The Jenin Massacre of 2002 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Mid-East Realities (MER) via Bill Koehnlein THE JENIN MASSACRE MID-EAST REALITIES - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 4/16/2002: Now the Refugee Camp of Jenin goes down into history with Sabra and Chatilla, Qana, and Deir Yassin...to name just the better-known of the horrendous massacres the Israelis have perpetrated in the past in order to suppress and conquer the Palestinian people. Whether a day of reckoning will eventually come, complete with trials and reparations and "truth and reconciliation commissions" is one of the big unknowns for the future. What is known at this juncture in history is that what the Israelis have now done in still further expanding their military occupation with such terrible bloodshed and destruction has inflamed not only the next generation of Palestinians, but a considerable part of the Arab and Muslim worlds, as well as many others especially in Europe and around the globe. Certainly don't expect the controlled and manipulated American news media to even come close to telling it like it is when it comes to what the Israelis are really doing, and why; not to mention what the U.S. Government is really doing and why. Indeed, it was non-other than media tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman who was the lead speaker at yesterday's massive Israeli Pep Rally on Capitol Hill -- he actually the Chairman of the Israeli-fixated American Jewish umbrella group that arranged it! But the British press, not without its own problems, is nevertheless much more capable of not only presenting the actual facts but providing more appropriate analysis and drawing more appropriate conclusions. The following article links, available also at MER WORLD, provide articles that all should now read and ponder, especially as much more of this is likely still to come if the Israelis aren't stopped one way or another. * AMID THE RUINS OF JENIN, THE GRISLY EVIDENCE OF A WAR CRIME by Phil Reeves in Jenin [The Independent - 16 April 2002]: A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the centre 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 shovelled 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 neighbourhood 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 15,000 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 15,000 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 Merkava tanks, army Jeep patrols, and armoured 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 sanitised 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 by I have found nothing but devastation. Just look for yourself." All had the same message: tell the world. * THE LUNAR LANDSCAPE THAT WAS THE JENIN REFUGEE CAMP by Suzanne Goldenberg in Jenin [The Guardian - Tuesday April 16, 2002] A fortnight ago, before Israeli forces invaded, this was a crowded, bustling place. The narrow alleys between the cinderblock homes -- spanning barely the width of outstretched arms -- were packed with children. Yesterday, the Hart al-Hawashin neighbourhood, the heart of the Jenin refugee camp, was a silent wasteland, permeated with the stench of rotting corpses and cordite. The evidence of lives interrupted was everywhere. Plates of food sat in refrigerators in houses sheared in half by Israeli bulldozers. Pages from children's exercise books fluttered in the breeze. In a ruined house, the charred corpse of a gunman wearing the green bandana of Hamas lay where it fell, beside his ammunition belt. Electric cables snaked through the ruins. Alleys leading off the square deepened the image of wanton destruction: entire sides of buildings gouged out, stripped out to the kitchen tiles like discarded dolls' houses. The scale is almost beyond imagination: a vast expanse of rubble and mangled iron rods, surrounded by the gaping carcasses of shattered homes. Yesterday the first definitive accounts of the battle of Jenin began to emerge as journalists broke through the Israeli cordon and gained access to the heart of the refugee camp. Palestinians describe a systematic campaign of destruction, with the Israeli army ploughing through occupied homes to broaden the alleys of the camp and make them accessible to tanks and vehicles. But they also say the demolition campaign increased dramatically in the last two days of the battle for Jenin, with Israeli bulldozers exacting harsh retribution for the killing of 13 Israeli soldiers last Tuesday. "When the soldiers were killed, the Israelis became more aggressive," said Ali Damaj, who lives on the eastern edge of the camp. "In one night, I counted 71 missiles from a helicopter." For the Palestinians, the battle for the Jenin refugee camp has become a legend. Before the last of the militants surrendered last Wednesday, the camp saw the bloodiest fighting of Israel's offensive on West Bank towns. The brutal close-quarters combat claimed the lives of 23 Israeli soldiers, and an unknown number of Palestinians, civilians as well as fighters. Palestinians accuse Israel of a massacre, and there are convincing accounts from local people of the occasional summary execution. However, there are no reliable figures for Palestinian dead and injured. The Red Cross carried away seven bodies yesterday, but the smell of rotting corpses remained. "The soldiers had a map with them of the houses they wanted bulldozed, and outlined them with a blue marker," said Aisha Salah, whose house overlooks the field of destruction. "You could see the houses, you could see the trees. It was a very detailed map. I could even find my own home." Ms Salah's home was occupied by Israeli soldiers who entered her living room by punching a hole through the neighbour's wall. Before they withdrew, one of the soldiers wrote a message on the wall in neat blue ink: "I don't have another land". A week ago, one of the Israeli soldiers bedded down in Ms Salah's house was shot in the face by a Palestinian sniper as he stood at the window. Two days later, 13 Israeli soldiers were lured to their deaths in a nearby alley by a series of booby trap explosives, and then picked off by Palestinian gunmen. "When there was resistance, especially after the 13 soldiers were killed, I could see a lot more squares on the map," said Ms Salah. The systematic bulldozing of Palestinian homes began four days after Israeli forces blasted their way into the camp on the night of April 3, strafing houses from helicopter gunships, and pounding them with tank shells. Several civilians were killed in the initial assault, including Afif al-Dasuki. An elderly woman, who lived alone, she was evidently too slow when the Israeli soldiers pounded on her door and asked her to open up. Her neighbours discovered her body a week after her death, by the smell of decomposition, huddled behind the yellow-painted steel door, with the large hole in the middle. Four days later, the army razed six houses in the Damaj neighbourhood on its eastern edges. They began with the house of Fatima Abu Tak, flattening homes on both sides of the street, "When I saw the house of Ahmed Goraj collapse, there was a tremendous amount of smoke and dust. I never expected that the bulldozers would continue moving. I was in a state of shock," said Mr Damaj, who fled to a neighbour's when his own home became dangerously unstable. A few hours later, soldiers entered the camp on foot, shooting their way between the cinderblock homes in groups of 15 or 20. Israeli soldiers injured in Jenin describe this as the most nerve-wracking part of the battle. "They booby trapped every centimetre. In one metre you would find 20 small booby traps or a big balloon attached with a wire. Every metre was very dangerous," said Dori Scheuer, who was shot in the stomach by a Palestinian gunman a week ago on Monday. "It was much more dangerous for us than it was for them because they knew the territory." People in the camp say the capability of their fighters did not run much beyond pipe bombs packed with homemade explosives. However, the fighters were organised. Palestinians admit the camp was liberally mined two or three days before the assault. But the strategy failed because Israel had no compunction about razing homes to make roads for its tanks. "The thing we did not count on was the bulldozer. It was a catastrophe. If the Israelis had only gone one by one inside the camp, they would never have succeeded in entering," said Mr Damaj. After the 13 soldiers were killed, Israel appears to have abandoned foot patrols. Instead, the army began knocking houses down indiscriminately, creating a vast plaza of rubble in the centre of the camp, a crossroads for the Israeli tanks. "They just started demolishing with the people inside," said Hania al-Kabia, a mother of six whose flat is on the edge of the lunar landscape. "I used to hear them on the loudspeaker saying come out, come out. Then they stopped doing that, but they went on bulldozing." INSIDE THE CAMP OF THE DEAD - The Times http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-268533,00.html GRISLY EVIDENCE OF WAR CRIMES - The Independent http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=285413 THE LUNAR LANDSCAPE THAT WAS CAMP JENIN - The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,685133,00.html BLASTED TO RUBBLE BY THE ISRAELIS - The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$IWRB3RYAAF115QFIQMGSFF 4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2002/04/16/wmid16.xml&sSheet=/portal/2002/04/16/ixport.html JENIN CAMP SITUATION 'HORRENDOUS' - BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1930000/1930295.stm To subscribe to MER with our compliments email to MERList@MiddleEast.Org with subject SUBSCRIBE ********************************************************************* "The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated." --José Martí ********************************************************************* The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory http://www.toplab.org ********************************************************************* ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytact-04.16.02-22:42:23-4659