Signs of atrocities at Jenin refugee camp piling up

By ANDREW LAXON

For weeks now the world has been hearing stories of atrocities at Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank, attacked by Israel last month as part of its campaign to root out Palestinian suicide bombers.

Suspicions grew last week when Israel blocked a United Nations mission from investigating the attack, which Palestinians have claimed turned into a massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians.

Now the first detailed report of the attack has emerged from the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which has carried out similar investigations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

The group found no evidence of a massacre or large-scale executions. But it said Israel had a case to answer on charges of war crimes and called for an immediate extensive investigation.

The report said Israeli forces:

* Launched missiles from helicopters indiscriminately at civilian houses away from the fighting, killing innocent women and children.

* Used armoured bulldozers to demolish residents' homes, making 4000 people homeless and razing an entire district where 13 Israeli soldiers had been killed in a Palestinian ambush.

* Executed one unarmed civilian and a wounded, unarmed Palestinian prisoner.

* Used Palestinian civilians as human shields - in one case forcing a father and son to stand still for three hours as soldiers rested and fired their rifles on their shoulders.

* Stopped doctors and ambulances from entering the camp to care for the sick and wounded for 11 days.

The report, based on a week of interviews with more than 100 camp residents as well as aid workers, medical workers and local officials, says Israel had obligations to protect the 14,000 civilians in Jenin, despite the presence of armed Palestinian militants in the camp.

"Unfortunately, these obligations were not met ... Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes."

It says at least 52 Palestinians were killed (along with 23 Israeli soldiers). Twenty-seven were suspected members of armed Palestinian movements such as Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. But at least 22 were civilians, including children, the physically disabled and elderly people.

Israel has dismissed the report. Danny Ayalon, an adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said: "I flatly reject the war crimes charge. It was a war zone. It was full of booby traps and explosives."

The Israeli Army, he said, "did everything to be reasonable".

Ayalon also disputed the group's figures. "Of the 51 bodies found, 44 were of armed terrorists and seven of civilians, which we very much regret."

But Human Rights Watch argues that many of the civilian deaths amount to unlawful or wilful killings by Israeli soldiers which should be investigated further.

The report says many other deaths could have been avoided if Israel had taken proper precautions to protect civilian life, as required by international humanitarian law.

Among the civilian deaths, it says, were those of Kamal Zgheir, a 57-year-old wheelchair-bound man who was shot and run over by a tank on a major road outside the camp on April 10, even though he had a white flag attached to his wheelchair.

Then there was 58-year-old Mariam Wishahi, killed by a missile in her home on April 6 just hours after her unarmed son was shot in the street.

Jamal Fayid, a 37-year-old paralysed man, was crushed in the rubble of his home on April 7 despite his family's pleas to be allowed to remove him.

A fourth civilian death was that of Faris Zaiban, 14, killed by fire from an IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) armoured car as he went to buy groceries when the IDF-imposed curfew was temporarily lifted on April 11.

The battle of Jenin began in earnest on April 3 as the IDF launched a major military operation in the city's refugee camp. The aim was to capture or kill Palestinian militants responsible for suicide bombings and other attacks that have killed more than 70 mainly Israeli civilians since March.

The report says the first two days of the battle consisted of tank, helicopter and gun fire. To enable tanks and heavy armour to penetrate the narrow winding alleys of the camp, the IDF sent in armoured bulldozers to widen the narrow accessways by shearing off the fronts of buildings, in places several metres deep.

Once inside the walls of Jenin, IDF soldiers "mouseholed" from house to house, knocking large holes in the walls between houses to provide routes of safe passage from the outer perimeters of the camp to the centre. Often they used Palestinian civilians as human shields or to check houses for booby-traps.

On April 6, Israeli helicopters (supplied by the United States) started firing missiles into the camp, often striking civilian homes where no Palestinian fighters were present.

The missile fire, which began in the early morning hours, caught many sleeping civilians by surprise.

The chaos and destruction caused by the bombardment allowed the IDF to move closer to the centre of the camp.

On April 9, Palestinian fighters killed 13 Israeli soldiers in an ambush in the Hawashin district.

The report says Israel changed tactics after this attack. It relied more heavily on helicopter missile strikes and armoured bulldozers, which began flattening houses as well as widening narrow streets.

"The change in military strategy arguably helped to defeat the armed Palestinians in the camp," says the report.

"But the new tactics had an unacceptable impact on the civilian population and infrastructure."

The report says camp residents described days of sustained missile fire from helicopters hitting their houses.

Some were forced to flee from house to house seeking shelter, while others were trapped by the fighting, unable to escape to safety, and were threatened by a curfew that the IDF enforced with lethal force, using sniper fire.

In some cases soldiers converted civilian houses into military positions, confining the inhabitants to a single room.

The report says Israeli attacks often failed to distinguish between civilian and military targets, especially during the helicopter missile attacks on April 6.

"One woman was killed by helicopter fire during that attack; a 4-year-old child in another part of the town was injured when a missile hit the house where she was sleeping.

"Both were buildings housing only civilians, with no fighters in the immediate vicinity."

The report says most fighting in Jenin had died down by April 10, except for isolated pockets of Palestinian militants who continued to hold out for several days.

But the armoured bulldozers continued to raze homes long afterwards, especially in Hawashin - scene of the ambush - which was completely flattened.

"The destruction extended well beyond any conceivable purpose of gaining access to fighters, and was vastly disproportionate to the military objectives pursued," says the report.

"Establishing whether this extensive destruction so exceeded military necessity as to constitute wanton destruction - or a war crime - should be one of the highest priorities for the United Nations fact-finding mission."

It says at least 140 buildings - most housing many families - were destroyed and severe damage caused to more than 200 others has rendered them uninhabitable or unsafe.

An estimated 4000 people, more than a quarter of the population of the camp, were made homeless because of this destruction.

More than 100 of the 140 destroyed buildings were in Hawashin district.

Despite multiple warnings by the Israelis, the report says, many civilians still learned of the risk only as bulldozers began to crush their houses.

Jamal Fayid, the paralysed man, was killed when the IDF bulldozed his home on top of him, refusing to allow his relatives the time to remove him from the home.

Sixty-five-year-old Muhammad Abu Saba'a had to plead with an IDF bulldozer operator to stop demolishing his home while his family remained inside.

When he returned to his half-demolished home, he was shot dead by an Israeli soldier.

Human Rights Watch claims some of the cases it discovered amount to summary executions, such as the shooting of Jamal al-Sabbagh on April 6.

The report says Israeli soldiers shot Al-Sabbagh dead as he was obeying their orders to strip off his clothes.

In at least one case, the report says, IDF soldiers unlawfully killed a wounded Palestinian, Munthir al-Haj, who was no longer carrying a weapon.

His arms were reportedly broken, and he was taking no active part in the fighting.

Throughout the attack, IDF soldiers used Palestinian civilians to protect them from danger, deploying them as "human shields" and forcing them to perform dangerous work.

Kamal Tawalbi, the father of 14 children, described how soldiers kept him and his 14-year-old son for three hours in the line of fire, using his and his son's shoulders to rest their rifles as they fired.

IDF soldiers forced a 65-year-old woman to stand on a rooftop in front of an IDF position in the middle of a helicopter battle.

Residents say Israeli troops routinely used them to search homes, often at gunpoint. The report calls this a serious violation of the laws of war, as it exposes civilians to direct risk of death or serious injury.

Investigators found no evidence that Palestinian gunmen forced civilians to serve as human shields.

But Palestinian gunmen did endanger Palestinian civilians in the camp by using it as a base for planning and launching attacks, using indiscriminate tactics such as planting improvised explosive devices within the camp and intermingling with the civilian population during armed conflict.

The report says that during "Operation Defensive Shield", the IDF blocked the passage of emergency medical vehicles and personnel to Jenin refugee camp for 11 days, from April 4 to April 15.

During this period, injured combatants and civilians in the camp as well as the sick had no access to emergency medical treatment.

Ambulances were repeatedly fired on by IDF soldiers and Farwa Jammal, a uniformed nurse, was killed by IDF fire while treating an injured civilian.

In at least two cases, injured civilians died without access to medical treatment.

Israel's claim that the whole camp was a war zone and that many "civilians" had to be treated as potential enemies has support from some independent military experts.

Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst for ABC News in the United States, has argued against what he calls the "atrocity" theory, saying urban warfare is the most difficult and potentially bloodiest form of warfare.

"It is also the form of war that politicians, human rights activists and media are least likely to understand and most likely to condemn."

Writing before the publication of the Human Rights Watch report, Cordesman said that to avoid heavy casualties of their own, "decisive force" was the only sensible option for the Israelis - just as it could be for the United States if it decided to attack Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

"Military analysts like to avoid being frank about what this kind of urban warfare really means, but it effectively means smashing a lot of things flat, significant collateral damage and civilian casualties."

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