Desmond Tutu
The Guardian
In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.
What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.
On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?
I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: "Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews."
My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?
Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.
The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.
Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or - I hope - to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.
We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?
My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: "I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression."
But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?
People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.
Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.
We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.
Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission. This address was given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month. A longer version appears in the current edition of Church Times.
The Real Aim Of Ariel Sharon Is To Break The Backbone of Palestinian People
by Uri Avnery
The real aim of "Operation Defensive Shield" was not to "destroy the infrastructure of terrorism".
This was merely a good slogan for uniting the people of Israel, who are angry and afraid after the suicide bombings. It is also a good political device, allowing Sharon to ride on the bandwagon of President Busch's "war against international terrorism". Under the umbrella of "destroying the infrastructure of terrorism" one can do practically anything.
If Sharon had really intended to "destroy the infrastructure of terrorism", he would have acted very differently. He would have given the Palestinian masses hope of achieving their national freedom in the near future. He would have fortified the position of Yasser Arafat, the only effective partner for peace. He would have strengthened the Palestinian security forces and radically improved economic conditions in the Palestinian territories.
But destroying the infrastructure of terrorism is not Ariel Sharon's aim. His program is far more radical: to break the backbone of the Palestinian people, crush their governmental institutions, turn the people into human wreckage that can be dealt with as he wishes. This may entail shutting them up in several enclaves or even driving them out of the country altogether.
As Sharon sees it, this would be finishing off the job started in 1948: to establish the real Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river; a state inhabited solely by Jews. It was no accident that he openly supported Slobodan Milosevic, the inventor of "ethnic cleansing".
When I wrote this a year ago, it sounded like malicious slander. Sharon was still pictured as a man determined to fight terrorism, not as a person using the fight against terrorism as a means to achieve quite different aims.
No more.
Four days ago I was in Ramallah. I sneaked into the town (Israelis are forbidden by the military commander from entering the Palestinian territories) in order to see it for myself. I visited the Palestinian ministries. A shocking sight, indeed.
Take, for example, the Palestinian Ministry of Education. It is housed in an imposing building, probably going back to British times, a mixture of neo-Classic European and oriental styles. In front of it there was a rose garden - "was", because a tank has crisscrossed it, for no apparent reason, leaving only one purple rosebush in all its glory. Just so. To teach them a lesson.
On the upper floor, where the archives and computers were housed, the destruction was total. The computers were taken apart and thrown on the floor, the safe blown open, the papers strewn around, the drawers empty, the telephones crushed . Some of it was just plain vandalism. The money in the safe was stolen, the furniture upturned, the papers dispersed. But when one looked closer, the real aim of the operation became clear. All the hard disks were taken from the computers, all the important files taken away. Only empty shells remained. All the important contents of the ministry were taken: the lists of pupils, examination results, lists of teachers, the whole logistics of the Palestinian school system.
The Ministry if Health suffered the same fate. The hard disks that contained all the information, state of diseases, medical tests, lists of doctors and nurses, the logistics of the hospitals had been taken.
Even the people most critical of the Palestinian Authority admitted that these two ministries " Education and Health " had been functioning well. They have been utterly destroyed.
This happened to virtually all the Palestinian government offices. Gone is the information pertaining to land registration and housing, taxes and government expenditure, car tests and drivers' licenses, everything necessary for administrating a modern society.
The lists of terrorists were not hidden in the land registration books, the inventory of bombs was not tucked away among the list of kindergarten teachers. The real aim is obvious: to destroy not only the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinian society itself: to push it back with one stroke from the stage of a modern state-in-the-making to the primitive society of Turkish times.
This is true for the civil society, and even more so for the security system. The headquarters of the security services were destroyed, files burned, computers crushed, the information concerning armed underground organizations and all other details pertaining to the war against terrorism were obliterated. There is no better evidence of the aims of this operation: not war on terrorism, but destruction of organized Palestinian society.
By the way, on that day I passed, with a group of Israeli peace activists, through the center of Ramallah -- from the mass-grave in the hospital parking lot to the besieged headquarters of Yasser Arafat. We carried Hebrew posters and encountered much sympathy and not a single sign of hostility. Even at this time, the Palestinians know the difference between the Israeli peace camp and those who responsible for this brutal attack. Here, perhaps, lies the only glimmer of hope.
WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?
What really happened in the Jenin refugee camp?
Throughout the assault, the army prevented Israeli and foreign journalists from getting close and reporting.
This gave rise to rumors about horrible events, in the wake of which the United Nations appointed a fact-finding mission of the highest order. Sharon pretended to accept this, but started at once to torpedo its task, undermine its legitimacy under ridiculous pretexts and set in motion a major propaganda campaign against it.
Now the whole world is asking: What is the terrible secret, which Sharon and Mofaz are trying so hard to hide?
Teenagers shot by Israelis, then run over with a tank
After their mutilated bodies are returned, families of three teenagers struggle to understand why they attacked Jewish settlers
By Robert Fisk in Gaza City
Two of the schoolboys were 14, the other was 15; they were internet surfers in the local cyber cafe, one of them idling his hours away drawing children's cartoons; all three were football enthusiasts. Hours after they had been shot dead by the Israeli army near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim, their fathers received the three young bodies. They had been driven over by an armoured vehicle which � in 14-year-old Ismail Abu-Nadi's case � cut his corpse in half.
Knife-wielding suicide bombers approaching the Jewish settlement, according to the Israeli army and, of course, The New York Times. But even Hamas, creator of the vicious Palestinian campaign of suicide bombing, admits that the three schoolchildren � all ninth-graders in the Salahadin School in Gaza City � had naively planned to attack the settlement of their own accord and with, at most, knives. It urged preachers and schoolteachers to tell children that they should never embark on such wild schemes again.
And when the three boys' fathers talked to The Independent yesterday, they told a story of waste and tragedy and childhood anger at Israel's bloody invasion of the Jenin refugee camp. "I spent all last night asking myself why my son did this,'' Mohamed Abu-Nadi told me as we sat among mourners outside his middle-class home. "Did Ismail need money? No. Did he fail at school? No. He was first in his class. Were there problems with his family or friends? No. I asked myself the same questions over and over. Why? Can you tell me?''
It's a painful question to be asked by a distraught father, a highly educated civil engineer. Did Ismail want to die? His father said this would have been impossible until "three or four months ago''. That was when the schoolboy, born in Abu Dhabi and a fluent English speaker, began to ask his father why the Palestinians were given no outside help in their struggle for a state. "He asked me: 'Why is it that only the Palestinians cannot have a state? Why doesn't America help? Why don't the other Arab states help?'."
Bassem Zaqout, the father of 15-year-old Yussef � none of the fathers have met, though their sons all attended the same school � also thought the Jenin bloodbath influenced his son.
"When I came back from evening prayers on Tuesday, he had left the house," he said. "I had no idea why. Now I think the boys were walking towards the Jewish settlement with some kind of idea of attacking the Israelis there, but he never touched a weapon. When we got his body back yesterday, it was in a terrible state. Dogs had been at it in the night and his face was unrecognisable because it had been crushed by a heavy vehicle driving over it."
Adel Hamdona's 14-year-old son Anwar was returned to him in a similar condition. The father's description was cold, emotionless. "He didn't have a face. His legs had been severed. He had been driven over several times and had been pretty well disembowelled.''
Anwar's body, too, had been gnawed by dogs. Mr Hamdona said: "He was just a boy, a child. I am a teacher at his school. At five in the evening, he told his mother he was going to an internet cafe to surf the net. When he hadn't come home by nine, I felt something was wrong. Then we heard shooting from Netzarim."
And there's a clue as to why Mr Hamdona felt that "something was wrong". For Anwar had begun talking to his family about "martyrdom". "The events here had an effect on the boy. He was always talking about the suicide operations, about martyrs and the concept of martyrdom. He used to want to become a martyr. I had a suspicion that a few years later, when he grew up, he might do this � but not now."
Ismail left what appears to be a farewell note to his parents. "One of his friends brought me a paper he had written," his father acknowledged after talking of his son's education and his puzzlement at the world's abandonment of Palestinians. "On the paper, Ismail had written: 'My father, my mother, please try to pray to God and to ask for me to succeed to enter Netzarim and to kill the Israeli soldiers and to drive them from our land'.
"I could not believe this. At his age, any other boy � and I've been to England, the United States, India, Pakistan � yes any other boy just wants to be educated, to be happy, to earn money, to be at peace. But our children here cannot find peace."
As for the condition of the bodies, none of the fathers wished to speculate on the reasons. Would the Israelis deliberately mutilate the bodies? It seems unlikely. Or did they, after shooting the three schoolboys, avoid the risk that one may be still alive � and with a bomb still waiting to go off � by driving over their remains? And when their bodies were crushed, were they all dead?
Nurse shot through heart and man in wheelchair among Jenin dead
By Phil Reeves and Justin Huggler in Jerusalem and David Usborne in New York(The Independent)
Israel's efforts to defend its conduct in the Jenin refugee camp are fast unravelling with revelations, published in The Independent today, that nearly half of the Palestinian dead identified so far were civilians.
After five days of interviews with survivors of the assault " conducted alongside a Human Rights Watch investigator " detailed accounts have emerged of widespread atrocities committed by Israeli troops inside the camp.
Israel has insisted that it has nothing to hide about the events in Jenin, the scene of eight days of fighting, but its officials say it may bar entry to a UN fact- finding team unless it can determine some of the members and define its terms of reference.
A high-level delegation from Israel is due at UN headquarters to see the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, this morning. UN officials said Mr Annan was unwilling to alter the line-up of the mission's three main members.
They are the former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, who will lead the team; Cornelio Sommaruga, a former president of the International Committee of the Red Cross; and Sadako Ogata, the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
But Mr Annan - who wants the mission to arrive in the region on Saturday - has signalled to the main military advisor attached to the mission, the retired US General William Nash, that he could use additional experts.
Israel wants Mr Annan to add members of the team " such as counter-terrorism and military experts " who will be more sympathetic to Israel's argument that the devastation was necessary to crush Palestinian militia groups, whose suicide bombers have killed many Israelicivilians.
Israel's army says most those killed in Jenin were fighters and that it did everything possible to protect civilians. But The Independent has found that nearly half of the 50 dead identified so far were civilians, including women, the elderly, and children.
They include a nurse in uniform who was shot in the heart as she tried to help a wounded civilian, a 14-year-old boy killed when he tried to buy groceries when a curfew was lifted, and a man in a wheelchair who was shot as he tried to wheel himself up the street and then crushed under a tank.
The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told a Congressional committee yesterday that he had no evidence that a massacre had occurred.
Officials say that a significant number from the camp are still missing. However, they could be in Israeli detention or in hiding.
Israeli armed forces were in action elsewhere yesterday. Tanks and troops killed three Palestinians in raids on West Bank villages, Palestinian hospital officials in Jenin said.
Negotiations, meanwhile, have been going on for a second day in Bethlehem to try to end the siege of the church, where about 200 people, including Palestinian gunmen, are trapped.
Schools, banks and a puppet theatre trashed
Palestinians say Israel has wrecked the infrastructure of their emerging state by systematically demolishing key installations in Ramallah
Ewen MacAskill in Ramallah
The Guardian
The damage done by the Israeli army during its three-week occupation of Ramallah, de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, is obvious: the flattened cars, blackened buildings and smashed shopfronts. But the more serious damage is invisible.
The army destroyed or removed the files and records of many Palestinian ministries and institutions, ranging from high-level financial documents to the records of school graduations.
The Palestinians were yesterday still clearing up the debris. The damage is estimated at tens of millions of dollars. Some said it would take years to rebuild the information that was stolen and taken to Israel. In many cases, the data has gone forever.
The Palestinians claim that Israel set out to destroy the infrastructure of their emerging state. The Israeli army insists its aim was purely to destroy the "infrastructure of terror". An army spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Olivier Rafowicsz, said yesterday: "We are not in a war against the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian people. We are in a war against terrorism."
But the army's interpretation of what constitutes the "infrastructure of terror" has turned out to be a broad one: the soldiers trashed schools, banks, hospitals, cultural centres, stores, human rights offices and radio and television stations, including one called Peace and Love.
Some of the wreckage was wanton and spiteful, carried out by bored soldiers billeted in Palestinian buildings.
The looting was small-scale. The worst of the damage was systematic. Police stations were wrecked and all the Palestinian Authority's ministries, except the ministry of planning and the ministry of sport, were ransacked. The main target was computers, whose hard drives were removed and taken to Israel.
Among the trashed institutions were:
� Aziz Shaheen girls' school
in the But al-Hawa district. With 800 pupils it is one of the biggest schools on the West Bank, and it has a good academic reputation, especially in science and technology. Ten Israeli tanks were parked in its playground for three weeks; snipers used the upper floor.
Children returning to the school on Monday found it surrounded by barbed wire, rubbish and spent explosives. They were told by the principal, Mariam Masharka, 45, to go home until the school was cleaned up and repaired.
Sabrine Wadir, 15, a pupil, said: "Our first sight was the playground, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, as if it was a jail. The lock to my classroom was broken. They destroyed pictures of flowers, martyrs, our president."
Musical instruments were looted, books were torn and piled in the corridors. Anti-Arab graffiti was scrawled in every corridor. Among the debris was a tapestry in a broken glass frame, saying "Peace and Justice for Palestine".
An Israeli army spokesman, Captain Ron Edelheit, responded: "If you have a platoon staying, there are bound to be scratches."
� Mattin human rights group which has an office at a crossroads on al-Haq street.
Salwa Daibis, a partner in the Mattin group, said: "A metal door had been flung 50 metres away. It took me half an hour to locate my desk, upside down, covered with other things, tins of food, Coca-Cola tins. The cash box was not there.
"I couldn't find my computer. I found a [computer] shell. I think it is mine. The hard disk is gone. Some monitors are missing. This is 20 years of work. My whole life is there. This is an assault against an entire population to damage the fabric of society."
Capt Edelheit's response: "The human rights organisations are not always fair, blonde, blue-eyed Europeans." Some of them were linked to terrorists, he claimed.
� Housing Bank for Trade and Finance one block from Manara Square. The headquarters of a Jordanian bank that provides loans for building homes.
On April 3, a tank fired three rounds through its plate-glass windows. The entire contents of two floors were demolished.
Talib Muleseh, 45, operations manager for the bank, which has 32 staff, 25,000 customers and is worth $51m, said: "There was no reason for this. It is banking terror. It is about destroying the Palestinian infrastructure. The bank supported the Palestinian economy."
He estimated the cost of repairs at more than $200,000, which includes two new cash-in-the wall machines at $40,000 each.
Capt Edelheit said there were buildings the army had not intended to attack, but had been forced to after coming under fire: "Where they fired at us, we fired back."
� Preventative security force's HQ Betunia, west of Ramallah, was the building most badly battered by Israeli tanks and rockets.
Before the assault, it resembled a huge hilltop fortress. Now the compound is gutted, the outside walls black from smoke and punctured with holes. A fresh Palestinian flag flies from the ruins.
The compound was the headquarters of Colonel Jibril Rajoub, who heads the most professional of the Palestinian police forces. The preventative security forces were trained by the CIA, and Mr Rajoub maintains close contacts with US security officials and with Israel. The compound was built with CIA cash.
Mr Rajoub, standing amid the rubble from the battle, said: "An attack of this sort on the preventative security service reflects a desire to destroy the infrastructure of which preventative security is the backbone." The Palestinians ask how are they to meet Israel's demands to arrest militants if their security apparatus is knocked out.
Capt Edelheit said: "There were 200 armed terrorists inside. Some of them were policemen and some were terrorists." He added that policemen during the day sometimes become terrorists at night.
� Puppet theatre in the But al-hawa district. Soldiers occupied the small theatre used by the puppeteer Nideal al-Khatib, 36, who takes his shows to schools in the West Bank.
"I used the puppets to get across the message that water is precious. My backdrops were used by the soldiers to cover the windows," he said, holding the destroyed sheets. "They stole three of my puppets. They left these two. Maybe they did not like them."
Israel's response: As with the school, some damage is inevitable in places where soldiers are billeted.
� Land registry office 200 metres east of Manara Square, holds the deeds to land records on the West Bank. Old pink maps, with detailed portions of land in faint ink, were scattered around the floor.
Najiba Suhal, 30, the assistant director, said: "The army destroyed the entrance to the office and took computers. We are trying to establish what has been taken. Some of these records go back to the Turkish era."
Israeli response: No specific information about what happened at the location.
� Education ministry in north Ramallah The soldiers took so much material from the ministry that they needed a van to carry it away.
Salah Sobani, a ministry employee, said that when the Israelis arrived, "I opened all the doors I had keys for and they blasted the rest".
Computers were piled in the middle of one floor after being stripped of hard disks containing a host of information, from instructions to teachers through to graduation lists.
Dr Gabi Baramki, the authority's adviser on academic affairs, said: "So much damage in just one hour."
Israeli response: Israel regularly protests that Palestinian textbooks incite hatred against the Jewish state. "In their computers, we are trying to find incitement to hate," Capt Edelheit said.
"We are finding glorification of suicide bombers and when we have the information, we will issue it."
� Peace and Love radio station which has been broadcasting since 1995 to a target audience of young people. It has a staff of 25.
Its founder, Mutazb Seiso, 36, said that the station's transmitter, tapes, mini-disks, mixers and all the other equipment needed to broadcast had been destroyed. He estimated the cost of the damage at more than $250,000 and said it would take months to get back on air - provided there was help from radio stations abroad.
Israeli response: No specific information about this site.
Once upon a time in Jenin
What really happened when Israeli forces went into Jenin? Just as the world is giving up hope of learning the truth, Justin Huggler and Phil Reeves have unearthed compelling evidence of an atrocity
The thought was as unshakable as the stench wafting from the ruins. Was this really about counterterrorism? Was it revenge? Or was it an episode - the nastiest so far - in a long war by Ariel Sharon, the staunch opponent of the Oslo accords, to establish Israel's presence in the West Bank as permanent, and force the Palestinians into final submission?
A neighbourhood had been reduced to a moonscape, pulverised under the tracks of bulldozers and tanks. A maze of cinder-block houses, home to about 800 Palestinian families, had disappeared. What was left - the piles of broken concrete and scattered belongings - reeked.
The rubble in Jenin reeked, literally, of rotting human corpses, buried underneath. But it also gave off the whiff of wrongdoing, of an army and a government that had lost its bearings. "This is horrifying beyond belief," said the United Nations' Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, as he gazed at the scene. He called it a "blot that will forever live on the history of the state of Israel" -- a remark for which he was to be vilified by Israelis. Even the painstakingly careful United States envoy, William Burns, was unusually outspoken as he trudged across the ruins. "It's obvious that what happened in Jenin refugee camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians," he said.
The Israeli army insists that its devastating invasion of the refugee camp in Jenin earlier this month was intended to root out the infrastructure of the Palestinian militias, particularly the authors of an increasingly vicious series of suicide attacks on Israelis. It now says the dead were mostly fighters. And, as always " although its daily behaviour in the occupied territories contradicts this claim " it insists that it did everything possible to protect civilians.
But The Independent has unearthed a different story. We have found that, while the Israeli operation clearly dealt a devastating blow to the militant organisations -- in the short term, at least -- nearly half of the Palestinian dead who have been identified so far were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. They died amid a ruthless and brutal Israeli operation, in which many individual atrocities occurred, and which Israel is seeking to hide by launching a massive propaganda drive.
The assault on Jenin refugee camp by Israel's armed forces began early on 3 April. One week earlier, 30 miles to the west in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, a Hamas suicide bomber had walked into a hotel and blown up a roomful of people as they were sitting down to celebrate the Passover feast. This horrific slaughter on one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar killed 28 people, young and old, making it the worst Palestinian attack of the intifada, a singularly evil moment even by the standards of the long conflict between the two peoples.
Ariel Sharon, Israel's premier, and his ministers responded by activating a plan that had long lain on his desk. Operation Defensive Shield was to become the largest military offensive by Israel since the 1967 war. Jenin refugee camp was high on the list of targets. Home to about 13,000 people, it was the heartland of violent resistance to Israel's 35-year occupation.
The graffiti-covered walls bellowed the slogans of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad; radical Islamists and secular nationalists worked side by side, burying differences in the name of the intifada. According to Israel, 23 suicide bombers had come out of the camp, which was a centre for bomb-making. Yet there were also many, many civilians. People such as Atiya Rumeleh, Afaf Desuqi and Ahmad Hamduni.
The army was expecting a swift victory. It had overwhelming superiority of arms ? 1,000 infantrymen, mostly reservists, accompanied by Merkava tanks, armoured vehicles, bulldozers and Cobra helicopters, armed with missiles and heavy machine guns. Ranged against this force were about 200 Palestinians, with members of the militias -- Hamas, al-Aqsa brigades and Islamic Jihad -- fighting alongside Yasser Arafat's security forces, mostly armed with Kalashnikovs and explosives.
The fight put up by the Palestinians shocked the soldiers. Eight days after entering, the Israeli army finally prevailed, but at a heavy price. Twenty-three soldiers were killed, 13 of them wiped out by an ambush, and an unknown number of Palestinians died. And a large residential area "400m by 500m" lay utterly devastated; scenes that the Israeli authorities knew at once would outrage the world as soon as they hit the TV screens. "We were not expecting them to fight so well," said one exhausted-looking Israeli reservist as he packed up to head home. Journalists and humanitarian workers were kept away for five more days while the Israeli army cleaned up the area, after the serious fighting ended on 10 April.
The Independent spent five days conducting long, detailed interviews of survivors among the ruins of the refugee camp, accompanied by Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch organisation. Many of the interviews were conducted in buildings that were on the verge of collapse, in living rooms where one entire wall had been ripped off by the bulldozers and that were open to the street.
An alarming picture has emerged of what took place. So far, 50 of the dead have been identified. The Independent has a list of names. Palestinians were happy, even proud, to tell us which of the dead were fighters for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa brigades; which belonged to their security forces; and which were civilians. They identified nearly half as civilians.
Not all the civilians were cut down in crossfire. Some, according to eyewitness accounts, were deliberately targeted by Israeli forces. Sami Abu Sba'a told us how his 65-year-old father, Mohammed Abu Sba'a, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers after he warned the driver of an approaching bulldozer that his house was packed with families sheltering from the fighting. The bulldozer turned back, said Mr Abu Sba'a -- but his father was almost immediately shot in the chest where he stood.
Israeli troops also shot dead a Palestinian nurse as she tried to help a wounded man. Hani Rumeleh, a 19-year-old civilian, had been shot as he tried to look out of his front door. Fadwa Jamma, a nurse staying with her sister in a house nearby, heard Hani's screaming and came to help. Her sister, Rufaida Damaj, who also ran to help, was wounded but survived. From her bed in Jenin hospital, she told us what happened.
"We were woken at 3.30 in the morning by a big explosion," she said. "I heard that one guy was wounded outside our house. So my sister and I went to do our duty and to help the guy and give him first aid. There were some guys from the resistance outside and we had to ask them before we moved anywhere. I told them that my sister was a nurse, I asked them to let us go to the wounded.
"Before I had finished talking to the guys the Israelis started shooting. I got a bullet in my leg and I fell down and broke my knee. My sister tried to come and help me. I told her, 'I'm wounded.' She said, 'I'm wounded too.' She had been shot in the side of her abdomen. Then they shot her again in the heart. I asked where she was wounded but she didn't answer, she made a terrible sound and tried to breathe three times."
Ms Jamma was wearing a white nurse's uniform clearly marked with a red crescent, the emblem of Palestinian medical workers, when the soldiers shot her. Ms Damaj said the soldiers could clearly see the women because they were standing under a bright light, and could hear their cries for help because they were "very near". As Ms Damaj shouted to the Palestinian fighters to get help, the Israeli soldiers fired again: a second bullet went up through her leg into her chest.
Eventually an ambulance was allowed through to rescue Ms Damaj. Her sister was already dead. It was to be one of the last times an ambulance was allowed near the wounded in Jenin camp until after the battle ended. Hani Rumeleh was taken to hospital, but he was dead. For his stepmother, however, the tragedy had only just begun; the next day, her 44-year-old husband Atiya, also a civilian, was killed.
As she told his story, her orphaned children clung to her side. "There was shooting all around the house. At about 5pm I went to check the building. I told my husband two bombs had come into the house. He went to check. After two minutes he called me to come, but he was having difficulty calling. I went with the children. He was still standing. In my life I've never seen the way he looked at me. He said, 'I'm wounded', and started bleeding from his mouth and nose. The children started crying, and he fell down. I asked him what happened but he couldn't talk.
"His eyes went to the children. He looked at them one by one. Then he looked at me. Then all his body was shaking. When I looked, there was a bullet in his head. I tried to call an ambulance, I was screaming for anybody to call an ambulance. One came but it was sent back by the Israelis."
It was Thursday 4 April, and the blockade against recovering the wounded had begun. With the fighting raging outside, Ms Rumeleh could not go out of the house to fetch help. Eventually she made a rope out of headscarves and lowered her seven-year-old son Mohammed out of the back window to go and seek help. The family, fearful of being shot if they ventured out, were trapped indoors with the body for a week.
A few doors away, we heard the story of Afaf Desuqi. Her sister, Aysha, told us how the 52-year-old woman was killed when the Israeli soldiers detonated a mine to blow the door of her house open. Ms Desuqi had heard the soldiers coming and gone to open the door. She showed us the remains of the mine, a large metal cylinder. The family screamed for an ambulance, but none was allowed through.
Ismehan Murad, another neighbour, told us the soldiers had been using her as a human shield when they blew the front door off the Desuqi house. They came to the young woman's house first, and ordered her to go ahead of them, so that they would not be fired on.
Jamal Feyed died after being buried alive in the rubble. His uncle, Saeb Feyed, told us that 37-year-old Jamal was mentally and physically disabled, and could not walk. The family had already moved him from house to house to avoid the fighting. When Mr Feyed saw an Israeli bulldozer approaching the house where his nephew was, he ran to warn the driver. But the bulldozer ploughed into the wall of the house, which collapsed on Jamal.
Although they evacuated significant numbers of civilians, the Israelis made use of others as human shields. Rajeh Tawafshi, a 72-year-old man, told us that the soldiers tied his hands and made him walk in front of them as they searched house to house. Moments before, they had shot dead Ahmad Hamduni, a man in his eighties, before Mr Tawafshi's eyes. Mr Hamduni had sought shelter in Mr Tawafshi's house, but the Israeli soldiers had blown the door open. Part of the metal door landed next to the two men. Mr Hamduni was hunched with age, and Mr Tawafshi thinks the soldiers may have mistakenly thought he was wearing a suicide-bomb belt. They shot him on sight.
Even children were not immune from the Israeli onslaught. Faris Zeben, a 14-year-old boy, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in cold blood. There was not even any fighting at the time. The curfew on Jenin had been lifted for a few hours and the boy went to buy groceries. This was on Thursday 11 April. Faris's eight-year-old brother, Abdel Rahman, was with him when he died. Nervously picking at his cardigan, his eyes on the ground, the child told us what happened.
"It was me and Faris and one other boy, and some women I didn't know. Faris told me to go home but I refused. We were going in front of the tank. Then we saw the front of the tank move towards us and I was scared. Faris told me to go home but I refused. The tank started shooting and Faris and the other boy ran away. I fell down. I saw Faris fall down, I thought he just fell. Then I saw blood on the ground so I went to Faris. Then two of the women came and put Faris in a car."
Abdel Rahman showed us where it happened. We paced it out: the tank had been about 80m away. He said there was only one burst of machine-gun fire. He imitated the sound it made. The soldiers in the tank gave no warning, he said. And after they shot Faris they did nothing.
Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Hawashin was shot dead as he tried to walk through the camp. Aliya Zubeidi told us how she was on her way to the hospital to see the body of her son Ziad, a militant from the Al-Aqsa brigades, who had been killed in the fighting. Mohammed accompanied her. "I heard shooting," said Ms Zubeidi. "The boy was sitting in the door. I thought he was hiding from the bullets. Then he said, 'Help.' We couldn't do anything for him. He had been shot in the face."
In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the flattened remains of a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon. In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag. Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when Mr Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.
Mr Zughayer, who was 58, had been shot and wounded in the first Palestinian intifada. He could not walk, and had no work. Mr Hassan showed us the pitiful single room where his friend lived, the only furnishing a filthy mattress on the floor. Mr Zughayer used to wheel himself to the petrol station where Mr Hassan worked every day, because he was lonely. Mr Hassan did his washing; it was he who put the white flag on Mr Zughayer's wheelchair.
"After 4pm I pushed him up to the street as usual," said Mr Hassan. "Then I heard the tanks coming, there were four or five. I heard shooting, and I thought they were just firing warning shots to tell him to move out of the middle of the road." It was not until the next morning that Mr Hassan went to check what had happened. He found the flattened wheelchair in the road, and Mr Zughayer's mangled body some distance away, in the grass.
The Independent has more such accounts. There simply is not enough space to print them all. Mr Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch researcher, who is preparing a report, said the sheer number of these accounts was convincing.
"We've carried out extensive interviews in the camp, and the testimonies of dozens of witnesses are entirely consistent with each other about the extent and the types of abuses that were carried out in the camp," said Mr Bouckaert, who has investigated human-rights abuses in a dozen war zones, including Rwanda, Kosovo and Chechnya. "Over and over again witnesses have been giving similar accounts of atrocities that were committed. Many of the people who were killed were young children or elderly people. Even in the cases of young men; in Palestinian society, relatives are quite forthcoming when young men are fighters. They take pride that their young men are so-called 'martyrs'. When Palestinian families claim their killed relatives were civilians we give a high degree of credibility to that."
The events at Jenin " which have passed almost unquestioned inside Israel " have created a crisis in Israel's relations with the outside world. Questions are now being asked increasingly in Europe over whether Ariel Sharon is, ultimately, fighting a "war on terror", or whether he is trying to inflict a defeat that will end all chance of a Palestinian state. These suspicions grew still stronger this week as pictures emerged of the damage inflicted by the Israeli army elsewhere in the West Bank during the operation: the soldiers deliberately trashed institutions of Palestinian statehood, such as the ministries of health and education.
To counter the international backlash, the Israeli government has launched an enormous public-relations drive to justify the operation in Jenin. Their efforts have been greatly helped by the Palestinian leadership, who instantly, and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in which as many as 500 died. Palestinian human-rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories.
No holds are barred in the Israeli PR counterattack. The army " realising that many journalists will not bother, or are unable, to go to Jenin " has even made an Orwellian attempt to alter the hard, physical facts on the ground. It has announced that the published reports of the devastated area are exaggerated, declaring it to be a mere 100m square " about one-twentieth of its true area.
One spokesman, Major Rafi Lederman, a brigade chief of staff, told a press conference on Saturday that the Israeli armed forces did not fire missiles from its Cobra helicopters " a claim dismissed by a Western military expert who has toured the wrecked camp with one word: "Bollocks." There were, said the major, "almost no innocent civilians" -- also untrue.
The chief aim of the PR campaign has been to redirect the blame elsewhere. Israeli officials accuse UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, for allowing a "terrorist infrastructure" to evolve in a camp under its administration without raising the alarm. UNWRA officials wearily point out that it does not administer the camp; it provides services, mainly schools and clinics.
The Israeli army has lashed out at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Palestinian Red Crescent, whose ambulances were barred from entering the camp for six days, from 9 to 15 April. It has accused them of refusing to allow the army to search their vehicles, and of smuggling out Palestinians posing as wounded. The ICRC has dismissed all these claims as nonsense, describing the ban " which violates the Geneva Convention " as "unacceptable".
The Israeli army says it bulldozed buildings after the battle ended, partly because they were heavily booby trapped but also because there was a danger of them collapsing on to its soldiers or Palestinian civilians. But after the army bulldozers withdrew, The Independent found many families, including children, living in badly damaged homes that were in severe danger of collapse.
The thrust of Israel's PR drive is to argue that the Palestinians blew up the neighbourhood, compelling the army to knock it down. It is true that there were a significant number of Palestinian booby traps around the camp, but how many is far from clear. Booby traps are a device typically used by a retreating force against an advancing one. Here, the Palestinian fighters had nowhere to go.
What is beyond dispute is that the misery of Jenin is not over. There are Palestinians still searching for missing people, although it is not clear whether they are in Israeli detention, buried deep under the rubble, or in graves elsewhere.
Suspicions abound among the Palestinians that bodies have been removed by the Israeli army. They cite the Israeli army's differing statements about the death toll during the Jenin operation ? first it said it thought that there were around 100 Palestinian dead; then it said hundreds of dead and wounded; and, finally, only dozens. More disturbingly, Israeli military sources originally said there was a plan to move bodies out of the camp and bury them in a "special cemetery". They now say that the plan was shelved after human-rights activists challenged it successfully at the Israeli supreme court.
Each day, as we interviewed the survivors, there were several explosions as people trod on unexploded bombs and rockets that littered the ruined camp. One hour after Fadl Musharqa, 42, had spoken with us about the death of his brother, he was rushed to the hospital, his foot shattered after he stepped on an explosive.
A man came up to us in the hospital holding out something in the palm of his hand. They were little, brown, fleshy stumps: the freshly severed toes of his 10-year-old son, who had stepped on some explosives. The boy lost both legs and an arm. The explosives that were left behind were both the Palestinians' crude pipe bombs and the Israelis' state-of-the-art explosives: the bombs and mines with which they blew open doors, the helicopter rockets they fired into civilian homes.
These are the facts that the Israeli government does not want the world to know. To them should be added the preliminary conclusion of Amnesty International, which has found evidence of severe abuses of human rights ? including extra-judicial executions ? and has called for a war crimes inquiry.
At the time of writing, Israel has withdrawn its co-operation from a fact-finding mission dispatched by the UN Security Council to find out what happened in Jenin. This is, given what we now know about the crimes committed there, hardly surprising.
Fresh evidence of Jenin atrocities
By Phil Reeves in Jerusalem (The Independent)
Evidence of atrocities by Israeli troops in Jenin refugee camp grew yesterday when a British pathologist said he found "highly suspicious" wounds during the first autopsy on a victim.
Derrick Pounder, professor of forensic medicine at Dundee University, who is working with Amnesty International, visited the ruined camp and said: "Claims that a large number of civilians died and are under the rubble are highly credible.It is not believable that only a few people have been killed, given the reports we have that a large number of people were inside three and four-storey buildings when they were demolished."
The autopsy on the 38-year-old Palestinian revealed that "he was either shot in the foot, and then in the back, or shot in the back first " receiving a fatal wound " and his corpse was for some reason shot in the foot," he said. "Whichever order the shots occurred in, it was highly suspicious".
As the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, left for America yesterday, having failed to secure a ceasefire, international fury was growing over events at Jenin. The camp, home to 13,500 refugees, was stormed by Israeli forces a fortnight ago in what Mr Sharon called a counter-terrorism operation against Palestinian militants. The furore has severely damaged Israel's international standing, sending it to its lowest point for several decades.
Palestinians who survived the long battle " in which Israeli helicopters fired rockets and machine-guns into a densely populated area" have said the Israeli army committed many atrocities. Witnesses have described people being shot as they surrendered; houses being bulldozed with people inside; the use of human shields; the burial of 32 bodies in a trench, and one case of Israeli soldiers turning on the household gas supply before tossing a stun grenade into a room full of people.
Richard Cook, head of operations for Unrwa " the UN agency for Palestinian refugees " visited the camp yesterday. He said: "I was absolutely appalled. I anticipated it to a degree but the devastation was much greater than I expected."
The Foreign Office said "disproportionate and excessive" force had been used by Israel, and "clearly civilians were not properly protected".
Sharon is taking us back to 1948
The prospect of a two-state solution has faded - Israel and the Palestinians are now digging in for all-out existential war
Ahmad Samih Khalidi
The Guardian
Despite the havoc wrought by Palestinian suicide bombers, it is Israel that has proven to be the incontestable historical master of controlled and directed fury; from the callous, calculating terrorism of its pre-state underground to the most recent thorough and systematic lynching of the Palestinian Authority - security agencies and civilian infrastructure alike. Against this background, recent events take on a certain cyclical consistency: Israeli oppression met by Palestinian acts of resistance - sometimes bold, often bloody - met in turn by Israeli force, always excessive, invariably disproportionate and purposely designed to inflict maximum pain.
Indeed, there is even an ironic symmetry in the fact that Ariel Sharon's old "special" forces Unit 101 was as active in Jenin this month as it was half a century ago in the attack on the Palestinian village of Qibya in October 1953 when 69 civilians were killed, their houses blown up over their heads as the future Israeli prime minister oversaw the operation in person. Jenin can thus be seen as the latest episode in a long-running Israeli attempt to break the back of the Palestinian national movement by attacking its soft civilian underbelly. Sharon's ongoing assault on the authority in many ways represents a return to the raw existential confrontations of 1948 in the land of Palestine, albeit with an even greater imbalance in tools of confrontation available to each side.
Sunday's apparent resolution of the impasse over Arafat's imprisonment in Ramallah should not be misconstrued: Israeli rightwing triumphalism is in full swing and its appetite for colonial expansion and a "greater Israel" whetted again. Even before the latest violence, 34 new settlement outposts had been established by Sharon on the West Bank and plans are apace to expand into densely populated areas of Hebron and Arab Jerusalem. The apparent defeat of the authority can only serve to fire the right wing's enthusiasm for yet more radical solutions - including a return to the basics of "transfer", or ethnic cleansing, supported by about 50% of the Israeli electorate, according to opinion polls. Sharon is now likely to extend his war to Gaza and is still bent on the political, perhaps physical, elimination of Yasser Arafat. His ultimate goal is no less than the total subjugation and dissolution of the Palestinian national movement.
Consequently, the outlines of the solution that has served as the underpinning of the peace camp on both sides since the mid-70s are beginning to fade. As "Sharon's way" has moved to occupy the Israeli centre, the very notion of a viable two-state solution is being called into question. Sharon is setting up fences and buffer zones outside the main Palestinian urban centres that will effectively designate the de facto boundaries between the two sides. Far from eliciting an Israeli return to anything like the 1967 borders, the coming political-diplomatic tussle is likely to centre on forcing Israel's retreat from the April 2002 lines. Sharon may well offer a political solution, even a " Palestinian state", but it will be nothing near the minimum required for a fair and sustainable peace, and he has already declared his refusal to dismantle a single settlement now or in the future. The Israeli Labour party, tainted by its association with Sharon's enterprise and unwilling or unable to suggest a viable alternative, has lost all credibility with the Palestinians -and its own electorate. For the foreseeable future, it looks as the notion of a "return to Taba" and a comprehensive two-state solution is sheer illusion. The two sides will simply not get there on their own, and the international community (read the United States) will simply not take upon itself the task of making both sides - and Israel in particular - an offer they cannot refuse. On the Palestinian side, other ominous trends have begun to emerge: in the West Bank and Gaza, Fatah and the other Palestinian political factions will be digging deep underground and preparing for the next -lengthy - phase of bloody armed resistance. Gone will be the hopes for an imminent end of occupation and with them the belief in a meaningful political process. Arafat's successors will not be some enlightened democrats rescued from the wreckage of the authority, but the hardened and embittered veterans of Sharon's war seeking revenge and retribution.
With the destruction of the authority, the centre of Palestinian political gravity is likely to shift back to the PLO on the outside. As long as it is at the mercy of Israel's superior firepower, it is evident that the authority, with its current or any subsequent leadership, will not have the freedom of action or credibility to sign and deliver a political solution that can carry the majority of Palestinians with it. The alternative is for the Palestinians inside and outside to prepare for the long haul.
Inside Israel itself, the 20% of its citizens who are Arabs can be expected to feel more alienated than ever from the Jewish state. Their fears will create new bonds with their Palestinian compatriots outside. Likewise, in the refugee camps and elsewhere in the diaspora, different Palestinian factions will be seeking to draw upon the vast groundswell of popular sympathy felt by a new generation of Arabs touched once more by the drama of Palestine. Innovative and more destructive modes of armed struggle will be sought and developed. April 2002 seems to have brought us back to where we all started in 1948, an all-out existential war for the land of Palestine. Only this time the way forward will be harder and more hazardous than ever before - not least for Israel itself.
AS Khalidi is a senior associate member of St Anthony's College, Oxford, and a former Palestinian negotiator.