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Jenin: Lying Down On Broken Glass, Crushing Bones
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| “This
was someone’s life, now it is gone”
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JENIN
REFUGEE CAMP, April 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Reporters
that have battled with Israeli soldiers to let them into Jenin refugee
camp are now inside. For those who survived the massacre those
reporters were warmly embraced as their only window to reveal to the
world the atrocities that took place in Jenin. A few attempted to put
words to the pictures.
As
Janine Di Giovanni, reporter from the U.K. daily newspaper The Times
put it, “The refugees I had interviewed in recent days while trying
to enter the camp were not lying. If anything, they underestimated the
carnage and the horror. Rarely, in more than a decade of war reporting
from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such
deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.”
The
same sentiments were reiterated by Phil Reeves from the Independent:
“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.”
“The
Israeli occupation forces stormed into my family’s 2 story house and
forcefully took us out and forced us all into one of its corridors
with five other families. We were more than 100 man, woman and child.
They hit us as they drove us to a nearby three-story house,” Rashid
Mansour, 48, a survivor of the massacre told IslamOnline
correspondent.
“We
were kept in this house as human shields to protect the Israeli
soldiers. There was no one in this house except for a 70-year-old man
who was shot in the hand. Luckily we had a nurse with us who tore a
dress that she found and tied his wound.”
“The
soldiers took us to an open area outside of Jenin and forced us to
take off our clothes and, threatening to crush our bones under the
tanks, forced us to lie down on broken glass.”
“This
is what Abu Ammar (Yasser Arafat) brought upon you!” the Israeli
soldiers told them, reported Mansour.
“They
tied our hands painfully backwards and we couldn’t move. We were in
so much pain. My younger brother started screaming in pain and at that
point I tried to gesture to the Israeli soldiers and didn’t even
know what I was saying. I was talking in English, Arabic and Hebrew
all together, but in vain,” said Mansour.
Kamal
Hussein, 30, faced death a hundred times as he was used by the Israeli
soldiers as a human shield. They arrested him and used his naked body
as a shield in front of resistance fighters. They then propped their
guns on his shoulder and head and started firing at the fighters.
A
week ago it was Israeli tanks and bulldozers that drove Palestinians
out of the devastated Jenin refugee camp - now it is the sickly sweet
smell of death, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"I
decided to leave this morning because the stench of decomposing bodies
was too much," said 30-year-old Hashim Natour, now living in a
temporary camp set up by the United Nations several miles (kilometers)
away. "The smell is simply overpowering," he said.
The
Israeli army committed a massacre in the camp, site of the most bitter
fighting since Israel launched the army onslaught in the West Bank on
March 29 to crush what it calls a "terrorist
infrastructure." Now, few deny that Jenin is now a humanitarian
disaster zone.
Jamal
Zubaidi, 16, said Israeli troops ordered all men living on his block
to come out on the street with their hands up on April 7.
The
men were then driven to a nearby yard, ordered to strip naked, and
made to lie face down in the dirt, Zubaidi said. "While my
neighbor Jamal Sabar was taking off his pants, they shot him
dead," he said in a stony voice, his eyes wandering into the
distance.
Naiem
Ghazani, a doctor, displayed a photograph taken of him by the army
after he had been forced to strip naked upon his arrest in Jenin.
"I
asked them why they were arresting me," said Ghazani. "And
they said that they were taking all men of fighting age because they
didn't know which of us were involved in the battles."
Reeves
from the Independent speaks about the grisly scenes. “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.
“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
U.N. 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.
“A
day earlier the Israeli armed forces took in a few selected
journalists to see sanitized 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,” Reeves reported.
Di
Giovanni from The Times also had stories to tell. “Bashir died in
agony. The hands of the 23-year-old Palestinian are clenched into
tight fists, his body charred. He lies buried under rubble and cement,
his head twisted towards the door as if crying out for help. His tomb
is a wasted house that crashed around him after the Israelis tried to
bulldoze it to make a road.
“Next
door, up a blackened stairway and across shards of glass, is the body
of Ashran Abu Hadel, also 23. Someone tried to pull him out of the
rubble but gave up. His arm lies straight out, as though he tried to
push himself away from the cement as he lay dying.
“This
was not only a town of fighters, as Israeli soldiers told me. It was a
town of women, children and old men, who have seen the camp grow into
a warren of ramshackle homes over half a century.
“Everyone
… has a terrible story to tell. They take your hand and lead you
into their houses across bulldozed mounds of rubble including photo
albums, clothing, toys and pillowcases. There, there are more bodies,
burnt or twisted grotesquely, caught off guard by sudden death.
Nothing prepares you for the smallness of a dead body.
“I
have seen demolished houses before. I have seen wells stuffed with
bodies. I have seen civilians terrorized and living under siege. But
what remains of Jenin camp is a wasteland of death that once housed
13,000 people.
“Sofas
and satellite dishes hang from the crevices of third floors of what
once were family villas. A red curtain, peppered with bullet holes,
flaps in the breeze. This is what war does: it leaves behind imprints
of lives. A sewing machine with a girl’s dress still under the
needle inside a house with the walls blown out. A goosedown pillow
ripped, the feathers fluttering. A photograph of a child with a bird
hangs on a partly demolished wall.
“I
saw some children who were wounded take four days to die, bleeding to
death because there was no one here to tend them,” says Fahdi Jamal,
a 30-year-old laborer.
“There
is no justice, no ethics to this war,” says Abu Bashir who is 70
years old. He points at a photo album heaped with the other trash.
“This was someone’s life, now it is gone, do you understand?” he
shouts,” reported Di Giovanni.
With
additional reporting by Al Jil Palestine Media Office
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