Jenin: the bloody truth

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."

You think and write like a Nazi. This is the way Hitler talked. Others only understand brute force. We, the superior race, will dominate the lesser races and bring a new world order into being. Right out of their playbook.

Well, it didn't take long for a Jew-baiter to show up, did it? The fact is, this story differs in several details from the one that was published in the Washington Post. Indeed, it differs mightily from the account of the interviews with the IDF troops that was published in The Guardian, of all papers, two days ago.

Tell me, the IDF is primarily a reservist army. Most of them are civilians in uniform. Many of them are on leave now. Why haven't any IDF troopers bared their souls to Ha'aretz or Ma'ariv, two reliably Labour papers (and backers of Peres)? Eh? Where are the IDF guys with any conscience? Why haven't they stepped forward?

Might it be because most of the Pallie stories are lies? The Namal and Golani brigades are regular troops. The reserve battalion, however, those were regular Joes. They would have told all of Israel by now if a massacre had happened, or if Arab families had been held hostage. But they haven't, because it didn't happen.

You're seriously expecting us to buy into Pallie massacre stories simply because they tell the international press and the delegation of U.N. gauleiters what they want to hear? That the Israelis are a bunch of evil, fascist animals who can't wait to start up their own chain of death camps?

You expect us to believe stories in which not one Pallie has any story of the Israelis behaving humanely? Sorry pal, but we've all seen how Goebbels and Streicher used to operate. We're not buying.

I'm not saying that two or three guys, perhaps more, might have cracked and killed civilians, especially amongst the reserve troops. That definitely happened. You'll notice, however, that the reporter gave short shrift to IDF reports that the Pallies had used plumbing mines, trashcan bombs, and alleyways with interlocking fields of fire.

There's also another aspect of this story that strikes me as suspicious. Nablus' casbah fell to regular Israelis who advanced from house to house by way of blowing holes in the walls of houses. IDF troops, towards the end of the battle, specifically mentioned that they did not do this in Jenin and they were complaining bitterly that reserve troops had been sent in there who had no idea about how to handle urban warfare. I specifically remember several junior officers going on about how they lost too many reservists because they weren't using proper tactics. They were going door-to-door, and did not have the plastique or semtex with them to blow out the walls. Only the regulars went in that way.

Your whole assertion is that the Israelis intentionally and with malice aforethought violated the fourth Geneva convention. You haven't proved a thing, and indeed, have proven far less than the latter day Julius Streicher who wrote this story.

You asserted, as if proven, that the Israeli actions were evil. No, they were not. They were the justifiable actions of citizen-soldiers attempting to defend their homeland and people against terrorist gangsters.

The war of the IDF is the same as our war. The American people understand that, and have seen through the web of lies spun by the PA talking heads.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

Excellent pictures... too bad they came late in the thread. They indeed put the lies to rest.

Put it into perspective, Palestinian terrorists apparantly killed more people between the Sbarro's pizza bombing and the Passover meal bombing than were killed by the IDF in this hard faught battle against armed militants and boobie trapped terrorist factories.

The difference, of course, is that the Palestinian terrorists targeted and murdered innocent civilians, whereas the IDF went after militants who chose to stay behind to protect their bomb making factories and weapons caches. The innocent Palestinians had plenty of time to flee, as most of them did. The innocent Jews were murdered without warning.

Yet you wouldn't know it from the media convulsions, lies and distortions... esp out of the European press. The leftists are truly sick puppies for their lack of moral clarity, and their immoral equivalences, but they are getting their due. In the French Presidential election held today, the two rightist candidates made it to the second ballot, pushing all the lefists and socialists off. France now will have to choose between a center-right leader and a far-right populist racist. Must be driving the leftists/socialists bonkers. Jospin, the socialist, has resigned from politics completely. They have done this to themselves.

Ah, so now our friend from the Cour de L'ene, Idaho branch of the American White People's Totenkopfverbande ("Das Reich" Chapter) decides to lie straight to our faces. To wit:

It's not "Jew-baiting" to point out you think like a Nazi. I refer to your recommendation that maybe it might be necessary to kill around a million Arabs--but hey, so what?

Dear lying Hitlerjugend. At what point, AT WHAT POINT, G*DDA#*IT, DID I SAY OR WRITE THAT IT MIGHT BE NECESSARY TO KILL A MILLION ARABS?

You lied. You deliberately lied. And both of us know it. Cite the post in which I advocate killing a million Arabs. I demand that you do so, immediately. You can't, and you know it.

On a much lighter note, how was "strength through joy" for your crowd last summer?

I'm sure you folks had great fun.

Just so the superior beings like yourself and those you favor conquer the region and establish a world order.

Again, another lie.

You National Socialists just can't stop lying, can't you? When did I advocate world conquest in the name of Christendom? Would you kindly demonstrate for the rest of the viewers on this thread when I posted such an opinion?

You can't, can you? The more you lie, the smaller you look.

Now I hate to change the subject, but what are you going to do this summer?

I thought so. Don't forget to burn those Torah scrolls. Got to keep up with the French, you know.

The last time somebody thought like this fifty million people died.

Oh, you'd be talking about Chairman Mao. He was responsible for the death of sixty million Chinese, give or take a few million. Sorry, I don't think like Mao. Gotta swim the Yangtze, now....

Whatever you have to say after that is not worth listening to.

Oh, isn't this rich! You set up a bogus argument made up of a combination of Palestinian lies, half-truths, Fleet Street hyperbole, and your own fine mixture of errant balderdash, then run away, run away as fast as you can all the while claiming that I'm not worth listening to!

You cheap little clown! You can't get away with that! You can't just drop an intellectual turd in the middle of cyberspace and pretend that it's my turd. You just can't LIE, and then pretend that it is my argument that is in error, as you did just now.

It's all predictable anyway: Arabs evil, Israelis good.

Actually, it's more complicated than that: Arabs-witless followers of any self-important charlatan who promises to lead them over the nearest cliff, as long as said charlatan is really baiting the Jew.

Israelis: too smart to fall for that bullcrap.

Arabs: attend madrassas and other institutions of higher learning so that they might lead the Arab world into the radiant future, also known as the Ninth Century.

Israelis: working on high-energy physics even as we speak. Filthy, money-grubbing Jews!

Hate to interrupt, Feenian, but did you give to the Winter Relief?

Give till it hurts!

But let's not stop there, my Arafat-believing friend.

Arabs lie, Israelis tell truth.

Actually, both lie and both tell the truth from time to time. For instance, when an Arab says, "Boy, that Hitler, he sure was a swell guy. He should have Finished the Job, by the way! Have you ever read 'The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion'? Wow, that really opened my eyes! Jews drink the blood of Arab babies at Purim.", he's telling the truth, at least by his lights.

When an Israeli says, "We never spy on the United States.", he is lying.

Arabs kill the innocent deliberately, Israelis sell cookies for the girl scouts. Yada yada yada.

Actually, Arab terrorists kill the innocent deliberately. Or was that Seder atrocity merely a figment of my fevered imagination? "Geez, I wouldn't put it past those crafty Jews to have blown themselves up just to make the AyRabs look bad!"

Israelis tend to kill the innocent by accident. Those who actually murder probably end up before a general courts martial, kind of like here in the states.

As to the Israeli Girl Scouts, they tend to end up in the Israeli Army.

Now that you've been thoroughly horsewhipped, Newbie, just remember one thing; try not to lie about what your opponents are writing. As you can see, I don't take too kindly to it, and neither does anyone else here at Free Republic. That crap might work over at DemocraticUnderground.com, however. Why don't you go over there? They're so pro-Pallie that I'm sure you'll feel at home there. Maybe you can participate in the group "Synagogue Raid and Kaffee Klatsch" that they're having there this weekend.

And see if you can come up with some better propaganda next time. The usual stuff from those intellectual gangsters over at The Independent and The Guardian is starting to get old.

Oh yeah, and enjoy "Summer Camp in Idaho".....

Be Seeing You,

Chris

I was the one who said that " We may need to kill a couple of million in order to make our point but probably not." in post #7.

I was refering to the fact that Arabs can't govern themslves except with brutaly repressive regimes.

The US is responsible for giving them independence. They are ingrates and blame us for all of their failures because we let them. Now our very civilization is threatened because of the weapons of mass destruction that they will eventually have. What do you think that these barbarians would do if they had nukes ?

It's time to take over again to protect them from themselves and the entire world. The experiment of allowing Arab self rule has failed.

If we have to kill a couple of million to get the job done then so be it but that wouldn't be necessary.

I've been in your shoes many times on freep. One of the good things about freep is that we can expess views that don't conform to the majority of the posters opinions. I appreciate someone being willing to argue with me. If it weren't for people chalanging our beliefs this site would be a boring waste of time.

Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular need brutal repressive rule. They can't live with anything else.

As soon as we make if very clear that Arab governments will be removed from power if they don't crack down hard on their anti-American press islamic fundamentalists we can start to correct the probelms in the middle east without having to take over the whole place or killing millions. It wouldn't take that in any case because they wouldn't resist that much.

Removing Sadam in a very aggressive way and setting up a puppet government with an American bayonett in his back would probably be enouph and would be relatively easy.

We need to put the 400 billion military budget to good use. Right now we're wasting about 350 billion of it while America and the civilized world is under a very real an serious threat.

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