragedy 
had only just begun; the next day, her 44-year-old husband Atiya, also a 
civilian, was killed.

As she told his story, her orphaned children clung to her side. "There was 
shooting all around the house. At about 5pm I went to check the building. I 
told my husband two bombs had come into the house. He went to check. After 
two minutes he called me to come, but he was having difficulty calling. I 
went with the children. He was still standing. In my life I've never seen the 
way he looked at me. He said, 'I'm wounded', and started bleeding from his 
mouth and nose. The children started crying, and he fell down. I asked him 
what happened but he couldn't talk.

"His eyes went to the children. He looked at them one by one. Then he looked 
at me. Then all his body was shaking. When I looked, there was a bullet in 
his head. I tried to call an ambulance, I was screaming for anybody to call 
an ambulance. One came but it was sent back by the Israelis."

It was Thursday 4 April, and the blockade against recovering the wounded had 
begun. With the fighting raging outside, Ms Rumeleh could not go out of the 
house to fetch help. Eventually she made a rope out of headscarves and 
lowered her seven-year-old son Mohammed out of the back window to go and seek 
help. The family, fearful of being shot if they ventured out, were trapped 
indoors with the body for a week.

A few doors away, we heard the story of Afaf Desuqi. Her sister, Aysha, told 
us how the 52-year-old woman was killed when the Israeli soldiers detonated a 
mine to blow the door of her house open. Ms Desuqi had heard the soldiers 
coming and gone to open the door. She showed us the remains of the mine, a 
large metal cylinder. The family screamed for an ambulance, but none was 
allowed through.

Ismehan Murad, another neighbour, told us the soldiers had been using her as 
a human shield when they blew the front door off the Desuqi house. They came 
to the young woman's house first, and ordered her to go ahead of them, so 
that they would not be fired on.

Jamal Feyed died after being buried alive in the rubble. His uncle, Saeb 
Feyed, told us that 37-year-old Jamal was mentally and physically disabled, 
and could not walk. The family had already moved him from house to house to 
avoid the fighting. When Mr Feyed saw an Israeli bulldozer approaching the 
house where his nephew was, he ran to warn the driver. But the bulldozer 
ploughed into the wall of the house, which collapsed on Jamal.

Although they evacuated significant numbers of civilians, the Israelis made 
use of others as human shields. Rajeh Tawafshi, a 72-year-old man, told us 
that the soldiers tied his hands and made him walk in front of them as they 
searched house to house. Moments before, they had shot dead Ahmad Hamduni, a 
man in his eighties, before Mr Tawafshi's eyes. Mr Hamduni had sought shelter 
in Mr Tawafshi's house, but the Israeli soldiers had blown the door open. 
Part of the metal door landed next to the two men. Mr Hamduni was hunched 
with age, and Mr Tawafshi thinks the soldiers may have mistakenly thought he 
was wearing a suicide-bomb belt. They shot him on sight.

Even children were not immune from the Israeli onslaught. Faris Zeben, a 
14-year-old boy, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in cold blood. There was 
not even any fighting at the time. The curfew on Jenin had been lifted for a 
few hours and the boy went to buy groceries. This was on Thursday 11 April. 
Faris's eight-year-old brother, Abdel Rahman, was with him when he died. 
Nervously picking at his cardigan, his eyes on the ground, the child told us 
what happened.

"It was me and Faris and one other boy, and some women I didn't know. Faris 
told me to go home but I refused. We were going in front of the tank. Then we 
saw the front of the tank move towards us and I was scared. Faris told me to 
go home but I refused. The tank started shooting and Faris and the other boy 
ran away. I fell down. I saw Faris fall down, I thought he just fell. Then I 
saw blood on the ground so I went to Faris. Then two of the women came and 
put Faris in a car."

Abdel Rahman showed us where it happened. We paced it out: the tank had been 
about 80m away. He said there was only one burst of machine-gun fire. He 
imitated the sound it made. The soldiers in the tank gave no warning, he 
said. And after they shot Faris they did nothing.

Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Hawashin was shot dead as he tried to walk through 
the camp. Aliya Zubeidi told us how she was on her way to the hospital to see 
the body of her son Ziad, a militant from the Al-Aqsa brigades, who had been 
killed in the fighting. Mohammed accompanied her. "I heard shooting," said Ms 
Zubeidi. "The boy was sitting in the door. I thought he was hiding from the 
bullets. Then he said, 'Help.' We couldn't do anything for him. He had been 
shot in the face."

In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the 
flattened remains of a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat 
as if in a cartoon. In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag. 
Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he 
tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over 
the body, because when Mr Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were 
missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.

Mr Zughayer, who was 58, had been shot and wounded in the first Palestinian 
intifada. He could not walk, and had no work. Mr Hassan showed us the pitiful 
single room where his friend lived, the only furnishing a filthy mattress on 
the floor. Mr Zughayer used to wheel himself to the petrol station where Mr 
Hassan worked every day, because he was lonely. Mr Hassan did his washing; it 
was he who put the white flag on Mr Zughayer's wheelchair.

"After 4pm I pushed him up to the street as usual," said Mr Hassan. "Then I 
heard the tanks coming, there were four or five. I heard shooting, and I 
thought they were just firing warning shots to tell him to move out of the 
middle of the road." It was not until the next morning that Mr Hassan went to 
check what had happened. He found the flattened wheelchair in the road, and 
Mr Zughayer's mangled body some distance away, in the grass.

The Independent has more such accounts. There simply is not enough space to 
print them all. Mr Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch researcher, who is 
preparing a report, said the sheer number of these accounts was convincing.

"We've carried out extensive interviews in the camp, and the testimonies of 
dozens of witnesses are entirely consistent with each other about the extent 
and the types of abuses that were carried out in the camp," said Mr 
Bouckaert, who has investigated human-rights abuses in a dozen war zones, 
including Rwanda, Kosovo and Chechnya. "Over and over again witnesses have 
been giving similar accounts of atrocities that were committed. Many of the 
people who were killed were young children or elderly people. Even in the 
cases of young men; in Palestinian society, relatives are quite forthcoming 
when young men are fighters. They take pride that their young men are 
so-called 'martyrs'. When Palestinian families claim their killed relatives 
were civilians we give a high degree of credibility to that."

The events at Jenin – which have passed almost unquestioned inside Israel – 
have created a crisis in Israel's relations with the outside world. Questions 
are now being asked increasingly in Europe over whether Ariel Sharon is, 
ultimately, fighting a "war on terror", or whether he is trying to inflict a 
defeat that will end all chance of a Palestinian state. These suspicions grew 
still stronger this week as pictures emerged of the damage inflicted by the 
Israeli army elsewhere in the West Bank during the operation: the soldiers 
deliberately trashed institutions of Palestinian statehood, such as the 
ministries of health and education.

To counter the international backlash, the Israeli government has launched an 
enormous public-relations drive to justify the operation in Jenin. Their 
efforts have been greatly helped by the Palestinian leadership, who 
instantly, and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in which 
as many as 500 died. Palestinian human-rights groups made matters worse by 
churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories.

No holds are barred in the Israeli PR counterattack. The army – realising 
that many journalists will not bother, or are unable, to go to Jenin – has 
even made an Orwellian attempt to alter the hard, physical facts on the 
ground. It has announced that the published reports of the devastated area 
are exaggerated, declaring it to be a mere 100m square – about one-twentieth 
of its true area.

One spokesman, Major Rafi Lederman, a brigade chief of staff, told a press 
conference on Saturday that the Israeli armed forces did not fire missiles 
from its Cobra helicopters – a claim dismissed by a Western military expert 
who has toured the wrecked camp with one word: "Bollocks." There were, said 
the major, "almost no innocent civilians" – also untrue.

The chief aim of the PR campaign has been to redirect the blame elsewhere. 
Israeli officials accuse UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, for 
allowing a "terrorist infrastructure" to evolve in a camp under its 
administration without raising the alarm. UNWRA officials wearily point out 
that it does not administer the camp; it provides services, mainly schools 
and clinics.

The Israeli army has lashed out at the International Committee of the Red 
Cross (ICRC) and Palestinian Red Crescent, whose ambulances were barred from 
entering the camp for six days, from 9 to 15 April. It has accused them of 
refusing to allow the army to search their vehicles, and of smuggling out 
Palestinians posing as wounded. The ICRC has dismissed all these claims as 
nonsense, describing the ban – which violates the Geneva Convention – as 
"unacceptable".

The Israeli army says it bulldozed buildings after the battle ended, partly 
because they were heavily booby trapped but also because there was a danger 
of them collapsing on to its soldiers or Palestinian civilians. But after the 
army bulldozers withdrew, The Independent found many families, including 
children, living in badly damaged homes that were in severe danger of 
collapse.

The thrust of Israel's PR drive is to argue that the Palestinians blew up the 
neighbourhood, compelling the army to knock it down. It is true that there 
were a significant number of Palestinian booby traps around the camp, but how 
many is far from clear. Booby traps are a device typically used by a 
retreating force against an advancing one. Here, the Palestinian fighters had 
nowhere to go.

What is beyond dispute is that the misery of Jenin is not over. There are 
Palestinians still searching for missing people, although it is not clear 
whether they are in Israeli detention, buried deep under the rubble, or in 
graves elsewhere.

Suspicions abound among the Palestinians that bodies have been removed by the 
Israeli army. They cite the Israeli army's differing statements about the 
death toll during the Jenin operation – first it said it thought that there 
were around 100 Palestinian dead; then it said hundreds of dead and wounded; 
and, finally, only dozens. More disturbingly, Israeli military sources 
originally said there was a plan to move bodies out of the camp and bury them 
in a "special cemetery". They now say that the plan was shelved after 
human-rights activists challenged it successfully at the Israeli supreme 
court.

Each day, as we interviewed the survivors, there were several explosions as 
people trod on unexploded bombs and rockets that littered the ruined camp. 
One hour after Fadl Musharqa, 42, had spoken with us about the death of his 
brother, he was rushed to the hospital, his foot shattered after he stepped 
on an explosive.

A man came up to us in the hospital holding out something in the palm of his 
hand. They were little, brown, fleshy stumps: the freshly severed toes of his 
10-year-old son, who had stepped on some explosives. The boy lost both legs 
and an arm. The explosives that were left behind were both the Palestinians' 
crude pipe bombs and the Israelis' state-of-the-art explosives: the bombs and 
mines with which they blew open doors, the helicopter rockets they fired into 
civilian homes.

These are the facts that the Israeli government does not want the world to 
know. To them should be added the preliminary conclusion of Amnesty 
International, which has found evidence of severe abuses of human rights – 
including extra-judicial executions – and has called for a war crimes 
inquiry.

At the time of writing, Israel has withdrawn its co-operation from a 
fact-finding mission dispatched by the UN Security Council to find out what 
happened in Jenin. This is, given what we now know about the crimes committed 
there, hardly surprising. 

Also in Middle 



 

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