Gość: wieslaw6
IP: *.cm-upc.chello.se
26.04.02, 06:57
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020422-230385,00.html
Monday, Apr. 22, 2002
The Israelis figured they had an advantage at night. During a week of
relentless fighting in the Jenin refugee camp, they had forced the Palestinian
militants inside a smaller and smaller perimeter. At about 4 a.m. last Tuesday,
16 reservists of the 5th Infantry Brigade began moving forward again, peering
through night-vision goggles as they searched for a house to use as a lookout.
The first one they chose proved inadequate, but a second, about 30 yards away,
seemed better situated. The soldiers walked into a 3-foot-wide alley next to
the house, searching for an entrance. They paused while an officer, Major Oded
Golomb, walked ahead to set charges to blow the door open.
The blast they heard next wasn't theirs. "I saw a flash of light that was
thrown at us, but it didn't reach us. Immediately after, another flash of
light," Sergeant Ron Drori told Time. "I understood right away it was a bomb."
It wasn't a suicide attack, as early reports suggested, but a bomb thrown from
a balcony. When the device detonated just feet from the soldiers, Palestinians
on the roof opposite opened up with automatic weapons. "It was like a curtain
of fire," said Drori. "We couldn't see anything, and all we could hear was the
sound of bullets flying and hitting the walls. I started to hear the crying of
people who were injured."
During a brief lull, Drori retreated behind a courtyard wall and returned fire
until a magazine in his M-203 rifle jammed. He switched to a grenade launcher
attached to the rifle. His fire drew an answer, and he was hit in the leg. Of
the 16 men in his company, only three escaped being wounded or killed.
The first phase of the fight lasted an hour. It was followed by a bizarre tug-
of-war in which the Palestinians tried to drag three Israeli bodies out of the
area. They were stopped by an Israeli rescue force. One of the rescuers, Lieut.
Eyal Yoel, and another soldier rushed into a house overlooking the ambush to
provide covering fire. But as Yoel entered a room, he hit a trip wire. The
explosion knocked him unconscious and set him afire. He died before his
comrades could reach him. When the shooting finally stopped, 13 Israelis lay
dead, including four members of a rescue squad. Ten Palestinians were killed.
The distance between opposing forces: 10 yards.
The night before the ambush, soldiers from the 5th Brigade had gathered in a
house inside the camp to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day. The 28-year-old
head of one company, Lieut. Dror Bar, had spoken about the symbolism of the
moment. "In Europe, Jews couldn't fight back," he had said. "Today we're being
attacked, but we can fight back." The soldiers had lighted candles and read a
Psalm. During the next morning's ambush, Dror Bar was killed.
The Jenin camp was bound to be a killing zone. Both sides knew as much.
Established in 1953 to provide temporary shelter for refugees still homeless
after the 1948 war, the camp has 14,000 residents crammed inside a 2 1/2-sq.-
mi. maze of attached cinder-block houses on streets barely wide enough for a
Toyota, much less a tank. It is home to a fiercely nationalist tradition and
some of the Palestinians' most successful terrorists. When the tanks came two
weeks ago, Jenin's fighters were surrounded and outgunned but not outfought. In
a radio broadcast, Hamas vowed to fight to the death. With the Israeli army
busy in Ramallah and elsewhere in the West Bank in late March, the Palestinians
had nearly a week to organize a defense--on their own turf, on their own terms.
The slope of the camp favored their position at the crest. And their bombmakers
expertly set about the delicate task of making every alley and building a
lethal conquest for the Israeli attackers.
The 5th Brigade paid a heavy price on Tuesday, but by Thursday, when the
Israeli military finally pulled back its armored curtain, the camp had been
obliterated. Bulldozers and tanks had blasted a long, wide attack corridor
through the camp. In a house-to-house, wall-to-wall onslaught of helicopter
gunships, armor and infantry, Israeli forces say they killed at least 100
Palestinians and captured nearly 700 others, including some on Israel's list of
terror suspects. The last group of 37 surrendered only after running out of
bullets. Dozens of civilians perished, some crushed by falling walls, others in
the cross fire. Palestinians put the total number of their dead as high as 500;
the Israeli military says it lost 23 in all.
Israel's capture of Jenin was never in doubt. It will go some way toward sating
Israeli hunger for revenge after the suicide attacks. But it isn't likely to
halt the attacks. In Palestinian minds, Jenin will forever be a heroic stand, a
Middle East Stalingrad.
Palestinians and some human-rights activists charge that Israeli troops
massacred civilians and then covered up the evidence. When reporters were
allowed into the camp on Thursday, there were no bodies to be found. Yet
residents reported that dozens of corpses had been left in the streets for
days, and later they directed reporters to what they said was a mass
grave. "They want to hide their crimes, the bodies of the little children and
women," Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat told the Associated Press. On
Friday the Israeli Supreme Court barred the army from carrying out a plan to
bury some of the camp's dead Palestinians until a hearing into the deaths could
take place two days later.
Israel denied committing any atrocities and blamed the Palestinians' defensive
strategy for the damage and civilian casualties. "A refugee camp is where there
are people who are living with a humanitarian crisis," said Colonel Gal Hirsch,
the Israeli army's chief of operations. "The Jenin refugee camp is a military
combat position. It was set up that way because the Palestinians decided they
wanted to fight us there. There wasn't a massacre there; there was a battle."
The pattern of the Israeli attack was frighteningly direct. Helicopter gunships
pounded areas where gunmen had taken positions. As the gunmen were chased
closer to the camp's center, tanks, bulldozers and troops advanced on the areas
that had been abandoned.
Jihad Hanoun, 30, lived in a compound with his six brothers and their families
in the camp's main square. On the morning of April 6, the army started shelling
his three-story house, briefly setting the third floor on fire. There were 60
people inside. They heard a voice over a loudspeaker telling them to leave, but
they didn't. "We were scared to death," said Hanoun. Then soldiers broke
through a wall from a neighbor's house.
In a pattern repeated throughout the campaign, the soldiers forced Hanoun to
knock on his neighbor's door, shooting over his head as he did so to prevent
ambush. (Palestinians also accused Israeli soldiers of using them as human
shields.) Hanoun persuaded his neighbors to come out. The soldiers separated
the men, forced them to take off their clothes, then blindfolded and handcuffed
them, he said. "I was beaten on my head and chest with the butt of a rifle.
They burned my face [with cigarettes]," he said.
Other residents told similar stories of harrowing escapes as bulldozers or
sledgehammers punched through walls of occupied houses. Fearing suicide attacks-
-five Palestinians died after blowing themselves up as they surrendered--the
soldiers forced hundreds of men to strip naked in the streets and march to
detention centers. Some prisoners said they were kept for days without clothes.
Ambulances were prevented from reaching the wounded. A 15-year-old boy was
forced to dump a dead body outside an Islamic Jihad leader's house. After the
fighting died down, a middle-aged man rushed amon