2 Operation Defensive Shield

Jenin's refugee camp was the place of one of the most controversial battles of Operation Defensive Shield. The battle itself drew enormous international attention and is still a painful issue for both Israeli and Palestinians, who continue to fight over it in the media.

2.1 The battle

Jenin was entered by Israeli forces in early April 2002, as part of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield. A battle took place there, about which conflicting reports were relayed. According to the Israeli Defence Forces, Israel chose not to bomb the spots of resistance using aircraft as it entered, in order to minimize civilian losses [1], but rather to take hold of the city using infantry. A total of 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in the street fighting, 14 of them in a single day either from a charge carried by a suicide bomber that triggered the collapse of a building or by being shot by the bombers' accomplices. Overall, Israel said that its forces had killed 47 militants and 7 civilians. Others reports claimed up to 22 civilians inamong the 54 fatalities. The walls of many buildings were covered with posters hailing the suicide bombers as "martyrs".

In October 2002, according to the Walla news agency, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas websites reported that their forces in Jenin before the Israeli entry included 250 armed militants. The official Kol Yisrael radio station reported that 15,000 explosive charges were at the militants' disposal, as well as a large number of handguns. The militants were well organized and had an extensive system of communications. Walla also mentioned sources who claimed that Palestinians youngsters contributed to the fighting, sometimes even carrying explosive charges in their schoolbags.

Time Magazine also wrote about the heavily wired refugee camp. It stated, for example, that on the outskirts of Jenin, an IDF armoured Caterpillar D9 detonated 124 explosive charges. Time also quoted an unnamed Palestinian who admitted that the gunmen own booby traps caused some of the civilian deaths.

According to Israeli authorities, numerous buildings, passages and even bodies were booby-trapped, often prompting Israelis to use armored bulldozers to level sections of the city. The Israelis also claimed to have found more than a dozen explosives-making labs, as well as the bodies of foreign citizens, most of whom were operatives of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement who had been brought over from Jordan.

2.2 Allegations of a Massacre

Israeli authorities prevented the international press from entering the refugee camp for two weeks as rumors of massacres in Jenin swirled through Palestinian communities. The rumors echoed in the world press for several weeks, further damaging Israel's reputation in the court of world public opinion. However, the allegations were later found to be inaccurate, as later inquiries by human rights groups and the UN commission did not find evidence of widespread massacres by Israeli forces in Jenin.

Officials of the Palestinian Authority claimed that the Israelis had deliberately massacred 5000 - 3,000 people, and were burying them in mass graves. Some advocates of Palestinian nationalism claimed that "the Jews" were starting a "Holocaust" against Arabs. [2]

"The Palestinians say hundreds more were killed and their information minister, Yasser Abed Rabbo , on Friday accused Israel of digging mass graves for 900 Palestinians in the camp." [3]

Many Western news agencies reported these claims uncritically and without confirmation. However, on April 30, Kadoura Mousa Kadoura , the director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the northern West Bank, dropped the death toll to 56 people, including armed combatants. Further investigation by the United Nations and international reporters rejected claims that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed in Israel's attack on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin and confirmed that only 52 Palestinians where killed in the operation, 22 of whom were civilians. [4]

On May 2nd, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) filmed adult Palestinians carrying out a mock funeral procession. The funeral was fake and the "body" was able to get up and walk. On May 8th, 2002, The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment issued a press release [5] stating that it was only Palestinian children playing "funeral". Israeli groups reject this claim outright.

In an article about the battle in Jenin, Time Magazine ruled out Palestinian allegations of massacre, writing that

"A Time investigation concludes that there was no wanton massacre in Jenin, no deliberate slaughter of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. But the 12 days of fighting took a severe toll on the camp." [6]

2.3 Human Rights reports

In late April and on May 3, 2002, the United Nations (UN), Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch released reports about the IDF incursions into Jenin. The reports documented that 32 Palestinian militants, 22 Palestinian civilians, and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting, while many buildings were reduced to rubble.

The UN report stated:

Many credible sources have reported about atrocities committed in the camp and about the presence of prima facie evidence of war crimes. In addition, it is probable that a massacre and a crime against humanity might have been committed in the Jenin refugee camp. [7].

The HRW report found "no evidence to sustain claims of massacres or large-scale extrajudicial executions by the IDF". The report agreed with the total casualty figures provided by the IDF but documented a higher proportion of civilian casualties. However, the HRW report also stated that "Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes". Amnesty International concurred.

The HRW report concluded:

Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes. Human Rights Watch found no evidence to sustain claims of massacres or large-scale extrajudicial executions by the IDF in Jenin refugee camp. However, many of the civilian deaths documented by Human Rights Watch amounted to unlawful or willful killings by the IDF. Many others could have been avoided if the IDF had taken proper precautions to protect civilian life during its military operation, as required by international humanitarian law. ... Some of the cases documented by Human Rights Watch amounted to summary executions, a clear war crime. ... Throughout the incursion, IDF soldiers used Palestinian civilians to protect them from danger, deploying them as "human shields" and forcing them to perform dangerous work ... the IDF prevented humanitarian organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, from gaining access to the camp and its civilian inhabitants-despite the great humanitarian need. [8]

While focusing mainly on the actions of the IDF, it adds that:

Palestinian gunmen did endanger Palestinian civilians in the camp by using it as a base for planning and launching attacks, using indiscriminate tactics such as planting improvised explosive devices within the camp, and intermingling with the civilian population during armed conflict, and, in some cases, to avoid apprehension by Israeli forces.

The report notes that:

The presence of armed Palestinian militants inside Jenin refugee camp, and the preparations made by those armed Palestinian militants in anticipation of the IDF incursion, does not detract from the IDF's obligation under international humanitarian law to take all feasible precautions to avoid harm to civilians ... Unfortunately, these obligations were not met.

Amnesty International reported that:

Unlawful killings violate the "right to life" laid down in Article 6 of the ICCPR. Amnesty International considers that some of these abuses of the right to life would amount to "willful killings" and "willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health" within the meaning of Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention dealing with grave breaches of the Convention; "grave breaches" of the Geneva Convention are war crimes. -[9].

Israeli critics of the report pointed out that the inquiries included no urban or counter-terrorist warfare specialists and therefore they believe that the investigators were unable to assess the justifiability of the IDF actions. Israel claimed that humanitarian organizations were rash to jump to conclusions about Israeli conduct without investigating thoroughly the conduct of the Palestinian guerrilla forces in the area. Moreover, Israel complained that although terrorists are civilians by definition, they are still combatants, which made their status different from that of the unarmed civilians. Finally, the human rights groups had not investigated the incidents in which ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent and equipment of other aid agencies were allegedly being used by Palestinian militants to transport weapons and combatants, thus voiding their nonbelligerent status as defined in the Geneva Convention.

To settle the contradictory claims, a fact finding mission was proposed by the United Nations on April 19 2002. Israel initially agreed to co-operate with the inquiry, but demanded a set of conditions to do so. Among the conditions, Israel demanded that the mission should include anti-terrorism experts, that the UN agree not to prosecute Israeli soldiers for potential violations of international law, and that it limit its scope exclusively to events in Jenin. The UN refused to accept the last two conditions and were forced to ultimately disband their mission. Israel argued that the conditions under which the UN proposed the mission were unfair, as the UN never agreed to give the anti-terrorism expert full membership, did not give the mission a strict mandate, and did not declare the mission solely investigatory (as opposed to having a judicial purpose). According to Israel, all three positions violate of the UN's own principles (as stated in the "Declaration on Fact-finding by the United Nations", A/RES/46/59 of December 9, 1991).

3 External links

• Declaration on Fact-finding by the United Nations
• Full Text of UN Report
• Human Rights Watch: Jenin War Crimes Investigation Needed
• Full Text of Human Rights Watch Report
• Executive Summary, The Battle in Jenin – The Israel Defence Force’s , Response to the Report by Amnesty International (IDF spokesman's official response to the report)
• Human Rights Watch - Jenin: IDF Military Operations
• Documenting the Myth
• Why Europeans bought the Jenin Myth
• How Europe's Media Lost Out
• List of suicide bombings originating in Jenin
• Palestinian view of UN report
• Israel Defense Forces' briefing on terrorist activity in Jenin
• Israel Defense Forces' footage of the allegedly fake burial in Jenin
• Israel Defense Forces' footage of the allegedly fake burial in Jenin
• TIME magazine writeup on Jenin
• The Secretary General's report on Jenin
• "Jenin Al Kassam" A Hothouse of Terrorism
• kuro5hin: Israel bans documentary about Jenin
• The Guardian: Israeli censors ban film about battle of Jenin
• Ha'aretz: Censor bans movie on Jenin offensive
• Reuters: Israeli Film Board Bans Jenin Camp Documentary

Palestinian Cities Israeli-Palestinian conflict

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