User:Tiamut/Jenin

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 * Volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement noted that two corpses in the hospital morgue remained unidentified and unclaimed by any family. They also reported that one of the first international aid workers to enter the camp found a foot in the rubble, whose size indicated it belonged to a child of about six, but that there was no corpse to match it.

Battle aftermath
thumb|right|Aerial photograph of the area demolished in the Jenin camp's central Hawashin district. The battle ended on April 11. The IDF announced that it would not withdraw its troops from the Jenin camp until it had collected the bodies of the Palestinian dead. The army would not confirm Palestinian reports that dozens of bodies had been removed in military trucks, nor would it comment on whether or not there had been burials. Medical teams from Canada, France, and Italy, as well as UN and ICRC officials, with trucks carrying supplies and water waited outside the camp for clearance to enter for days, but were denied entry, with Israel citing ongoing military operations. The first independent observers were granted access to the camp on April 16. Israeli troops began withdrawing from the camp itself on April 18. Tanks ringed the perimeter of the camp for a few more days, but by April 24, Israeli troops had withdrawn from the autonomous zone of Jenin.

Removal of bodies
According to Haa'retz, some of the bodies had already been removed from the camp by soldiers to a site near Jenin on April 11, but had not yet been buried. Others were said to have been buried by Palestinians during the battle in a mass grave near the hospital on the outskirts of the camp. On the evening of April 11, footage of refrigerator trucks waiting outside the camp to transfer bodies to "terrorist cemeteries" was shown on Israeli TV. On April 12, Ha'aretz reported that, "'The IDF intends to bury today Palestinians killed in the West Bank camp ... The sources said two infantry companies, along with members of the military rabbinate, will enter the camp today to collect bodies. Those who can be identified as civilians will be moved to a hospital in Jenin, and then on to burial, while those identified as terrorists will be buried at a special cemetery in the Jordan Valley.'"

The same day, in response to a petition presented by the Adalah organization, the Israeli High Court ordered the IDF to stop removing the bodies of Palestinians killed in battle until a hearing was held on the matter. MK Ahmed Tibi, one of many signatories to the petition before the court, said that removing the bodies from the city violated international law and was, "intended to hide the truth from the public about the killing that occurred there." Following the court's decision, issued by Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, the IDF stopped clearing the bodies from the camp. It was reported that by the afternoon of April 13, the IDF had determined the location of 23 bodies in the camp which were marked on maps. On April 14, the Supreme Court reversed its decision, and ruled that the bodies could be removed by the IDF. IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz confirmed to Israeli media on April 14 that the army intended to bury the bodies in the special cemetery.

On April 15, humanitarian aid organizations were granted access to the camp for the first time since the invasion had begun. Palestinian Red Crescent Society and International Committee of the Red Cross staff entered the camp, accompanied by the IDF. Officials from the Red Crescent told lawyer Hassan Jabareen that the IDF did not allow them to move around the camps freely, and that advanced decomposition, as well as the enormous destruction in the camp made it impossible to find and retrieve bodies without the proper equipment. That same day, Adalah and LAW, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, filed a petition, asking the Court to order the IDF to immediately hand over the bodies of Palestinians to the Red Cross or the Red Crescent, claiming that the bodies of dead Palestinians were being left to rot in the camp. On April 19, a day after Israeli troops withdrew from the camp, journalists reported counting about 23 bodies that were lined up on the outdoor grounds of the clinic, before being quickly buried by Palestinians. Tanya Reinhart notes that later Israeli media reports attempted to conceal and reinterpret their intention to transfer the bodies to the special cemetery in the Jordan Valley. As an example, she cites a July 17, 2002 article by Ze'ev Schiff in Ha'aretz which provided a wholly different explanation for the presence of the refrigerator trucks posted outside the city on April 11. Schiff's article said: "Toward the end of the fighting, the army sent three large refrigerator trucks into the city. Reservists decided to sleep in them for their air-conditioning. Some Palestinians saw dozens of covered bodies lying in the trucks and rumors spread that the Jews had filled the trucks full of Palestinian bodies."

Damages
The BBC reported that ten percent of the camp was, "virtually rubbed out by a dozen armoured Israeli bulldozers." David Holley, a Major in the British Territorial Army and a military adviser to Amnesty International, reported that an area within the refugee camp of about 100m by 200m was flattened. According to Stephen Graham, the IDF had systematically bulldozed an area measuring 160 x 250m in the Jenin refugee camp. The Hawashin neighbourhood was levelled. Many residents had no advance warning, and some were buried alive.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) said 4,000 people were rendered homeless as a result of the IDF incursion. HRW listed 140 buildings, most of which housed multiple families, as completely destroyed, and 200 other buildings as sustaining damage rendering them uninhabitable or unsafe for use. AI said complete destruction affected 164 houses with 374 apartment units, and that other buildings had been partially destroyed. Israel said those numbers were exaggerations.

On May 31, 2002 the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published an interview with Moshe Nissim, nicknamed "Kurdi Bear", a D-9 operator who took part in the battle. Nissim said he had driven his D-9 for seventy-five hours straight, drinking whiskey to avoid fatigue, and that apart from a two-hour training before the battle, he had no prior experience in driving a bulldozer. He said he had begged his officers to let him destroy more houses and added: "I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. and I didn't see house[s] falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all."

Casualties
Reporting of casualty numbers during the invasion varied widely and fluctuated day to day. On April 10, the BBC reported that Israel estimated 150 Palestinians had died in Jenin, and Palestinians were saying the number was far higher. That same day, Saeb Erekat, on a phone interview to CNN from Jericho, estimated that there were a total of 500 Palestinians killed during Operation Defensive Shield, this figure also including fatalities outside of the Jenin camp, in other areas of the West Bank. On April 11, Ben Wedeman of CNN reported that Palestinians were reporting 500 dead, while international relief agencies were saying possibly as many as 200; he noted that his efforts to independently verify the claims had so far come to naught since people were being prevented from entering the camp by Israeli soldiers.

On April 12, Brigadier-General Ron Kitri said on Israeli Army Radio that there are apparently hundreds of Palestinians killed in Jenin. He later retracted this statement. Secretary-General of the Palestinian Authority, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, said that thousands of Palestinians had been killed and buried in mass graves, or lay under houses destroyed in Jenin and Nablus. On April 13, Palestinian Information Minister, Yasser Abed Rabbo, accused Israel of digging mass graves for 900 Palestinians in the camp. On April 14, Ha'aretz reported that the exact number of Palestinian dead was still unknown, but that the IDF placed the toll between 100 and 200. On the same day, Israel Insider reported that the IDF gave a final figure of 45 casualties. On April 18, Zalman Shoval, adviser to Sharon, said that only about 65 bodies had been recovered, five of them civilians. On April 30, Qadoura Mousa, director of the Fatah for the northern West Bank, said the number of dead was fifty-six.

Based on figures provided by the Jenin hospital and the IDF, the UN placed the death toll at 23 Israeli soldiers, noting that only 52 Palestinian deaths could be confirmed, half of whom were thought to be civilians. In 2004, Haaretz journalists Amos Harel and Avi Isacharoff wrote that 23 Israelis had died and 52 had been wounded; Palestinian casualties included 53 dead, hundreds wounded and about 200 captured. According to retired IDF General Shlomo Gazit, the death toll was 55 Palestinians and 33 Israels.

Human Rights Watch documented 22 civilian killings during the IDF incursion, and said that "Many of them were killed willfully or unlawfully, and in some cases constituted war crimes." Examples highlighted in the report include the case of 57-year old Kamal Zugheir who was shot and then run over by IDF tanks while in his wheelchair, and that of 37-year old Jamal Fayid, a quadraplegic crushed to death in the rubble of his home after an IDF bulldozer advanced upon it, refusing to allow his family to intervene to remove him.

Massacre allegations
The battle attracted widespread international attention due to allegations that a massacre had been committed. On April 4, The Observer reported that Palestinians called the incident a 'massacre', alleging that houses were bulldozed with families still inside, helicopters fired indiscriminately on a civilian area, and ambulances were prevented from reaching the wounded. A camp resident who worked at the Jenin hospital said: "I saw the Israelis line up five young men with their legs spread and their hands up as they faced a wall. The soldiers then sprayed them from head to toe with gunfire". CNN correspondent, Ben Wedeman, heard stories of bodies being loaded into trucks and driven away, and of bodies being left in the sewers and bulldozed. Palestinian cabinet minister, Saeb Erekat, accused the Israelis of trying to cover up the killing of civilians.

On April 9, Haaretz reported that Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was privately referring to the battle as a "massacre" but the next day, they reported Peres for expressing concerns that "Palestinian propaganda is liable to accuse Israel that a 'massacre' took place in Jenin rather than a pitched battle against heavily armed terrorists". Haaretz editor Hanoch Marmari later said in a lecture that "Some correspondents might have been obsessive in their determination to unearth a massacre in a refugee camp". Mouin Rabbani, Director of the Palestinian American Research Center in Ramallah, cited Peres' alleged statement and his office's decision to establish a PR committee as an indication that a massacre had taken place.

On April 18, Derrick Pounder, a British forensic expert who was part of an Amnesty International team granted access to Jenin, said: "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". In early May, Human Rights Watch completed its report on Jenin. The report said there was no massacre, but accused the IDF of war crimes.

In November, Amnesty International reported that there was "clear evidence" that the IDF committed war crimes against Palestinian civilians, including unlawful killings and torture, in Jenin and Nablus. The report also accused Israel of blocking medical care, using people as human shields and bulldozing houses with residents inside, as well as beating prisoners, which resulted in one death, and preventing ambulances and aid organizations from reaching the areas of combat even after the fighting had reportedly been stopped. Amnesty criticized the UN report, noting that its officials did not actually visit Jenin. The Observer reporter, Peter Beaumont, wrote that what happened in Jenin was not a massacre, but that the mass destruction of houses was a war crime.

In early May, the IDF released a videotape showing what it called "a phony funeral that the Palestinians organized in order to multiply the number of casualties in Jenin". The tape showed six people putting a green sheet on the ground. In the next scene, someone was walking toward the sheet, lying on it before being wrapped inside. The following scene showed a procession of over a dozen people, some of them carrying the body and then dropping it. Then, the dropped person unwraps the sheet and runs away, along with several other participants in the procession. LAW, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights, held a press conference on May 8, disputing the conclusions drawn by Israel. LAW stated that Mohammad Bakri who was in Jenin on April 28, making his documentary film Jenin, Jenin, shot the same footage from the ground, and that it shows a group of children playing "funeral" near the cemetry. LAW added that, "The media uncritically took up the Israeli spokesmen conclusions, without investigating what the footage actually shows."

Harel and Issacharoff wrote that the IDF's misconduct with the media, including Kitri's statement, contributed to the allegations of massacre. Mofaz later admitted that the limitations imposed on the media were a mistake. Head of the Operations Directorate, General Dan Harel, said: "Today, I would send a reporter in every APC".

Lorenzo Cremonesi, the correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in Jerusalem, writes in a 2009 article, that he snuck past the army barricades and entered the Jenin camp on April 13 in 2002. He says the hospital was almost deserted as doctors played cards in the emergency room and that he spoke to 25 lightly wounded patients who told heartrending stories but when asked for names of the dead and urged to show where the bodies were, became evasive. "In short, it was all talk and nothing could be verified," wrote Cremonesi. "At the end of that day, I wrote that the death toll was not more than 50 and most of them were combatants". Cremonesi criticized Israel's exclusion of the media from Jenin and from Gaza during the 2009 war, saying, "If you hide something from me, that means first and foremost that you want to hide it, and secondly, that you have done something wrong."

Israeli military analysis
The Israelis claimed to have found explosive-making labs and factories for assembling Qassam II rockets. One Israeli special forces commander who fought in the camp said that "the Palestinians were admirably well prepared. They correctly analyzed the lessons of the previous raid". General Dan Harel, Head of the IDF Operations Directorate, said "There were indications it was going to be hard, but we didn't think it was going to be so hard". An internal investigation published by the IDF six months after the battle implicitly cast the responsibility for the death of the thirteen soldiers on the soldiers themselves, for straying from their path unreported. It also said that the focusing on the rescue instead of subduing the enemy complicated things. Buchris was given the Chief of Staff citation.

Palestinian militant analysis
Mardawi told CNN from his prison in Israel, that after learning the IDF was going to use troops, and not planes, "It was like hunting ... like being given a prize... The Israelis knew that any soldier who went into the camp like that was going to get killed... I've been waiting for a moment like that for years". After leaving Ramallah on May 14, 2002, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat praised the refugees' endurance and compared the fighting to the Battle of Stalingrad. Addressing a gathering of about 200 people in Jenin, he said: "People of Jenin, all the citizens of Jenin and the refugee camp, this is Jenin-grad. Your battle has paved the way to the liberation of the occupied territories". The battle became known among the Palestinians as "Jeningrad".

UN fact-finding mission
On April 18, as Israeli troops began pulling out of Jenin and Nablus, UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen entered the camp, describing the devastation as, "horrific beyond belief." He also relayed his view that it was "morally repugnant" that Israel had not allowed emergency workers into the camp after the battle with Palestinian gunmen had ended. On April 19, the United Nations Security Council passed a unanimous resolution to send a fact-finding mission to Jenin. Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, that Israel would welcome a UN official "to clarify the facts", saying "Israel has nothing to hide regarding the operation in Jenin. Our hands are clean". Yasser Abd Rabbo, from the PLO's Executive Committee, also welcomed the decision, saying the mission was, "the first step toward making Sharon stand trial before an international tribunal".

The composition of the fact-finding team was announced on April 22. Led by former Finnish President, Martti Ahtisaari, the other two members were Cornelio Sommaruga, former president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (controversial in Israel for previous "Red Swastika" remarks) ), and Sadako Ogata, the former UN high commissioner for refugees who was Japan's special envoy on Afghan reconstruction.

Official Israeli sources expressed surprise that the composition of the team was not discussed with them in advance, adding, "We expected that the operational aspects of the fact-finding mission would be carried out by military experts." On April 22, Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer expressed his disappointment to Annan regarding the make-up of the team, and his hope that the mission would not overstep its mandate. Peres asked Annan to deny reports that the findings would have legal validity, and that the mission would investigate events that took place outside the refugee camp. Annan replied that the mission would only investigate events inside the camp, though interviews with some displaced residents might have to be conducted outside, adding that the findings would not be legally binding.

On April 23, Gideon Saar, the cabinet secretary, publicly threatened to ban the team from entering Jenin. In private discussions, Giora Eiland, Major General and Head of the IDF Operation Branch, convinced Shaul Mofaz that the team would ask to investigate officers and soldiers, and that it might accuse Israel of war crimes, paving the way for the sending of an international force. Eiland and Mofaz's position was accepted by Sharon. Sharon announced Israel's decision the team was no longer acceptable on April 24, citing the lack of military experts on the UN team. Israel also claimed not to have been adequately consulted. The US rebuked Sharon's decision, and a White House official said, "We were the sponsors of that and we want it implemented as written. We support the initiative of the secretary general."

Annan initially refused to delay the mission. Ben-Eliezer justified Israel's refusal to accept it, saying: "In the last month alone, 137 people were slaughtered by Palestinians and nearly 700 wounded. Is there any one who is investigating that?" On April 25, the UN agreed to postpone the arrival of the team by two days, and acceded to an Israeli request that two military officers be added to the team. Annan said the talks with Israel talks had been, "very, very constructive and I'm sure we'll be able to sort out our differences". Peres said that a delay would give the Israeli cabinet the opportunity to discuss the mission before the team arrived. Israeli Government spokesman, Avi Pazner, said that he expected the UN mission to investigate "terrorist activity," and guarantee immunity for Israeli soldiers. Israel Radio reported that Israel was also pushing for the right for both sides to review the team's report before was to be presented to Annan. On April 28, following a lengthy Israeli cabinet meeting, the Communications Minister, Reuven Rivlin, told reporters that the UN had reneged on its commitments to Israel regarding the team, and would therefore not be allowed to access the camp. He expressed the cabinet's view that the composition of the team and its terms of reference made it inevitable that its report would blame Israel. The Security Council was convened to discuss Israel's decision not to grant entry to the UN team. Meanwhile, the AIPAC lobby in Washington was called to pressure Annan and George W. Bush.

On April 30, Annan decided to disband the team, On May 2, the team was disbanded. On May 4, Israel was isolated in an open debate in the Security Council. The deputy US ambassador to the UN, James Cunningham, said it was "regrettable" Israel had decided not to cooperate with the fact-finding team. Nasser Al-Kidwa, the Palestinian observer to the UN, said the council failed to give Annan its full support, and that the council caved in to "blackmailing" by the Israeli Government. The General Assembly passed a resolution condemning Israel's military action in Jenin by 74 votes to four, with 54 abstentions. The Bush administration supported Israel's decision as part of a deal in which Sharon agreed to lift the siege on the Mukataa in Ramallah.

Report
On July 31, the UN issued its report indicating at the time the report was issued 52 Palestinians killed had been verified and it's possible that as many as half of them were civilians. The UN criticized the Palestinians and the Israelis for having exposed civilians to danger. The Israeli Foreign Ministry indicated that the report "repudiates malicious lies". Daniel Taub, a senior Foreign Ministry official, said "There was no massacre, and statements by the Palestinian leadership talking about hundreds of civilians that were killed were nothing more than atrocity propaganda".

The Palestinians disagreed. Erekat said that an "Israeli massacre in Jenin's refugee camp clearly happened" and that "crimes against humanity also took place". Palestinian Planning Minister, Nabil Shaath, said: "I know it does not satisfy everybody ... but still it identifies what happens in Jenin as a war crime against humanity and that is very important". Annan denounced Israel's refusal to admit the UN investigators into the camp but said "I would hope that both parties will draw the right lessons from this tragic episode and take steps to end the cycle of violence which is killing innocent civilians on both sides". He added that "While some of the facts may be in dispute, I think it is clear that the Palestinian population have suffered and are suffering the humanitarian consequences which are very severe".