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“A Lunar Landscape”: Jenin Refugee Camp, April 2002 May 9, 2005
Isabelle Humphries entered the camp in the days following the Israeli withdrawal from the Hawashin camp. This an edited version of her eyewitness account of the destruction in Jenin camp and the wider effects in the West Bank of Israel’s so-called Operation Defensive Shield. Wandering in and out of what remains, unable to escape the smell of rotting corpses, many of the Western journalists and humanitarian workers began to ask why the West is failing to call this a war crime. The residents knew perfectly well. The previous day those who still had access to televisions had heard Bush call Sharon a “man of peace.” The devastation that is Jenin defies description. As one turns the corner of a broken street, the camp suddenly opens up into a vast gaping landscape, quite unidentifiable as a residential neighborhood. It is impossible for a non-resident to count the number of houses destroyed, as many of structures are simply no longer there. “I think my house was here,” said a resident in her 50s. She couldn’t be sure because the debris had been swept into a pile with several other houses and there were simply great expanses of dust where the houses had been.
This woman was lucky enough not to be inside her house at the time. Ahmad, 26, is a teacher who had already had one brother and two cousins killed earlier in the Intifada. Another brother, 38-year-old Jamal, had been paralyzed and housebound since childhood. Ahmad, like all other men who were able, had fled the camp before the bulldozers arrived. Jamal remained at home with his mother. As the bulldozer arrived she went outside her house and begged with the Israeli soldiers to allow her and other female neighbors to carry her son out. The soldiers physically prevented her from returning inside the house, and so she had to stand and listen to his screams as the house was bulldozed on top of him. For the two days I was in the camp, Ahmad and his elderly mother and father could be found sitting by the crater that was their house. Initial digging did not uncover the body. But they could smell it.
Muhammad Fayed’s house is still standing. But a visit to his house is a good case study in the manner in which Israel conducted its own war on terrorism. Every single item in his house is destroyed. During the attack, soldiers occupied Muhammad’s house, but they obviously did not feel the need to use inside doors. In many rooms a large hole has been smashed through the inside wall. The glass on computer and television screens has been shattered. Sofas were turned upside down and Hebrew graffiti covered the walls. Empty boxes of Israeli army food provisions lie strewn across the floor. Muhammad’s 77-year-old father is still in the hospital after being shot during the invasion. One brother was killed earlier in the Intifada, on September 11. His portrait on the wall was ripped off. Another brother is being held in custody. This is an average family story in Jenin. Eighteen members of the Damaj family cowered on the ground floor of their house as it was hit by missiles from Israeli helicopters. An entire side wall is destroyed, making it look like a burned-out doll house. All upstairs rooms caught fire, leaving all their possessions beyond recovery. “This is the work of the ‘man of peace,’” they said in reference to Bush’s comment. This was a mantra repeated by nearly every person I spoke to. Israeli tanks can still be seen on the hill above the camp, and any refugees who try to return from the surrounding villages in which they were hiding are targeted with live ammunition. Although no shooting was taking place inside the camp, the danger of stumbling on unexploded ordinance was high. UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) announced that it was launching a campaign to warn residents of the dangers of such explosions, and also of the collapse of houses as people sift through the rubble. A house collapsed on a small boy leaving him trapped for three hours; several people disturbed explosives and were injured as they searched their houses. A Palestinian doctor from the Galilee, holding an Israeli passport, managed to get into the camp with a delegation to assist, only to find himself one of the injured when he accidentally set off a tank shell.
“We’ve brought over some Swiss, French, and other experts in explosives and search and rescue, and have around 40 volunteers to go with them to talk about things such as how not to open doors and gates and to avoid approaching debris,” an UNRWA spokesman said. Israel released a statement announcing that such accidents were the reason that they had kept the area closed for so long—contradicting humanitarian and media claims that they were actually covering up the evidence. Israel is coming under vast criticism from a variety of international bodies and organizations. “This is one of the worst scenes of devastation I have ever witnessed. It is almost impossible to conceive that what was once a town is now a lunar landscape,” said Amnesty International’s Javier Zuniga on April 17 after a visit to the camp. The international human rights organization called for immediate and unimpeded access for humanitarian assistance wherever it is needed. “If this was an earthquake the international community would be asked for and give urgent help. It is shocking that the authorities have not asked for help and that the international community is not offering it.”
“Have you got enough blood and oxygen here at the hospital?” asked an American human rights worker who had come to document the crimes that occurred in Jenin. “Of course,” replied a doctor from Jenin’s Shifa Hospital, “the wounded never got to us.” Ziad, an ambulance driver and Jenin resident who lost his home, described how he had to wait for days outside the camp knowing that people were bleeding to death due to lack of medical attention. A 13-year-old girl described how the bodies of six men lay on the concrete outside her house for over a week. “Fact-Finding” Committee?
Criticism has been unusually strong from international human rights bodies such as Amnesty—who often fall on the cautious side in their criticism. However the criticism that has really irked Israel has come from an unusual source: UN Middle East envoy Terje Rød-Larsen, one of the architects of the Oslo Accords. The Israeli cabinet is considering declaring him a persona non-grata in Israel after he announced that it was “morally repugnant” that Israel had refused to allow humanitarian workers into the camp for 11 days after the fighting ended. Sharon forbade any of his cabinet from speaking with Rød-Larsen, while other members of his cabinet tried to push for the deportation of the UN envoy. Peres tried to smooth the waters saying that his old friend was still a “friend of Israel.” Rød-Larsen is not the only UN figure to be blacklisted by Israel. The United Nations has announced that it will be conducting a fact-finding mission into what happened in Jenin, but after US and Israeli threats of veto, has not classified this as an “investigation.” Concern among Palestinians and human rights groups is that, so long as this is described as a “humanitarian disaster” rather than a deliberately perpetrated war crime or crime against humanity, the full responsibility of Israel will not be highlighted. On April 22, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed a three-member committee, headed by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari and including Cornelio Sommaruge, former president of the International Committee for the Red Cross; and Sadako Ogata, the former UN high commissioner for refugees. Israel had not only said it wouldn’t participate if Rød-Larsen was on the fact-finding team, but also demanded that UN human rights chief Mary Robinson and Peter Hansen, the head of the UN relief works agency for Palestinian refugees, be excluded. Unsurprisingly Palestinians and humanitarian workers are highly skeptical of the potential of justice emerging from such a mission. Israel has continued to insist that it has nothing to hide, but is not as yet doing a very good PR job. In response to Rød-Larsen’s comments, Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit suggested that if Rød-Larsen was that concerned, he should take the Palestinians back with him to Norway.
Former Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu, speaking from the United States, said that Israel should not cooperate with the United Nations over the fact-finding committee: “The fact that the UN didn’t ask for any inquiry after dozens of massacres in which hundreds of Israeli citizens were murdered is clear proof that this investigation is one-sided, illegitimate and biased against Israel.” To date, however, Israel is still claiming officially that they will cooperate. “Israel has nothing to hide in Jenin,” said Ben-Eliezer. (In the end Israel would not allow any form of investigation and neither the UN or the international community pursued the matter.) The Rest of the West Bank
The scale of the devastation was the largest seen so far in this Intifada, but the actions are by no means limited to Jenin. A photographer with an Italian news agency told the Cairo Times that the devastation and the human rights abuses that occurred in the old city of Nablus were identical, and he had the photos to prove it. The soap factory that Israel claims was a bomb-making laboratory has been blown to pieces, with 20 bodies believed to be still under the rubble. While the withdrawal that Sharon has declared still includes curfews and house-to-house searches, the residents of Ramallah have recently had slightly more freedom to inspect the damage inflicted to their city and businesses. “All our computers are destroyed,” an NGO worker with the Health, Development, Information and Policy Institute (HDIP) reported. “We will have to start from the beginning again.” Concerns over where the money will come from are paramount. Meanwhile in Bethlehem, the siege at the Church of the Nativity continues as of press time. “Despite press reports that the Israeli army is withdrawing from Bethlehem, apart from the Manger Square, I can confirm that there is no such movement,” British international Georgina Reeves (one of the hundreds of foreign activists who have come to Palestine in the last months to serve as observers) reported on April 22. “This morning, I witnessed a group of approximately 10 soldiers stopping an ambulance outside my office and searching it at gunpoint. There have been house-to-house searches conducted in my neighborhood.” As for Arafat’s compound in Ramallah, Israel says it will continue the siege until three people are handed over. Israel says they are suspects in the assassination of extreme right-wing Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi.
It’s impossible to estimate how many Palestinians are currently being detained. The chaos in Jenin means that it is impossible to know who is dead and who has been taken to detention camps. Many of the detainees from Jenin are being held just a few kilometers away in the Megiddo camp (the site of the biblical Armageddon). Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has reported that hundreds of Palestinians have been illegally transferred from a camp outside Ramallah to the reopened Ketziot camp in the Negev desert. Ketziot is known as Ansar III, named after the jails run by the Israelis in the south of Lebanon and Gaza. The camp was used during the last Intifada but had been closed for the past six years. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) believes that Israel is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention in transferring Palestinians to this tented camp, as the conditions fall below UN detention standards. It has filed a petition to have the camp closed. After? In his 40s, Murshad Abu Khair is a resident of Jenin town, and he was on his first visit to the camp since the curfew had been lifted. “Do you think this is going to break people’s will to resist now?” Jamal escaped the camp but his brother is in detention. “Of course we go on; what else do we do?”
Umm Ramzi felt she was one of the “lucky” ones. She has one son and brother in prison, a son-in-law killed months previously, and she is one of the estimated 4,000 residents now left homeless. However, she has a roof over her head, as her oldest son’s house was not destroyed. Speaking of how she lost her home in Haifa as a child, she was coping with being made a refugee once again. Hopes that Jenin will make the international community aid the Palestinian struggle against occupation are probably optimistic. Expressions of shock, horror, and revulsion are obviously important for global awareness, but it seems that the most that the West can offer is to try and coax Sharon into peace talks. Though after the failure of Oslo, many wonder what the point of talking is. To the Palestinians of Jenin and elsewhere, a complete Israeli withdrawal, of both military and settlers, is what is needed to end the violence. In the meantime the Palestinians will continue with their struggle in anyway that they can. So long as the international community fails to recognize their right to resist, Israel will be able to continue to label Palestinians as terrorists. And Jenin will happen again and again. Resources: Readings: “Fact Finding is Not Enough: Can the West Ignore the Cry of Jenin?”Several articles at www.nickpretzlik.co.uk Baroud, Ramzy (ed.), Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion, (Seattle: Cune Press, 2003). Films: External links last accessed January 18, 2005.
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