Amnesty, Red Cross Denounce Continuing Israeli Siege Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit [Here, AI and the ICRC are both describing the Israeli behavior during its incursion into Palestinian civilian centers as likely criminal under international law, in the sense of 'the Geneva accords cover this quite specifically.' Earlier this month, AI condemned quite strongly the use of heavy weapons (tanks, belt-fed guns, rockets, etc.) against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli occupation force. The BBC had a remarkable piece of tape last week. One of the people in Jenin is a doctor who normally works with Save the Children (a Christian charity that has people out and about worldwide) but who was home with his wife as she was close to term with their son. During the assault, she delivered, and his son was born sufficiently premature that he needed to be placed in an incubator, in a hospital seven minutes or so from their home by ambulance. Before the isolation of Jenin, seven minutes. During the incursion, far more than a lifetime. For forty-five minutes this doctor worked both to try and get an ambulance brought in for his *infant* and to keep the child alive by artificial respiration. What he needed was pure oxygen and good temperature control, neither of which the Israelis would permit. The boy's father was relatively clear-spoken until he began contrasting his experiences elsewhere in the world, where doctors are routinely able to travel unimpeded across hostile lines when they need to with what he experienced as his son died in his arms, seven minutes from growing up.--PB] The Guardian (UK)-April 23, 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,688959,00.html Israel accused over Jenin assault Red Cross and Amnesty say attack violated Geneva accords by Chris McGreal in Jerusalem and Brian Whitaker The International Committee of the Red Cross yesterday accused Israel of breaching the Geneva conventions by recklessly endangering civilian lives and property during its assault on the Jenin refugee camp, and by refusing the injured access to medical personnel for six days. Amnesty International concurred and called for an investigation on the same basis as the war crimes inquiries in the Balkans. The allegations came as the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, named a fact-finding team to look into the 10 days of fighting in Jenin between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants. It will be led by the former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, who will be joined by Sadako Ogata, former UN high commissioner for refugees, and Cornelio Sommaruga, the ICRC's former head. The Palestinians claim that the Israeli military massacred up to 500 people in the camp. Israel says about 40 people died, plus 23 of its troops. The killing continued in other parts of the occupied territories yesterday as Israeli soldiers shot dead five Palestinians - two in Gaza and three in West Bank villages - and Palestinian militants in Ramallah shot three alleged collaborators with Israel, killing one man. The Israeli army said it arrested a 17-year-old Palestinian woman in Gaza who was on her way to carry out a suicide attack. Last night a Palestinian militia leader and a second man were killed in a helicopter attack in Hebron. The helicopter fired missiles at a car, killing Marwan Zalloum, the commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade militia in the city, residents said. Palestinian security officials said he was on a list of 33 activists the Israelis asked the Palestinians to arrest several months ago. In Bethlehem, heavy gunfire erupted yesterday around the Church of the Nativity, where Israeli troops have been besieging Palestinian gunmen holed up inside in a 20-day standoff, witnesses said. A Palestinian policeman inside the compound told Reuters by telephone: "They're shooting around us from all directions." In Ramallah, the US undersecretary of state, William Burns, met Yasser Arafat for two hours yesterday, but there was no sign of an imminent end to the Israeli siege of the Palestinian leader's offices. Rene Kosirnik, the head of the ICRC delegation in the region, said there was little doubt that Israel had breached interna tional law at the Jenin camp. "When we are confronted with the extent of destruction in an area of civilian concentration, it is difficult to accept that international humanitarian law has been fully respected," he said. "What the law says is that you cannot attack or destroy civilians or civilian property. If you are in a military operation you have to take utmost care. If you suspect that your operation will cause disproportionate damage to civilians or civilian property then you have to stop the operation." Mr Kosirnik said the Israelis also blocked emergency medical aid to the camp for nearly a week after the fighting end ed, while failing to provide care to the wounded. "We were there for six days offering our services and we were refused," he said. "As long as Jenin refugee camp was occupied by the Israeli defence force, the first responsibility lies with the IDF to save lives. It is the responsibility of the force concerned to deliver services, to care for friend and foe. That is the rule." He said the ICRC had two days ago asked the Israelis for equipment to search for survivors and recover the dead, but was awaiting a response. A team of British experts arrived on Sunday with equipment able to detect life in the rubble. An Israeli army spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Olivier Rafowicz, accused the ICRC of pro-Palestinian bias. "The camp became a camp of terrorists," he said. "Civilians are killed when they are used by terrorists as a human shield." But Amnesty International in London backed the ICRC's allegations. "There is sufficient evidence to indicate that there have been serious violations of international law," Dr Kathleen Cavanaugh, a member of Amnesty's investigating team, said. "The question of whether this constitutes war crimes ... is what we want to ascertain." Amnesty alleges that the Israelis gave civilians in the camp no opportunity to flee, and prevented the severely injured from being rescued. Professor Derrick Pounder, forensic pathologist at Dundee University, who visited Jenin hospital, near the camp, for Amnesty, was struck by the absence of severely injured people. Normally the severely injured would outnumber the dead by three to one, he said. "The question to the Israeli army is: where are the severely injured?" he said. "No seriously injured persons arrived at the hospital. We draw the conclusion that they were allowed to die where they were." * [This isn't the audio piece I heard, unfortunately, but describes the situation of doctors outside Jenin trying to get in even after the incursion was officially finished: ] BBC - April 17, 2002 http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1936000/1936204.stm Israel's stranglehold on Jenin Israel is under pressure to say why Jenin is still closed By Tarik Kafala BBC News Online, Nablus About 150 Israeli Arab medics gathered at the main Walajeh checkpoint into Jenin early on Wednesday morning. They hoped to gain access to the city and the Jenin refugee camp which the Red Cross has described as "resembling an earthquake zone". On a hot, dusty day, doctors in clean white smocks, many with stethoscopes at the ready on their necks and their medical cases in hand, milled about the checkpoint for more than two hours. They had a lorry and minibus packed with all kinds of medical supplies. A delegation representing them argued, cajoled, gently harassed and sometimes shouted at the commanding Israel Defence Forces (IDF) officer at the checkpoint to let them through. According to the IDF, the whole of Jenin was again a closed military zone and no one apart from soldiers and settlers who lived beyond the checkpoint was getting through. "There are injured people in there," Dr Mohammed Bakri, one of the party's negotiators, told BBC News Online. "We are told that people are dying from lack of treatment as we speak. Our oath tells us that we must treat the sick and we are going to get through whatever they say. Let them try and stop us. "I used to treat Jews in Kiryat Shmona [Israeli city near Lebanese border] in 1982 when the Katyusha rockets were falling. My oath told me to treat the injured then, and I'm going to do that now. "We have had emergency calls from inside Jenin and we must do something. It's calm in there. They have finished shooting and killing and destroying." Jenin refugee camp was largely reduced to rubble during the Israeli army's offensive in the West Bank. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Wednesday that they were refused permission from the IDF to take earth-moving equipment into the camp. Many are believed to be still buried alive beneath the camp's collapsed buildings. Some of the medics wanted to storm the checkpoint - to walk towards and through it en masse, to see what the soldiers would do. Others were not so keen. From time to time, a chant would break out and banners reading "We want to save the lives of women and children" were made and brandished. Celebration In the middle of this, a group of about 25 Israelis rolled by waving national flags. Wednesday was Israeli Independence Day, a time when Israelis visit army bases to express solidarity with the soldiers. The group, from a kibbutz on Mount Gilboa inside Israel, was led by an older man armed with an M-16 rifle. The Israelis went into the small IDF encampment shaking hands with the soldiers and offering them sweets and cold drinks. "We have come to support our soldiers, our brothers in these days when they can't be at home with their families," said Nitzam Aviram. "To tell you the truth, if we'd known the doctors were here trying to get in we wouldn't have come. Good luck to them." The Israelis sat down in a circle and sang patriotic songs along to two strummed guitars, a mouth organ and hand claps. There was no camp fire, but it would have suited the scene. The increasingly frustrated medics looked on aghast. There was no interaction at all between the groups, each keeping firmly to their side of the road that led to the checkpoint. After about an hour, the Israelis got back into their minibuses and moved off to the next army base in the area. Scuffles Among the Israeli Arab medics, tempers began to fray as arguments with the IDF commander got more and more heated. An Israeli armoured personnel carrier (APC) approached the checkpoint but was blocked by the medics who refused to move. As the carrier nudged forward, driving the medics back, Israeli soldiers moved in to drag the protesters away. A brief scuffle broke out, a few smocks were torn and someone had their glasses crushed underfoot. The APC moved through to chants of "Fascism will not work" but the IDF had made their point and the plan to walk through the checkpoint was dropped. After much discussion, the medics got into their cars, minibuses and a Nazareth Angels Travel Company coach and headed off in a long caravan to a the nearby village of Salem. The caravan climbed to the top of a hill overlooking rolling fields and, about five kilometres away, Jenin. The plan was to set out across the fields by foot carrying the cases of medicine, but within minutes the IDF and Israeli border police arrived on the scene. Apparently the fields between Salem and Jenin were full of Israeli soldiers and the medics were likely to be shot at if they walked down the hill. The negotiations kicked off again. The Israeli border police appeared to be more sympathetic to the medics and their mission. Talks dragged on into the afternoon and at about 1400 a group of 60 medics with as much medicine as they could carry were loaded onto army jeeps and escorted into Jenin. City in turmoil From inside the city, one of the medics, Nimr Hussein, told BBC News Online that the doctors had got into Jenin but not its refugee camp. They were able to treat hundreds of people and deliver their medicine to the city's hospital. "There are people in the city looking for their relatives,"said Mr Hussein said. "There are children looking for their parents. Everybody is asking me for news of people I have never heard of. "People are picking through the rubble of their houses looking for the dead. There are many injured people who have not been able to get to the hospital. "We found a 20 or 25-year-old man who had a bullet wound in his side, and two bullets in his hand - still there after 10 days. We got him escorted to the nearest hospital, in Afula, in Israel. He will have his hand amputated. "We are treating many light injuries. Those who were seriously injured have died already." The medics were unable to get into the refugee camp, and were taken out of the city by the IDF at 1630. They left cases of medicine with the Israeli army, in the hope that they would be given to medics in the camp who may have survived ================================================================= 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 ================================================================= nytmid-04.23.02-05:45:17-27137