"Ariel Sharon is a strong and forceful man and has never equivocated in his public declarations nor deviated from his ultimate purpose. His rejection of all peace agreements that included Israeli withdrawal from Arab lands, his invasion of Lebanon, his provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the destruction of villages and homes, the arrests of thousands of Palestinians and his open defiance of President George W. Bush's demand that he comply with international law have all been orchestrated to accomplish his ultimate goals: to establish Israeli settlements as widely as possible throughout occupied territories and to deny Palestinians a cohesive political existence."
- Former President Jimmy Carter, New York Times, April 21, 2002

USNewsLink/April 21, 2002

GUIDED BY SHARON, ISRAEL IS ON A MURDEROUS RAMPAGE, KILLING ALL WHO GET IN THE WAY. WHO/WHAT WILL STOP ISRAEL?

As Israel continues to expand its war "operation" against Palestinians while simultaneously blaming its aggressive take over of Palestinian occupied territory on its Arab victims, the world is unilaterally condemning it for perpetrating war crimes upon civilian refugees.

Beginning on April 3, 2002, and continuing through to the present date, Israel has forfeited its right to claim the moral high ground in its ongoing war with Palestine by undertaking a wholesale massacre of civilians living in a refugee camp in Jenin in what it called "an operation to rid itself of suicide bombers".

Subsequent to Israel's ignoring calls to withdraw from Jenin and proceeding with the murder of the refugees, the world has condemned Israel's wholesale slaughter of men, women and children.

And in an effort to shift responsibility for its heinous acts, Israeli leaders say it is Palestine's fault that they raided the camp then killed refugees in Jenin with sniper fire, bulldozers, live aerial coordination, and cobra helicopters firing TOW missiles through homes occupied by noncombatants.

WHO IS THE CRIMINAL? SHARON OR ARAFAT?

Israel claims it has a right to defend itself by undertaking acts such as those perpetrated upon civilians in Jenin. But the rest of the civilized world says otherwise.

Following the commission of its war crime, Israel refused to allow UN inspectors into the refugee camp while leaving its victims buried under the rubble and leaving corpses to rot in the streets.

Israel's leaders and commanders have demonstrated to the world that they are bloodthirsty war criminals with an arrogant disregard for international law.

Until Israel completely withdraws from Arab occupied territory, the United States should immediately cut off all aid and support to Israel and demand that Israeli war criminals be brought to justice.

ISRAEL BURIES THE TRUTH OF ITS CRIMES AGAINST NONCOMBATANTS IN JENIN, WHILE PALESTINIANS BURY VICTIMS OF ISRAEL'S RAGE

Left: U.N. workers inspect ruins in the Jenin refugee camp April 17, 2002, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting during the Israeli military incursion into Palestinian West Bank territories.

Right: The Israeli invasion of West Bank cities has included blocking ambulances and medical supplies, detaining paramedics, physicians and nurses and temporarily occupying hospitals. But the doctors and nurses of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC), a non-governmental organization whose mission is to bring medical care to Palestinians who normally couldn't afford it, continue in their tasks.

HISTORY OF JENIN REFUGEE CAMP

Jenin camp was established in 1953, within the municipal boundaries of Jenin on 373 dunums. Most of the camp's residents came from villages which can be seen from the camp and which today lie inside the Green Line in Israel. Many of the refugees still maintain close ties with their relatives in those villages.

While camp residents find employment in the agricultural sector around Jenin, many are still dependant on work inside Israel.

After the redeployment of the Israeli army in 1995, the camp came under Palestinian Authority control.

FACTS FIGURES
The registered refugee population is 13,055 persons;

The United Nations runs two schools in the camp, one for boys (750 pupils) and one for girls (727 pupils);

• There are some 307 families registered as special hardship cases, consisting of 877 beneficiaries;

• Over the past three years, the UN has assisted around 177 poor refugee families with the rehabilitation of their shelters;

• As part of the UN's poverty alleviation program, about 25 youth from poor families were provided with skills training, apprenticeships in marketable skills.

Above: A Palestinian child is shown picking through the dead bodies and rubble in Jenin refugee camp Friday, April 19, 2002.

That, he said, was not enough time to save his 38-year-old son Jamal, paralyzed from the neck down since a childhood accident.

"We begged and screamed for help to carry him out but the Israelis went ahead and knocked the house down on top of him," Fayed said as he stood vigil amid the wreckage, waiting for an ancient farm tractor to come and dig out the corpse.

Above: Palestinian women refugees at Jenin lost their homes, relatives, everything.

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF MASSACRE IN JENIN

AN AMERICAN ACTIVIST GIVES THE FIRST UNACCOMPANIED EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT FROM INSIDE THE CAMP; UNLIKE REPORTERS, HE WAS NOT LED BY THE ISRAELI MILITARY

Date: 4/15/2002
Palestinian medics accompanied by Israeli troops began searching for bodies in Jenin refugee camp this morning, as Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat conditionally accepts an Israeli proposal for a Middle East peace conference led by the United States. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has proposed Arafat be excluded.

Palestinians charge that the Israeli military has killed hundreds of people in the camp, although this weekend, the Israeli military reduced the number of Palestinians it says died in the conflict down from hundreds to only dozens. International humanitarian organizations are still trying to establish how many people had been killed; how many are still lying wounded, and how many are buried beneath the rubble.

Over the weekend, the stories of death and destruction continued to seep out of Jenin refugee camp, which was once home to 15,000 Palestinians. Those who escaped describe how camp residents leapt from window to window to escape the advancing bulldozers; how some survived beneath the rubble, and called from mobile phones; how some people were cut in half by tanks.

The Israeli army continues to deny these reports, saying that no atrocities have occurred, and that the dead were "terrorists" killed in fighting. According to Jenin municipality authorities, two-thirds of the homes inside the camp have either been flattened or rendered uninhabitable. They say there are about 5,000 people still inside the camp, surrounded by tanks and snipers.

Several convoys of ambulances drove through the alleys of the camp this morning, a day after the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the Israeli military plan to bury most of the bodies from the camp in an Israeli cemetery and insisted the Red Cross monitor the gathering of the corpses.

After banning reporters from the camp throughout the battle, the Israeli military escorted a group of journalists through the camp on Sunday. The official convoy of reporters saw only one body. But this morning, a group of eight international activists made it inside the camp, after facing off with Israeli soldiers, and they have a different story to tell.

Mohammed Abu Ghali, the director of Jenin's main hospital, said that 22 bodies have been recovered, some brought out during the first days of fighting, others only now being discovered. His workers removed a shapeless, fly-swarmed clump of brownish matter, the remains of a body crushed under the treads of a tank.

A five-hour walk through the camp on Wednesday, from its southeastern edge to its northwestern corner, yields some evidence of this precision. The outline of a corpse and part of a leg – the remains of a fighter, judging from a military-style vest nearby – lie in a room blackened by an apparent missile strike.

But there are also signs of a much more blunt-edged approach. In at least three neighborhoods, spaces ranging in size from half a football field to four times that area have been flattened to rubble by Israeli munitions and bulldozers.

The Israelis say the demolition was carried out to make way for tanks and armored personnel carriers to reach areas of the camp where Palestinian fighters were holed up. Some residents report that the Israelis used loudspeakers to tell people to flee houses that were about to be destroyed, but others say the demolitions commenced without warning.

Palestinian Red Crescent Society, is trying to aid the wounded in the camp. In the wake of an eight-day battle that left scores of people dead, it seems obvious that many injured Palestinians need help. But along with the body count, the fate of the wounded is unclear. There are hardly any. Mr. Dabrowski says the Red Crescent may have located "one or two, but I can't even say that for sure."

Some may have died for lack of treatment, especially because Israel barred or inhibited aid workers from the camp for nearly a week after the fighting all but ended. Others may be in hiding, fearful of seeking treatment as long as Israeli soldiers are in the area. With Israel's pull-out, they may appear. "It may just be that we have to find them," Dabrowski says.

A British forensic expert who has gained access to the West Bank city of Jenin says evidence points to a massacre by Israeli forces.

Prof Derrick Pounder, who is part of an Amnesty International team granted access to Jenin, said he has seen bodies lying in the streets and received eyewitness accounts of civilian deaths.

The Dundee University expert said the Amnesty investigation has only just begun but Palestinian claims of a massacre were gaining foundation as the team continued its analysis.

He said: "The truth will come out, as it has come out in Bosnia and Kosovo, as it has in other places where we've had these kinds of allegations.

"I must say that the evidence before us at the moment doesn't lead us to believe that the allegations are anything other than truthful and that therefore there are large numbers of civilian dead underneath these bulldozed and bombed ruins that we see."

The professor said recovering the bodies would be difficult because many buildings collapsed during bombardment.

He said: "We know there are families who were there and killed and buried.

"We were on the ruins yesterday and two elderly men came forward, each of them pointed to where their houses had been and one of them told us that 10 members of his family were buried under the rubble."

'Beyond belief'

He said post mortems on two bodies had "given cause for suspicion" and there was "extensive damage" to Jenin.

An area of the town the size of several football pitches has been flattened.

Prof Pounder was speaking as Israeli forces began to pull out of Jenin and the town of Nablus.

A United Nations special envoy described the the devastation as "horrific beyond belief".

Terje Roed-Larsen, who visited the Jenin refugee camp on Thursday, criticised Israel for not allowing rescue teams in after the battle with Palestinian gunmen.

Israeli officials reversed a ban on the Amnesty team entering the Jenin refugee camp and government hospital on Wednesday.

Amnesty had considered legal action against the Israeli Government over the ban.

Israel 'fighting for its life'

Israeli forces moved into the Jenin camp on 3 April, saying it was a hotbed of Palestinian militancy and declaring it a closed military zone.

Zalmon Shoval, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, defended Israel's actions, saying it was fighting for its life.

"Mr Larsen has no business whatsoever to tell us what is right or wrong," he told the BBC.

Palestinians claim hundreds of bodies are buried beneath the rubble, but Mr Shoval said only about 65 bodies had been recovered, of which five were civilians.

By Asma Rashid, DAWN (Pakistan),
28 June 2002

On May 31, Israel's widely circulated newspaper Yediot Aharonot published a chilling account of what actually happened in Jenin after it was stormed by Israeli air and ground forces last April.

It described how an army reservist Moshe Nissim - a frustrated, drunken, fanatic football fan and a habitual troublemaker - was told to drive a 60 ton armoured demolition bulldozer, with only two hours' training, straight into the congested Jenin refugee camp, where more than half of its residents were under 18 years of age.

The funny bit is, he told Aharonot, I didn't even know how to operate the D-9. I have never been an operator. But I begged them to give me a chance to learn.

Before we went into Shekhem (Nablus), I asked some of the guys to teach me. They sat with me for two hours. They taught me how to drive forward and make a flat surface.

This is what happened in Jenin as well. I have never demolished a house before, or even a wall. I got into the D-9 with a friend of mine, a Yemenite.

In the Jenin refugee camp, he was called, over the military radio Kurdi Bear - 'Kurdi' because this was the name he insisted upon and 'Bear' after the D-9 he was driving. He tied a flag of his home football team on his bulldozer vowing to turn the camp into a stadium.

The moment I drove the bulldozer into the camp, something switched in my head. I went mad. All the desperation, caused by my personal condition, just vanished at once. All that remained was the anger over what had happened to our guys. Till now I am convinced, and so are the rest of us, that if we were let into the camp earlier with all our might, twenty four soldiers would not have been killed in this camp.

His first mission was 'to open a track inside the camp' to bring food supplies for the Israeli soldiers. What is 'opening a track'? he asks and explains: You erase buildings on both sides. There is no other choice, because the bulldozer was much wider than their alleys. But I am not looking for excuses or anything. You must 'shave' them. I didn't give a damn about demolishing their houses, because it saved the lives of our soldiers....

I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9, just so that our soldiers won't expose themselves to danger. This is why I didn't give a damn about demolishing all the houses I've demolished - and I have demolished plenty....

He filled the bulldozer till the roof, and drove it right up to the door of their post so that they would not have to take even one step outside their shelter and expose themselves to harm. You could not tell where the charges were. They (the Palestinian fighters) dug holes in the ground and planted charges....

But they posed no danger to him. Even 80 kilos of explosives only rattled the bulldozer's blade. It weighs three and a half tons. It's a monster. I was willing to do with my bulldozer anything they would ask for. I begged for work. 'Let me finish another house, open another track,'I would say.

Do you know how I held out for 75 hours? I didn't get off the bulldozer. I had no problem of fatigue, because I drank whisky all the time. I had a bottle in the bulldozer at all times. I had put them in my bag in advance. Everybody else took clothes, but I knew what was waiting for me there, so I took whisky and something to munch on. Clothes? Didn't need any. A towel was enough....

Difficult? No way. You must be kidding. I wanted to destroy everything. I begged the officers, over the radio, to let me knock it all down; from top to bottom. To level everything. It's not as if I wanted to kill. Just the houses. We didn't harm those who came out of the houses we had started to demolish, waving white flags. We screwed just those who wanted to fight.

No one refused an order to knock down a house. No such thing. When I was told to bring down a house, I took the opportunity to bring down some more houses; not because I wanted to - but because when you are asked to demolish a house, some other houses usually obscure it, so there is no other way. I would have to do it even if I didn't want to. They just stood in the way....

For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. Any house that they fired from came down. And to knock it down, I tore down some more. They were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I come, but I gave no one a chance. I didn't wait. I didn't give one blow, and wait for them to come out. I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. Others may have restrained themselves, or so they say. Who are they kidding? Anyone who was there, and saw our soldiers in the houses, would understand they were in a death trap. I thought about saving them. I didn't give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn't just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders.

Many people were inside the houses we sought to demolish. They would come out of the houses we were working on. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. and I didn't see house falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses, but it was difficult to see, there was lots of dust everywhere, and we worked a lot at night. I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn't mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down....

I had plenty of satisfaction. I really enjoyed it. I remember pulling down a wall of a four-story building. We would go for the sides of the buildings, and then ram them. If the job was too hard, we would ask for a tank shell.... On Sunday (April 14), after the fighting was over, we got orders to pull our D-9s out of the area and stop working on our 'football stadium', because the army didn't want the cameras and the press to see us working. I was really upset, because I had plans to knock down the big sign at the entrance of Jenin - three poles with a picture of Arafat. But on Sunday, they pulled us away before I had time to do it.

I had lots of satisfaction in Jenin, lots of satisfaction. It was like getting all the 18 years of doing nothing - into three days. The soldiers came up to me and said: 'Kurdi, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot'.

No one expressed any reservations against doing it. Not only me. Who would dare speak? If anyone would as much as open his mouth, I would have buried him under the D-9. This is the reason I didn't mind seeing the hundred by hundred we've flattened. As far as I am concerned, I left them with a football stadium, so they can play. This was our gift to the camp....

After the publication of the story - and in spite of it - the unit to which the man belongs received from the army command an official citation for outstanding service.

When after a three-week total news blackout, the UN and International Red Cross officials were allowed to enter Jenin, they were appalled by the sight of the devastated camp. Pictures of a vast grey wasteland that only days before was home to thousands of Palestinian refugees sent shock waves around the world and the UN Security Council was forced to pass a unanimous resolution on April 20 asking the secretary-general to dispatch a fact-finding commission. But though Israel had initially acquiesced to the inquiry, it refused to allow the commission to enter Jenin, and on May 4, Kofi Annan who as late as on April 29 had expressed his resolution to proceed with the inquiry, quietly dissolved the commission, apparently under strong American pressure.

Since then Israeli forces have vandalized again and again the ruined, bleeding camp, with the world community looking the other way. America's reluctance to allow an inquiry mission into Jenin is understandable as it could evoke certain ugly memories of the 1991 Gulf War. As revealed months after the war ended, the US Army division that broke through Iraqi defensive frontline on the second day of the ground offensive, had used ploughs mounted on tanks and combat earth removers to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers - some still alive and firing their weapons - in more than 70 miles of trenches. After the first wave of bulldozers had incapacitated the Iraqi defenders, a second wave filled the trenches with sand, ensuring that none of the wounded could survive.

However, it has not inhibited the US from carrying out some discreet fact-finding on its own with an eye to the next mass air and ground offensive it proposes to launch against Iraq. According to a special report published by WorldTribune.com dated June 6, the US marine Corps and Israeli military commanders are studying the capture of the Palestinian refugee camp outside the West Bank city of Jenin. The Marines - struggling to reduce casualties in urban warfare simulations - want to learn from the Israeli experience in urban warfare and the recent massive search-and-destroy operations for the Palestinian freedom fighters in West Bank.

Lt. Col. Dave Booth who oversees the Marine Corps-Israeli defence force exchanges told the US Marine Corps Times: We're interested in what they are developing, especially since Sept. 11. We're interested in their past experience in fighting terrorism. So there's a lot of things we could learn from them. The weekly said the marine war fighting laboratory plans to revise the corps' urban warfare doctrine after an examination of Israeli tactics. This includes adapting Israeli methods in the deployment of air and armour in urban areas. According to the report, America also sent a delegation from the joint chiefs of staff last month to review Operation Defensive Shield, the term used for the month-long offensive against the Palestinians.

ADDITIONAL READING:

U.N. press release regarding Jenin massacre

In Rubble of a Refugee Camp, Bitter Lessons for 2 Enemies

U.S. Official at Jenin Sees 'Terrible Human Tragedy'

Israel Reluctantly Allows U.N. Fact-Finding Mission

UN backs mission to probe Jenin siege