25 April - 1 May 2002
Issue No.583
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 25 April - 1 May 2002 Issue No.583 |
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War crime
Despite Israeli claims that they have withdrawn from Jenin, nothing has changed on the ground, Michael Jansen reports from the devastated refugee camp
Only hours after removing its tanks and troops from the West Bank town of Jenin and its refugee camp, the Israeli army reinforced its siege on the area. Soldiers blocked access to checkpoints on the main roads and bulldozed mounds of earth across back routes. Then troops took up positions at strategic vantage points on the barricades. Cars packed full with returning refugees and their household goods were marooned, forcing families to drag everything home on foot.
I walked into the camp with a student from Bir Zeit University who was arrested when Israel reoccupied Jenin. He was held for three days and then dumped in a nearby village. "I haven't seen my family for 18 days," he said. "They're okay. Our house is in the camp next to the worst hit area." There were scores like him: young men with no baggage making their way through the terraced, olive groves.
Havoc begins at the very edge of the refugee camp. Boys speaking good English serve as unpaid guides for the horror tour. They want the world to witness events here and to secure a little solace, by talking to outsiders about their ordeal.
I began at a gutted house, picking my way gingerly over shapeless mounds of gravel and broken cement blocks, spiked with twisted iron rods. The first person I saw was a well-dressed man dragging a huge rubber water container across an expanse of rubble which was once a UN camp for 14,000 refugees. The quarter was named "Hawashin" after a family of Palestinians who settled here in 1948. They were initially housed in tents, then standard-issue huts which then became two and three storey apartment blocks.
Relief workers say one-third of the camp had been demolished, making 3,000 homeless. Another 10 or 15 per cent of the dwellings were rendered uninhabitable. Many homes, though structurally sound, were disfigured. On one wall, a Star of David was sprayed round a hole, through which an elderly woman invited me to view the devastation within. Israeli soldiers had smashed everything: cupboards, crockery and glassware. They had overturned furniture and blown another large hole through the kitchen wall. The UN Relief and Works Agency clinic was shot up and its pharmacy gutted.
Avoiding a pile of smouldering rubbish, I found a group of men on a hillock pounding the ground with crude implements and scrabbling in the rubble with bare hands, in search of the source of the heavy, stench of putrefying flesh. A huge yellow bulldozer hovered nearby, awaiting orders. There were three or four such knots of men digging carefully, slowly, in the search for survivors. A few have left the wreckage alive. But more often corpses are found.
"Come, come, with us," the boys cried. They led the way to a house where the smell of death was strong. "You see there on the wall, brains," the eldest boy remarked as we turned a corner. A thick black splatter of fibrous tissue clung to the dusty wall. Inside the house there was more, several men were said to have been shot here while lined up against the wall. On the floor lay a brass vase containing a bunch of pink silk roses. The boys did not know how many had died or who they were. It could take weeks to compile an accurate death toll. The number of dead cannot be calculated until Israel releases the names of the men it holds and all those now released have managed to return home.
Some men on a mound found the remnants of a torso and covered it with a cloth pulled from the rubble.
A pretty student, Aya Oweiss, took my hand and led me to her house. Her mother and sisters sat in their second-floor salon observing the scene. The entire front wall of their house had sheared away from the building and a large section of the floor sloped downwards. "The Israelis sent us to stay with our neighbours and moved into our house for 10 days," Aya said. "When they left, they blew it up."
Outside, a canopy of pink cloth had been hurriedly erected over the spot where a bloated body of a child was found. In a depression, a multiple grave was uncovered. The powerful, cloying, sweet stench drove away bystanders with weak stomachs.
Here and there, old people in dust-caked clothing, sat on piles of stone and shattered cement blocks, laying claim to their addresses even though their homes had vanished. Children hoarded empty tank shells and scrap metal into a pram. Expended cartridges litter the ground.
People are wounded every day by unexploded ordnance and booby traps. So far, there is no evidence that a "massacre" was committed here, but what happened in Jenin was clearly a "war crime," observed an international human rights lawyer.
My companions and I took a taxi back to the earth barrier on the Burqin road, but as we left the car to return to our van about 200 metres away, there was a burst of machine gun fire and several sharp explosions. From the hill above us; an Israeli armoured personnel carrier had decided to reinforce the blockade.
We scrambled upwards into the olive terraces, dodging from tree to tree, until we took cover in a depression. A bullet whined by, then another nipped a branch of a tree.
After taking a rest behind a house, we ran alongside Palestinian men, women and children returning to their villages after trying to search for friends and relatives in Jenin.
They, like us, had mistakenly thought the siege of Jenin was over.
illusrtation: Gamil Shafiq
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