Booby traps amid rubble stall burials in camp of death

JENIN - Israeli soldiers hunted yesterday for booby traps amid decaying Palestinian bodies in the rubble of Jenin refugee camp, scene of the fiercest fighting in Israel's West Bank offensive.

The fly-infested corpse of a bearded Palestinian militant in fatigues sat upright in the camp's demolished main square, bulldozed by the Army after gunmen in buildings suspected to have been booby-trapped refused to surrender.

Reporters were escorted into the camp by the Army for the first time, three days after the last serious resistance abated and a day after a Reuters news team eluded tanks and found bodies rotting in homes occupied by women and children.

In Jerusalem, Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told the Cabinet about 70 militants had been killed in the camp, fewer than earlier Army estimates.

Army spokesman Jacob Dallal said 26 bodies lay unretrieved around the once teeming concrete camp, home to Palestinian refugees since 1948, and more could be under the wreckage.

Another nine Palestinian bodies had been turned over to two hospitals for burial and two more had been buried by relatives.

All but three were members of the estimated 200-strong, hard-core Palestinian militant force in the camp, Dallal said. The others were two women and a child.

Jenin has exacted the highest Israeli toll - 23 dead soldiers and scores wounded - in the 16-day-old incursion into West Bank cities, billed as a drive against suicide bombers.

The Army says most of the dead were killed by booby traps fitted to cars, assault rifles, rubbish bins, doors, closets, chairs, drawers, fridges, sports balls and uniforms.

Dallal cited these as one reason why 26 bodies had yet to be retrieved. "Some of the bodies themselves may be booby-trapped."

Army officers said the Palestinian Red Crescent had been reluctant to collect bodies for safety reasons.

But Palestinian medics say the Army has barred them from entering the camp and some Palestinians said the Army was secretly burying corpses in mass graves to cover up a massacre.

Israel's Supreme Court rejected an appeal by an Arab-Israeli human rights group to ban the Army from collecting bodies. But it said the bodies should be identified and their burial carried out "with dignity, according to religious custom by local elements". If Palestinian authorities failed to conduct burials, the Army was entitled to do so with the involvement of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

An Israeli military source said the Army would implement the new burial procedure today.

Army officers, standing before mounds of rubble and earth in the square, said most of the camp's 15,000 residents had been evicted before the Army arrived by militants who placed booby traps in their homes.

Camp residents said the Army had driven them out by threatening to destroy their homes.

"Most of the houses we approached on entering the camp were empty [of civilians]. The camp was ready for war," said Israeli platoon commander Yoni Wolff.

"There were booby traps, fortified positions all over. Very few civilians. Some old ladies and children were made to hold a gun in front of terrorists to make it hard for us to fight back."

He said women had acted as rooftop spotters for the militants.

"The fighting was house-to-house, window by window," he said. "It took us a day to advance 100 metres. Every few metres there was another booby trap. But any ammunition we used was very specifically (targeted) only at places where guns were firing."

He said the Army could have crushed resistance without taking casualties of its own by bombing from the air, but had refrained from doing so out of concern for civilians.

The Reuters news team had to play cat and mouse with roving tanks to make it across a downtown olive grove into the refugee quarter. They found heavy damage in twisting alleys coated with spent shell and bullet casings and glass shards.

The contorted bodies of four Palestinian men, blackened by decomposition, were found in a living room apparently hit by a missile. Andeera Harb, 34, whose relatives owned the house, said the four had been eating dinner.

But there was a helmet on the head of one body. What appeared to be pipe bombs were partially hidden under a coat.

In a room of a house 100m away, the body of a middle-aged man lay on its side next to a bookcase.

Only a few dozen residents were seen, all women, children and older men. They said the Army had killed or detained all men of fighting age.

Many homes, including some untouched by fighting, seemed to have been ransacked. Residents said money, jewellery and other valuables had been stolen, and that larders were raided.

Jewish Stars of David were spraypainted on the walls and mirrors of some rooms, and one tearful resident showed reporters the shredded pages of a Koran.

Jenin, nestling in a lush valley in the northern West Bank close to the Green Line boundary with Israel, remains a "closed military zone". A curfew is periodically lifted for a couple of hours to allow residents to stock up on essentials. Lieutenant Colonel Fuad Halhal, head of the Army's civil liaison office dealing with Palestinian relief services, said electricity had been restored to much of Jenin yesterday after an Army-enforced blackout of more than 10 days.

He denied the Army was blocking humanitarian deliveries, and said it had sent in "tens of trucks" with food and bottled water as well as keeping Jenin hospital supplied with oxygen and medicines throughout the fighting.

- REUTERS

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