JENIN,
May 3 (News Agencies) - Evidence suggests that the Israeli occupation
army committed war crimes in the military operation in the Jenin
refugee camp, Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged in a report issued
Friday, May 3, after a week-long investigation.
In
its forty-eight page report, “Israel, the Occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Authority Territories: Jenin: IDF
[Israeli army] Military Operations,” Human Rights Watch was able to
identify fifty-two Palestinians who were killed during the operation,
of whom twenty-two were civilians. Many of the civilians were killed
willfully or unlawfully.
Human
Rights Watch also found that the Israeli army used Palestinian
civilians as "human shields" and used indiscriminate and
excessive force during the operation.
"The
abuses we documented in Jenin are extremely serious, and in some cases
appear to be war crimes," said Peter Bouckaert, senior researcher
at Human Rights Watch and a member of the investigative team.
"Criminal
investigations are needed to ascertain individual responsibility for
the most serious violations. Such investigations are first and
foremost the duty of the Israeli government, but the international
community needs to ensure that meaningful accountability occurs,"
HRW website reported Bouckaert as saying.
A
Human Rights Watch team of three experienced investigators spent seven
days in the Jenin refugee camp, gathering detailed accounts from
victims and witnesses and carefully corroborating and independently
crosschecking their accounts with those of others to reconstruct a
detailed picture of events in the camp in April 2002.
The
Israeli occupation army has not agreed to Human Rights Watch's
repeated requests for information regarding its military incursions
into the West Bank and Gaza.
Bouckaert,
who headed up earlier Human Rights Watch investigations into wartime abuses
in Chechnya, Kosovo,
and Afghanistan,
said that the Jenin events clearly warrant further investigation. He
noted that the hallmark of a professional army is to take seriously
the need to establish accountability for serious violations of the
laws of war.
"There
have been widely divergent accounts of what happened in Jenin. A U.N.
fact-finding mission could contribute significantly to the search for
the truth in Jenin," Bouckaert said. "Israel should
cooperate fully with whatever new U.N. fact-finding mission might be
established, and there should be no immunity for persons implicated in
the most serious violations of the laws of war."
Among
the twenty-two civilian deaths documented during the HRW investigation
were the following:
-
Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man who was shot
and then run over by Israeli army tanks April 10 as he was moving in
his wheelchair equipped with a white flag down a major road in Jenin.
-
Thirty-seven-year-old Jamal Fayid, a paralyzed man, who was crushed in
the rubble of his home April 7 after Israeli army soldiers refused to
allow his family the time to remove him from their home before a
bulldozer destroyed it.
-
Fourteen-year-old Faris Zaiben, who was killed by fire from an Israeli
armored car as he went to buy groceries when the Israeli-imposed
curfew was finally lifted April 11.
-
Fifty-two-year-old 'Afaf Disuqi, who was killed April 5 by an
explosive charge that Israeli army soldiers had placed at her front
door as she went to open it for the soldiers.”
In
one case involving a wounded Palestinian resistance fighter, Israeli
soldiers for several hours prevented medical help from reaching him.
The soldiers then killed the man, who had been left close to a
hospital near the camp and was no longer armed or taking active part
in the fighting.
Human
Rights Watch also found evidence of indiscriminate and
disproportionate use of force by the Israeli occupation army.
U.S.-supplied helicopters fired anti-tank missiles and other ordinance
into the camp. The helicopters struck many houses in Jenin refugee
camp that were inhabited only by civilians, and where no Palestinian
fighters were present.
In
one of many such cases, said the report, a tank shell and two
helicopter-fired TOW anti-tank missiles hit the house of Kamal
Tawalba, a father of fourteen children, on April 6. No fighters were
present in the home. When Tawalba and his family tried to leave their
burning home, Israeli soldiers in the vicinity shot at them.
In
another case, a sixty-year-old woman was killed when a helicopter
fired a missile directly into her top-floor apartment although there
were no armed Palestinians in the building or the vicinity.
The
Israeli offensive caused extensive and disproportionate destruction of
the civilian infrastructure of the camp, particularly in the Hawashin
district which was entirely razed by the Israeli army.
Throughout
the Jenin refugee camp, at least 140 buildings were completely
leveled, many of them multi-family dwellings, and more than 200 others
were severely damaged, leaving an estimated 4,000 people, more than a
quarter of the population, homeless. More than one hundred of those
buildings were in Hawashin district.
The
extensive, systematic, and deliberate leveling of the entire district
was clearly disproportionate to any military objective that Israel
aimed to achieve, HRW said. Establishing whether this devastation so
exceeded military necessity as to constitute wanton destruction-a war
crime-should be one of the highest priorities for any future U.N.
fact-finding team, said Bouckaert.
Human
Rights Watch also documented
cases in which Israeli forces used Palestinian civilians as human
shields, a practice prohibited under international humanitarian law.
In
one case, Israeli soldiers forced eight civilians to shield them by
making them stand on a balcony while the soldiers fired at Palestinian
gunmen. Kamal Tawalba and his fourteen-year-old son were among them.
Tawalba described how the soldiers kept them for three hours in the
line of fire, and used his and his son's shoulders to rest their
rifles as they fired.
 |
| A woman wails
before a tractor wagon where the bodies of Palestinians murdered
in the Israeli incursion into Jenin were piled to be taken to a
mass grave.
|
"Even
accepting the Israeli charge that Palestinian groups who used the
refugee camp as a base were responsible for attacking Israeli
civilians," said Bouckaert, "this does not excuse the IDF
violations documented in this report."
Bouckaert
added that Human Rights Watch found no evidence that Palestinian
gunmen forced civilians to serve as human shields during the battles
in the camp, and no indication that Palestinian gunmen had prevented
Palestinian civilians from leaving the camp.
"As
in our prior investigations of IDF operations, we also found numerous
cases where the IDF coerced Palestinian civilians to take part in
military operations," Bouckaert said. "Palestinian civilians
were forced, sometimes at gunpoint, to accompany IDF troops during
their searches of homes and to carry out some of the most dangerous
tasks during these searches."
During
most of "Operation Defensive Shield," the IDF blocked
emergency medical access to Jenin camp. Soldiers repeatedly fired on
Red Crescent ambulances, and in one case shot to death a uniformed
nurse, twenty-seven-year-old Farwa Jammal, who had come to the
assistance of a wounded man.
In
another case, fifty-eight-year-old Mariam Wishahi died in her home
thirty-six hours after she was injured by shrapnel. Israeli soldiers
repeatedly prevented ambulances from reaching her home, located just a
few hundred meters from Jenin's main hospital.
During
the period the Israeli occupation army had control of the camp, the
Israeli authorities had responsibility under international
humanitarian law for the welfare of the civilian population. Yet
Israeli authorities denied humanitarian organizations access to the
camp during their offensive, said HRW, and continued to prevent
humanitarian access to the refugee camp for days after military
operations had ceased, despite great need.
