Jenin, Bethlehem - Sydney Morning Herald Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/04/17/1019020661483.html Sydney Morning Herald - Apr 18, 2002 The guns are silent but cries for help go unheard Amid destruction and the smell of death, Herald Correspondent Paul McGeough reports from Jenin. It was late afternoon and not another soul could be seen in the utter desolation at the heart of the Jenin refugee camp - just the smell of death and a mundane jumble of clothing and household stuff that fluttered in a tangle of steel that used to reinforce the homes in which thousands lived. Suddenly the silence was broken by a voice from just over a crest in the rubble. It was a US reporter, not quite able to believe his own eyes as he briefed his foreign desk by mobile telephone. "It's just like Hiroshima," he said of the frenzied destruction thought to have been wreaked in the last two days of the Israelis' assault on a camp that was home to 15,000 people and to some of the strongest resistance to Israel's control of the West Bank and Gaza. Putting aside politics and war, and the propaganda brawl over how many died in the fighting, this is a disaster zone without an adequate response. The guns have been silent for five days, but desperate voices are still trying to kick-start an emergency operation - heavy-lifting machines, food, water and medicine - that some of the agencies involved said was being made difficult and painfully slow by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). In the Israeli Supreme Court, human rights groups sought an order that would make the IDF hand over bodies that are rotting in the rubble after arguing that the IDF were hindering the search and had reneged on a promise to provide rescue teams and the right digging equipment for the job. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent, overwhelmed by what they have seen, were demanding greater access to the camp where 3000 people still huddle after two weeks, some of them without food and water. In the two days that the ICRC and the PRC have had access to the camp, their emergency response teams have been allowed in for only 6 hours. The United Nations was able to get food to only 20 to 30 per cent of the camp on Tuesday before the rubble mountains, some of which the IDF say could be booby-trapped, blocked its aid convoy from going deeper into the camp. The UN Relief and Works Agency, which is responsible for Palestinian refugees, said it believed that many of the dead had been buried beneath their demolished homes. The IDF denied they were denying access or equipment. "I don't think it's for lack of proper resources," said Captain Jacob Dallal, a military spokesman. "It's the nature of the work ... [and] the assessment is that there are not people in the rubble." When the Herald came upon an obviously distressed foreign aid worker in the camp yesterday afternoon, all he could say was: "This is worse than I believed it would be. Can you imagine anything worse?" But yesterday the most desperate voice was one that cried weakly from under the rubble, "Help, help". Digging with their bare hands, camp residents said they pulled out a young man who they said was a wounded Palestinian fighter who had been trapped in a space in the rubble for at least four or five days. They whisked him to an unidentified part of the camp, to have his bullet wounds treated and to have shrapnel removed from his neck. They said that the building in which he had been hiding had come under missile attack before parts of it were bulldozed by the IDF. Their story bore out the frustration of the ICRC and PRC search for those wounded in the 10-day battle for Jenin. A relief worker said the Palestinians had opted for the risk of treating their wounded in makeshift, back-room first aid posts. This followed the arrest on Monday of a wounded fighter as the ambulance taking him to hospital went through an Israeli checkpoint, and the stationing of tanks and armoured personnel carriers outside local hospitals at which the wounded might seek treatment. Nothing quite prepares you for the reality of the destruction in the camp or for the response of the inhabitants to their loss. The smell of death hangs in the air around some buildings still standing and from sections of the rubble. When the Herald tried to take aid workers to a building in which camp residents said there were five dead men, Israeli soldiers ordered us away at gunpoint. In the rubble at the centre of the camp, reminiscent of pictures of the destruction of Dresden, two human feet protruded from the rubble. And as I spoke to an aid worker in a nearby alley, he pointed out that on the ground, between my feet, was a human foot - which he presumed had been part of a nearby blob that he said was a corpse mangled beyond recognition when it had been run over by an Israeli tank. In one house a gathering of mothers and grandmothers of the next generations of Palestinians were defiant. "Abu Amar! Abu Amar!" they sang, using their affectionate name for Yasser Arafat. "We like him," one of the women said. Asked what the Palestinian response to what had happened might be, she said: "If our big boss can't do anything, what can we do?" Although people were under curfew, Andira Harab, 34, insisted on taking the Herald to the remains of her home, which she said was demolished without warning by Israeli bulldozers. "We just had to run out," she said. Down a swathe of gouged road, a tangle of wires and plumbing on which every building had been peeled open by the bulldozers, the personal and private side of her life was blowing in the breeze - her bathroom with her cosmetics; the toilet; her dust-covered lounge suite and her curtains; a crockery cabinet and a framed reading from the Koran. Across the alleyway, a fridge miraculously stood on a ledge of floor that once was part of her neighbour's kitchen, and a dining suite hung precariously into the roadway. Nearby, artificial flowers dangled in the corner of a room that no longer existed and rows of jars of olives could be seen in a cupboard that used to back on to a wall that is no longer there. Across the camp, the washing machine repair shop was a jumble of tumblers and wrecked masonry; chickens had taken up residence in the bicycle shop; and the hairdresser's had been blown to bits. An orange skirt was blowing in fractured masonry that dangled like a macabre mobile, and a green shirt was caught near where a window used to be. A stack of mattresses was splayed like a hand of cards in what was left of a bedroom. And on a cardboard box half-buried in the rubble there was a label: "Save the Children". Just down from where the leaves of a mulberry tree had been rendered into a fine green dust by a missile, the Star of David had been sprayed on one of the few sets of steel shutters in the area that was not already filled with Palestinian graffiti and posters eulogising those who have died in the conflict: the soldiers carry spray packs to paint directions on walls for those following them. As an aid worker paused to make notes, a camp resident practised her English: "Do you keep a diary," she asked. "No," said the aid worker, "I keep a list of the dead - 13 so far today." All over the camp, there were stories that cannot be verified. Andira Harab told how her brother had been made to strip to the waist and how other young men were stripped naked before they were bound and made to lie on the road, where Israeli soldiers tormented them by stepping on sensitive parts of their bodies before they were taken away. Subheia Abi Sabin, 60, thrust a crying one-year-old at me, complaining that the IDF had ordered the child and his mother to stay in the open without food and nappies for two days. Thahee Amran said that the dowry gold of several women she knew had been stolen during the occupation. But not hers - she lifted her shirt to show it strapped around her midriff. Several residents complained that as the IDF left buildings they had commandeered to use as staging posts during the battle, they had trashed them. They showed smashed crockery and kitchenware, emptied bedroom cupboards, copies of the Koran that had been burnt or shredded, and interior walls seemingly needlessly sprayed with gunfire. And Mohamed Abu Heja told of the family that fled their home as a bulldozer prepared to move in, in their haste leaving behind a 38-year-old son who was confined to a wheelchair. He said: "They pleaded with the soldiers to be allowed to go back to get him, but the bulldozer just moved in on the building." As night fell and the doors were closed against a sky that was periodically alight with brilliant flares fired by the Israelis, Mr Abu Heja's family and neighbours gathered for a sparse meal. But afterwards, with only an oil lamp to light a room that slowly filled with the sweet scent of the water pipe, it quickly emerged that the attack on Jenin, home to more than half of the recent wave of suicide bombers unleashed on Israel, had not caused political discourse to skip a beat. The Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, still was the sadi (abnormal) man; those killed in the conflict were still shahid (martyrs); the camp would be rebuilt; it might take generations, but the Palestinians would win back their land; and, in the meantime, more suicide bombers were likely to be sent into Israel. "Welcome to Palestine - you know this is not Israel, don't you?"one of the women said. pmcgeough@s... * Shooting at the Cross: Jordan Times April 18, 2002 http://www.jordantimes.com/Thu/opinion/opinion1.htm Editorial: Shooting at the cross ISRAELI ATTACKS against the Nativity Churchin Bethlehem are emblematic of the war that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has waged against the Palestinians. The target, one of Christianity's holiest places, speaks volumes of Sharon's barbaric disregard for anything sacred to anyone. The tactics and modus operandi are the same used against any other Palestinian town or village: an entire community -- mostly consisting of Arab and foreign religious men and women in the case of the Nativity Church -- is targeted and hurt in what Israel calls a search for "terrorists??" The number and affiliation of such "terrorists" are, again, unclear. Israel's mighty propaganda machine first fed US television channels with the lie that there were "200 armed Palestinian terrorists" inside the church. A few days later, the "200 terrorists" became 30, and now Israeli spokesmen have again re touched that figure, conceding that some of the armed Palestinians holed up inside the church are policemen. At the beginning of the siege, on April 2, Israel even claimed that priests and nuns were being held hostage by the "terrorists" inside the church -- a pathetic, short-lived lie that was unmasked as soon as the first "hostage" was reached by mobile phone. In Bethlehem like in Ramallah or Nablus, Israeli troops shoot indiscriminately. Unprovoked, they opened fire on old and young, priests and laymen, or whoever they felt like. In the Nativity Church like in the rest of the West Bank, doctors and humanitarian workers were prevented from assisting the wounded and the needy. One badly wounded Palestinian policeman was evacuated by ambulance only five days after he was shot in the abdomen. There have been reports from inside the church of another Palestinian policeman whose leg wound had turned gangrenous. But he is still inside. Israel's utter disregard for the Fourth Geneva Convention ha sobviously not stopped at the threshold of the grotto where Jesus wasborn. On the contrary, Israel even resorted to torture, as if it had notalready accumulated enough violations of humanitarian and human rightslaw over the past 21 days. Siren-like, extremely high-pitched sounds have been played onloudspeakers all around the church over and over, in order to driveout the occupants. But people all over the world know little of all this, as Bethlehem and Manger Square continue to be off-limits to journalists and television cameras. Pope John Paul II called the church himself, on Monday, but hismessage has been reported very differently. He called to send his prayers and thank the priests inside the church for their "Christian testimony," said some reports. "He called to tell us to resist steadfast and not leave the church," said one Franciscan father who spoke to the Pope from inside the Nativity Church. The priest recounted the phone conversation to an Arabic radio station. Secretary of State Colin Powell announced yesterday that US mediation efforts were under way to end the standoff at the church. But whatever mediation efforts will be exerted by regional and international parties to end the siege, the world cannot forget what has already happened in Bethlehem. That Israel has desecrated not only Muslim sites, but also Christian sites. That it has dealt as an aggressor with all the other peoples ofthe Book. ===================================================================== * The Activist * http://activist.cjb.net * http://get.to/activist This is not about the world that we inherited from our forefathers, It is about the world we have borrowed from our children !! ===================================================================== ================================================================= 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 ================================================================= nytmed-04.19.02-04:30:10-16104