The APC column rumbled down the hill, bounced over a dirt road a few hundred meters, then entered the refugee camp. Crammed inside his armored shell, Binyamin (a pseudonym) couldn’t see a thing, but the ping and crackle of bullets from Kalashnikovs and M-16s was incessant and terrifying. The APCs screeched to a stop in an alley somewhere near the center; as Binyamin leapt outside, snipers perched on rooftops fired at the vehicle, narrowly missing him. Binyamin and his comrades quickly commandeered a two-story dwelling and then began their work, crashing through walls with giant hammers, searching houses, shepherding terrified Palestinian families into rooms out of the line of fire.
On the fourth day, Binyamin was pulling night guard duty in another house that his unit had occupied, peering through the living-room window with a starlight scope attached to his M-16. A sniper fired through the window, and a bullet smashed into his trigger hand, crushing the bones in his fingers. Recuperating in a hospital in Afula now, Binyamin says that in the late 1990s he experienced plenty of fighting in southern Lebanon, but the scale and intensity of this battle dwarfed that confrontation. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says.
The battle of Jenin has already given rise to dueling metaphors: one of Israel’s top generals called it the “Palestinian Masada,” a reference to the suicidal last stand of Jewish warriors besieged by Roman invaders in their hilltop fortress in A.D. 73. Palestinian leaders have labeled it another Sabra and Shatila, referring to the massacre of more than 1,000 Palestinians by Christian militias during the Lebanon war in 1982, an atrocity for which the then Israeli commander, Ariel Sharon, was held indirectly responsible. As of late last week, Israeli military sources admitted only to “hundreds” of dead and wounded Palestinian guerrillas, while Saeb Erakat, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of local government, claimed that 500 people were killed, many of them civilians. A handful of journalists who managed to evade Israel’s military cordon and sneak into the camp found several corpses, and did not get the sense that an outright massacre had occurred.
But even before the full story emerges, the battle is looming large in the mythologies of both peoples. Eight days of close-range fighting left 23 Israeli soldiers dead in the camp. It was one of the bloodiest military operations for Israel since the 1973 war, and confirmation for many Israelis that they are engaged, as Prime Minister Sharon has repeatedly said, in a war for survival against a ruthless enemy. For Palestinians, the epic defense of Jenin represents the apex of their liberation struggle–a mix of victimhood and heroism. Dozens of women in Gaza who gave birth during the fighting named their children Jenin, in solidarity with the besieged refugee camp.
Already some Middle Eastern television networks are reporting that Jenin was a horrific massacre, and the Israeli military’s barring of reporters from the refugee camp for the past week is certain to feed Arab conspiracy theories. Even if the truth turns out to be something less than a full-scale atrocity, Jenin is certain to intensify the Arab world’s demonization of Sharon–and further dim the prospects of peace in the region.
The fall of Jenin coincided with the arrival in Israel last Thursday of Secretary of State Colin Powell, bound for a peace mission that many believe was doomed to failure before it began. Sharon had ignored American requests to call back his forces, which had killed an untold number of civilians, caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem and other West Bank cities, and left the Palestinian Authority in ruins. The prime minister repeatedly insisted that he’d continue Operation Protective Wall until the infrastructure of terror was rooted out. Many observers on both sides doubt he will ever succeed. “The terrorism of suicide bombings was born of despair. There is no military solution to despair,” says Nahum Barnea, a columnist with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot.
The difficulty of Powell’s position became tragically clear on Friday, when a female suicide bomber killed six Israelis and injured 70 at a crowded market in central Jerusalem. On Saturday, under pressure from Washington, Yasir Arafat issued a statement in Arabic and English in which he condemned suicide bombings of civilians and expressed “our full commitment to a fair and just peace between the two peoples.” Although the statement was dismissed by some as a transparent ploy to obtain a meeting with Powell, it was still enough to get a session scheduled for Sunday. Even so, Arafat may prove stubbornly intransigent: held hostage in his fetid Ramallah compound, his popularity at a record high, his people dying by the hundreds, he almost seemed to relish his role as a would-be (but not-quite) martyr for his cause.
With the extremism on both sides deepening, the United States finds itself in an increasingly uncomfortable–and potentially dangerous–position. Anti-American sentiment is growing among Palestinians, most of whom regard the Bush administration as openly pro-Sharon. Many are incensed that American weapons, from Apache helicopters to M-16 rifles, are being used by the Israeli military to kill their people. Israel, meanwhile, is worried that the United States may be tilting toward the Palestinians, prodding Sharon to make political concessions without regard to Israel’s security concerns.
It’s not surprising that the most ferocious battle of the Israeli-Palestinian war unfolded in Jenin. The town has a long history of militancy. Izzadin Al Kassem, a Muslim preacher turned guerrilla from Jenin, led a bloody revolt against British rule in the 1930s; the military wing of the radical Islamic group Hamas named itself after him. More recently, Jenin’s refugee camp, a dense labyrinth of cinder-block houses and rutted dirt roads established by Palestinian refugees from Haifa and other northern Israeli towns in 1948, has been the focal point of Palestinian resistance during the second intifada. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad enjoy enormous popularity here, and more than a dozen suicide bombers have come out of the camp and its surrounding area, earning Jenin the dubious distinction of being “the suicide-bombing capital of the West Bank.”
Militant leaders inside Jenin’s refugee camp were well prepared for the Israeli invasion. The resistance was guided by a committee of radicals, including Mahmoud Tawalbeh, the leader of Islamic Jihad’s military wing in Jenin, and Jamal abul Haija, a one-handed Hamas explosives expert. After the Passover massacre in Netanya that killed 27 people, “the calls went out from the mosque to prepare for the enemy,” one witness told NEWSWEEK. Bombmakers from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades manufactured explosives in home laboratories and secreted them in the roads and inside doorways and wall crevices; snipers built up positions on rooftops, and militant leaders burrowed tunnels underneath the camp, giving them freedom of movement. Ordinary citizens also took up arms–often no more than an aging pistol or Enfield rifle–to defend their turf against the enemy. Studying Israel’s previous incursion into the camp in early March, the militants were able to predict, with uncanny accuracy, how and where the troops would be deployed.
At 2 in the morning on Wednesday, April 3, the Israeli Army moved in. Merkava tanks and armored personnel carriers entered the city from as many as five different points, swiftly overcoming resistance from gunmen stationed across downtown Jenin before advancing toward the refugee camp on the western edge of the city. Infantry troops threaded their way through the dirt alleyways, clambering over electric poles deliberately knocked down to block their paths. Sniper fire rang out from all directions, and booby traps exploded in their faces. One soldier was shot in the head and killed the moment he emerged from his armored personnel carrier; another one was shot in the throat and died murmuring, “I can’t feel myself.” On the morning of Tuesday, April 9, a unit of reservists had just entered a small courtyard surrounded by houses in the heart of the camp when a suicide bomber leapt out and detonated himself. Some soldiers died instantly in the blast; others were crushed to death beneath collapsing walls or shot by snipers. Thirteen lives were lost. “We saw the flashes of the explosion, and the people lying on the ground,” an officer told Yediot Ahronot. “There was no need to say anything, as we all knew immediately what had happened.”
The suicide attack brought a brutal Israeli response. Just past midnight on April 10, Hassan Al Ahmad watched from his windows one mile across tomato and wheat fields from the refugee camp as four Apache helicopters swooped in low over his neighborhood. Hovering over the rooftops, the choppers fired 20 missiles into the camp in 15 minutes and obliterated many homes. Then the Apaches moved in closer, Al Ahmad says, shooting hundreds of 800mm rounds from their cannons at gunmen in the alleys. Over the next days, Israeli forces broke through narrow alleyways with bulldozers, flattening blocks of houses and sometimes burying their inhabitants alive, according to witnesses. Some residents were used as human shields, witnesses say, forced to open doors to suspected militants’ homes before Israeli troops stormed inside. The onslaught began to weaken the resistance: Mahmoud Tawalbeh, the Islamic Jihad commander, was reportedly killed in an exchange of gunfire on Tuesday morning. On Thursday morning, 36 guerrillas surrendered after running out of ammunition. They left behind a landscape of devastation and an unknown number of casualties. “Children are looking for their parents among the ruins,” one witness reported. “There are entire families who cannot find their homes.”
As of late last week, that destruction remained barely visible to the outside world. On Friday morning, a small group of reporters managed to enter the center of Jenin city by following a circuitous route along dirt tracks through vegetable fields. The streets were utterly deserted and wrecked, a scene common now to many West Bank towns: smashed cars, broken electrical poles, buildings pocked by bullets or more seriously damaged by rockets. The tight military cordon around Jenin camp, however, made it impossible to substantiate or refute claims of atrocities committed there by Israel.
Much of the Palestinian testimony seemed confused or based on hearsay. But some eyewitnesses did provide accounts of atrocities that human-rights organizations would like to investigate, as soon as Israel provides access to the camp. Ahmad Assad, for instance, told NEWSWEEK that Israeli troops entered his house on Jenin’s main street at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 6. They searched both floors and then ordered Assad, 75, to call his neighbors into the street. The soldiers placed 13 women and children in one room, then brought outside three men–two brothers from the Shalabi family and their aged father–and told them to remove their shirts in a routine check for suicide bombs. One of the brothers wore a Johnson & Johnson elastic back brace around his waist. Assad claims that the officer in charge, who went by the nickname Gabi, apparently thought it was a suicide belt. “Gabi screamed, ‘Look, look,’ and told two of his soldiers, ‘Kill him’,” says Assad, who speaks some Hebrew. “They shot all three men with bursts from their M-16s from two meters away.” The two younger men were killed; the third, 60-year-old Fateh Saleh Shalabi, survived and is reportedly still in the camp. An Israeli military spokeswoman calls the allegation a lie. “This is against all basic rules and morals that the IDF has,” she says. “IDF soldiers have orders not to harm civilians, to fire only on gunmen who put soldiers’ lives in risk.”
Though the resistance in Jenin was over by the weekend, the International Committee of the Red Cross was still being barred from entering the camp to make a survey of the dead. Red Cross workers say that they’ve even been prevented by the Army from rescuing two women trapped in the bulldozed ruins of their home. Israel has announced that it plans to inter the dead gunmen in an “enemies cemetery” in the Jordan Valley where Lebanese guerrillas killed in cross-border fighting are buried in unmarked graves. It also said it will soon allow the families of dead civilians to bury their remains in the Jenin cemetery. But the long delay in opening the camp has cemented the impression that Israel has something to hide. It’s also created a space for myths and legends–of the sort that cry out for revenge–to grow.
