Posted on 04/24/2002 1:44:28 PM PDT by tomahawk
Jenin: The soldier's view
By Mike Gallagher
JENIN, West Bank, April 24 (UPI) -- The Israeli army that has been blamed for the killing of possibly hundreds of "innocent civilians" at the Jenin refugee camp is holding fast to its claims that the area was an "armed camp" and that those who operated inside it had spent a considerable amount of time booby trapping and preparing fighting positions for the expected Israeli invasion.
Israeli soldiers who were in the camp have described how Palestinian fighters would fire on them from exposed positions. Fighters would then disappear down a maze of narrow and twisting alleyways and residential buildings, they said. Tanks were too large to go down the tight roads, so the troops would go alone, without protective tank cover.
Snipers would then open up on them from schools and homes where terrified civilians were often found cowering inside.
In one case, a Palestinian fighter made no apparent effort to conceal his position at one of the town's many mosques. He continually fired from the doorway and when the soldiers got close, went inside.
The commander of a tank support unit, suspicious of the fighter's behavior, decided that tear gas was probably a safer option than sending heavily armed soldiers into what looked like an obvious trap.
When the gas went into the mosque, out came scores of choking civilians -- with the masked fighters shooting in their midst. Soldiers gave chase, cornering and arresting several of the gunmen.
But what stunned the Israeli commander was that the mosque had been booby trapped with explosives. Fighters had probably hoped to detonate the explosives once the Israeli troops were inside the mosque, which would have contained terrified civilians.
"I had horrible visions of our bodies lying amongst those of the Palestinians and the whole thing being made to look like we had massacred them in the middle of a firefight," one soldier said in a recent interview.
The second act of "unbelievable madness" the soldier said he witnessed was watching as a Palestinian gunman fired at his platoon from extremely close range, then threw away his rifle and ran toward a group of civilians who were hiding behind a wall.
The fighter crouched behind women and children, holding his hands up and shouting to the army in Hebrew that he was unarmed and not "a terrorist." When the troops stormed his position, the women and children began pelting his men with rocks and bottles and tried to prevent soldiers from arresting the shooter, the soldier said.
When he was finally apprehended, the fighter began quoting the laws of the Geneva Convention on the rights of non-combatants. The officer said he nearly fainted.
"The women accused us of attacking someone who 'had done nothing wrong', and no one saw him firing at us or could tell us where the still warm gun had come from," said the soldier, Danny Hirsch, a 35-year-old reservist from Haifa. "They all claimed to be his wife, sister, daughter and son and said we had planted the weapon on him."
Hirsch said, "We barely had him bound before we began taking sniper (fire) from three different points and dived for cover. He got away, while several of our guys were injured, one almost killed. The snipers fired on us when we were among civilians while in the middle of making an arrest. We couldn't fire back without hitting the civilians, but the snipers obviously didn't care for their own people. Do you see what we were up against?"
There were times when the soldiers found themselves bogged down under withering Palestinian fire that made advancing almost impossible.
"It took us almost eight hours just to secure three buildings. We advanced a little under a hundred yards that day" said Rubi Meisdorf, a reservist who flew back from Berlin when his mother told him he was being called up.
Both sides have told United Press International that at various times the fighting was so heavy that unarmed people "went crazy" and ran out into the fighting.
"When the bulldozers came bearing down over their homes they ran in panic. I saw one going under the wheels of the machine," said one Palestinian woman who lived in the camp. "She ran straight into it."
Little is left of the homes and businesses of those who once lived in the camp. Whole neighborhoods have been erased. In some cases, the bulldozers appear to have gone on a road-widening exercise.
Palestinian witnesses have described seeing Apache gunships destroying buildings from the top down, while bulldozers did it from the ground up. Alert Israeli snipers would pick off anyone who came running out, they said.
"Do you know what we found as we advanced towards the camp?" said Meisdorf. "We found dozens of freshly dug graves, waiting to be filled. That's when we knew we were in for a hard time. They had already booked their places for the way to the next life.
"They were going for broke and it scared the hell out of us. Some of the guys pulled the shovels off from the sides of the tanks and began frantically filling them in, hoping to ward off any bad luck," Meisdorf said. "One of the guys I saw doing it died two days later. It was horrific."
Some of the international observers who have arrived in the camp were stunned by what they saw.
Eyewitnesses said the amount of resources both sides threw into the confrontation was a big indication of what they expected the outcome to be. All or nothing.
All that is left is nothing. The heart of Jenin has been ripped out and crushed as much by the owners as those who surgically wanted to remove it.
The author BS'es when he suggests the IDF threw a lot of its resources into the battle. It used infantry mostly, the least effective means of destroying the terrorists. The idea was minimize civilian casualties, but they could not be avoided when the Islamic Jihadists intentionally fought behind/among them.
More BS is that the "heart of Jenin has been ripped out". Only a small section of Jenin, and as much from the thousands of explosives strung all over the camp by the Jihadists as from the IDF.
When you want to kill something, that is a good way to do it. How many of the homicide bombers came from Jenin?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.