16 April 2002. Thanks to S.
Indymedia reporter Kevin Skvorak from inside the Jenin refugee camp:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=22676group=webcast
inside a masacre- Jenin camp report w/pics by Kev s
2:52am Tue Apr 16 '02
k.skvorak@verizon.net
Inside jenin camp (article 1)
We entered Jenin camp on the morning of the 14th. It was and still is a closed
zone, but we didn’t ask permission to go in, and the few soldiers that
saw us, did not intervene.
The lower portion of the camp appears to be almost completely deserted, except for some wandering chickens and goats, and it looks like every house has been damaged in some way by fire, or tank, or rockets... but most are still standing.
The destruction in the center of the camp though is total…a huge area that is nothing but rubble in what was once the densest, most populous, and poorest area of the camp…it was also the area of the strongest resistance in the camp.
Estimates form inside the camp varied between 250 350 homes demolished, or 450 to 600 families, or something 2000 people with no home at all. The soldiers were working on this area with heavy equipment for over a week, demolishing the houses, digging a huge trench, and filling it with debris…
This is the area where the horrible stories of people having their houses pushed down on top of them were. We heard theses stories as well from people who had escaped, many who had lost children or other family in the attacks. Some people said they were given a warning and time to flee, others heard no such warning and just found the house collapsing around them as they hid in what they thought was the safest room of the house…most often the one nearest the bottom with no window or escape route.
None knows the number of dead buried under the debris, but at this point it would take an sifting operation something similar in technique to the efforts at the world trade center to collect all of the bodies and body parts..everything that is under there has been crushed to small pieces by the 70 ton Macerva tanks.
Total numbers of dead inside the camp range from 200 to 500. No one really has any realistic idea yet and no one here knows how many where removed by the Israelis, but witnesses in the camp saw at least two large refrigerated semi trailers in the camp, and the UN aid people here maintain it is a relatively open secret that the Israelis maintain an “enemies” graveyard in the Jordan valley for events like this.
There are still many families living in the top of the camp, and probably 2/3rds of the houses there are still relatively intact. There are still perhaps 2000 to 3000 people there, and we stayed inside the camp with a family over night there and were able to talk to lot’s of people there. Many women took us inside their or the family members home to show us the damage caused bytthe soldiers. What was particulary upsetting to most women was the damaged caused by the soldiers in their house to house searches.
Some houses were completely ransacked inside and everything of value destroyed,..tv’s, radios, glass ware, etc. Even old linens destroyed or used in the bathrooms by the soldiers.
In other houses the actions did not appear to be quite as malicious, they just tore everything apart in the search. In other houses the sodliers camped out, left Israeli packaged food trash everywhere, ate the Palestinian food in the house, and used the WC in inappropriate ways.
One universal complaint though was the looting of valuables by the Israeli soldiers. Every woman complained of valuables being stolen; gold, money, a camera etc. This has been a very common story all over the west bank, people describing having their valuables or money stolen in a search.
No one really has good numbers for the numbers dead or homeless. Not he hospitals, or aid agencies, or the red crescent. None of them has officially been allowed back in the camp to do real aid work yet, though yesterday they allowed two ambulances in to collect some of the remaining bodies under Israeli escort, and they took out around ten. They are hoping for more acess today. It appears the Israelis are finally relaxing their control a bit, and several press went in yesterday as well.
The people inside the camp spent much of the last two weeks hidden in their homes, so their information is not good either…and they have no real idea of the dead. There are volunteers going in now the last couple of days, without permission like us, and yesterday they carried a dehydrated women down to the hospital by hand. Today there will be an attempt made to drive in a truck full of food.
There are probably still several dozen bodies laying in houses and even in the streets. Some women and children took us to photograph some of these people, many dead for two weeks now. Some were burned, some half buried, some laying under blankets in bed where they clearly died wounded in their sleep. The smell in many areas of the camp is of course very bad.
Will try to report more later ... online acess of course tough.
Photographs:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/buried-body.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/burnt-body.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/camp-1.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/camp-2.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/camp-3.jpg
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http://nyc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=22718group=webcast
update from Jenin 4/16 by kev s
11:46am Tue Apr 16 '02
update w/ moe pics (article 1)
Jenin update: 4/16 2:30 pm
Myself and Andreas from Sweden just got back from the camp from another trip
in this morning with a red Crescent volunteer. The soldiers have relaxed
there hold on the camp even more, and today there were many journalists running
around, and a couple of UN aid trucks. At about 1pm though the soldiers
drove throught calling on the loudspeaker for everyone to go back in their
houses. Most people actually did…they are terrified of the
IDF…some remained out though..showing the journalists around, and ducking
into a building whenever they heard the tanks or apc’s coming.
We mostly did the same because the Red Crescent volunteer group we are spending
time with are particularly disliked by the Israelis. The
resistance culture was and is tremendously strong in the camp, with martyrs
pictures even on the hospital corridors walls.
It may be difficult to interpret the pictures, all that open area. But try to imagine in the place of that open area, densely paced village with houses two to three stories high, and packed together with streets so narrow only very few could even pass a car. Most were just narrow footpaths. That area is now completely flattened.
We were taken to photograph many more martyrs today..i unfortunately even stepped on/in one. Lot’s of body parts, and crushed laying around..a foot, or a hand mioghtbe recognizable, but mostly the people are recognized by the damp and discolored clothes sticking out of the ground..mostly connected to just bit’s of tissue and bone. Difficult to photograph.
There are more internationals here doing aid work, and it looks like all that is left here to do is that kind of work, there may be some internationals gathering in Jerusalem to confront an electrified "Jerusalem wall" being constructed around "greater" jerusalem (the settlements in the nearby occupied west bank)
The next big military operation being planned by the Israelis is Gaza. No one knows exactly when it will come but when iut does it will also probably be devastating. The camps there are very dense, and are known to have strong resistance.
So far the internationals here lately have mostly been responding to events " after the fact"
If a lot more come soon, and make their way to gaza, there may be an opportunity for more "preventative" style actions..
so come on over!
Photographs:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/palestinian-weaponl2nrke.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/girl-with-food-aid.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/clothesline.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/martyr-7ep9ypz.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/martyr-6ssaxnh.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/martyr-55utg46.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/martyr-4fwyaja.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/martyr-30txhgb.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/martyr-2yqepnw.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/martyr-1uqio9n.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/looking-for-survivors3zdedk.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/jewish-soldiers-graffittivnrq8h.jpg
http://nyc.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/metafiles/boy-with-truck.jpg
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?dir=75story=285413&host=3&printable=1
Amid the ruins of Jenin, the grisly evidence of a war crime
From Phil Reeves in Jenin
16 April 2002
A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins.
A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shovelled by bulldozers into 30 ft piles. The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks.
In one nearby half-wrecked building, gutted by fire, lies the fly-blown corpse of a man covered by a tartan rug. In another we found the remains of 23-year-old Ashraf Abu Hejar beneath the ruins of a fire-blackened room that collapsed on him after being hit by a rocket. His head is shrunken and blackened. In a third, five long-dead men lay under blankets.
A quiet. sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland, littered now with detritus of what were once households, foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes, tin cans, children's toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing.
We stared at a mound of debris. Here, he said, he saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank. We could not see the bodies. But we could smell them.
A few days ago, we might not have believed Kamal Anis. But the descriptions given by the many other refugees who escaped from Jenin camp were understated, not, as many feared and Israel encouraged us to believe, exaggerations. Their stories had not prepared me for what I saw yesterday. I believe them now.
Until two weeks ago, there were several hundred tightly-packed homes in this neighbourhood called Hanat al-Hawashim. They no longer exist. Around the central ruins, there are many hundreds of half-wrecked homes. Much of the camp once home to 15,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war is falling down. Every wall is speckled and torn with bullet holes and shrapnel, testimony of the awesome, random firepower of Cobra and Apache helicopters that hovered over the camp.
Building after building has been torn apart, their contents of cheap fake furnishings, mattresses, white plastic chairs spewed out into the road. Every other building bears the giant, charred, impact mark of a helicopter missile. Last night there were still many families and weeping children still living amid the ruins, cut off from the humanitarian aid. Ominously, we found no wounded, although there was a report of a man being rescued from beneath ruins only an hour before we arrived.
Those who did not flee the camp, or not detained by the army, have spent the bombardment in basements, enduring day after day of terror. Some were forced into rooms by the soldiers, who smashed their way into houses through the walls. The UN says half of the camp's 15,000 residents were under 18. As the evening hush fell over these killing fields, we could suddenly hear the children chattering. The mosques, once so noisy at prayer time, were silent.
Israel was still trying to conceal these scenes yesterday. It had refused entry to Red Cross ambulances for nearly a week, in violation of the Geneva Convention. Yesterday it continued to try to keep us out.
Jenin, in the northern end of the occupied West Bank, remained "a closed military zone", was ringed Merkava tanks, army Jeep patrols, and armoured personnel carriers. Reporters caught trying to get in were escorted out. A day earlier the Israeli armed forces took in a few selected journalists to see sanitised parts of the camp. We simply walked across the fields, flitted through an olive orchard overlooked by two Israeli tanks, and into the camp itself.
We were led in by hands gesturing at windows. Hidden, whispering people directed us through narrow alleys they thought were clear. When there were soldiers about, a finger would raise in warning, or a hand waved us back.
We were welcomed by people desperate to tell what had occurred. They spoke of executions, and bulldozers wrecking homes with people inside. "This is mass murder committed by Ariel Sharon," Jamel Saleh, 43, said. "We feel more hate for Israel now than ever. Look at this boy." He placed his hand on the tousled head of a little boy, Mohammed, the eight-year-old son of a friend. "He saw all this evil. He will remember it all." So will everyone else who saw the horror of Jenin refugee camp. Palestinians who entered the camp yesterday were almost speechless.
Rajib Ahmed, from the Palestinian Energy Authority, came to try to repair the power lines. He was trembling with fury and shock. "This is mass murder. I have come here to help but I have found nothing but devastation. Just look for yourself."
All had the same message: tell the world.
