Jenin War Crimes
Human Rights Watch | 03.05.2002 19:39
(Jenin, May 3, 2002) Evidence suggests that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) committed war crimes in the military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, Human Rights Watch charged in a report issued today after a week-long investigation. Human Rights Watch did not find evidence to support claims that the IDF massacred hundreds of Palestinians in the camp.
In its forty-eight page report, "Israel, the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Authority Territories: Jenin: IDF Military Operations," Human Rights Watch identified 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 IDF 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."
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 IDF 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."
On April 3, 2002, the IDF launched a major military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, home to some fourteen thousand Palestinian refugees. An estimated eighty to one hundred armed Palestinians took part in the fighting. Israel claims the camp had been the launching ground for many of the suicide bombings that have killed and maimed over one hundred Israeli civilians in recent months. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly condemned this deliberate killing of civilians. Palestinian armed militants had also planted many explosive devices in the camp prior to and during the IDF incursion.
Among the twenty-two civilian deaths documented during this investigation were the following:
Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man who was shot and then run over by IDF tanks on 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 on April 7 after IDF 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 IDF armored car as he went to buy groceries when the IDF-imposed curfew was finally lifted on April 11; and
Fifty-two-year-old 'Afaf Disuqi, who was killed on April 5 by an explosive charge that IDF soldiers had placed at her front door as she went to open it for the soldiers;
In one case involving a wounded Palestinian militant, IDF 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 IDF. U.S.-supplied helicopters fired anti-tank missiles and other ordinance into the camp, in some cases making insufficient efforts to identify legitimate military targets and avoid hitting civilian houses. 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, 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, IDF 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 immediate vicinity.
The IDF's campaign caused extensive and disproportionate destruction of the civilian infrastructure of the camp, particularly in the Hawashin district following an April 9 ambush of Israeli soldiers there. In contrast to other parts of the camp where armored bulldozers were used mainly to widen streets, in Hawashin they razed the entire district. Throughout the 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. 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 troops used Palestinian civilians as human shields, a practice prohibited under international humanitarian law. In one case, IDF 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.
"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; IDF soldiers repeatedly prevented ambulances from reaching her home, located just a few hundred meters from Jenin's main hospital.
During the period the IDF 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, and continued to prevent humanitarian access to the refugee camp for days after military operations had ceased, despite great need.
Human Rights Watch has investigated and reported on violations of international humanitarian law by governments and armed groups in conflict situations around the globe, including most recently in Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, eastern Congo, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Colombia.
Human Rights Watch is preparing a separate report on those responsible for suicide bombings directed against Israeli civilians
www.hrw.org/press/2002/05/jenin0503.htm
"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."
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 IDF 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."
On April 3, 2002, the IDF launched a major military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, home to some fourteen thousand Palestinian refugees. An estimated eighty to one hundred armed Palestinians took part in the fighting. Israel claims the camp had been the launching ground for many of the suicide bombings that have killed and maimed over one hundred Israeli civilians in recent months. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly condemned this deliberate killing of civilians. Palestinian armed militants had also planted many explosive devices in the camp prior to and during the IDF incursion.
Among the twenty-two civilian deaths documented during this investigation were the following:
Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man who was shot and then run over by IDF tanks on 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 on April 7 after IDF 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 IDF armored car as he went to buy groceries when the IDF-imposed curfew was finally lifted on April 11; and
Fifty-two-year-old 'Afaf Disuqi, who was killed on April 5 by an explosive charge that IDF soldiers had placed at her front door as she went to open it for the soldiers;
In one case involving a wounded Palestinian militant, IDF 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 IDF. U.S.-supplied helicopters fired anti-tank missiles and other ordinance into the camp, in some cases making insufficient efforts to identify legitimate military targets and avoid hitting civilian houses. 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, 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, IDF 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 immediate vicinity.
The IDF's campaign caused extensive and disproportionate destruction of the civilian infrastructure of the camp, particularly in the Hawashin district following an April 9 ambush of Israeli soldiers there. In contrast to other parts of the camp where armored bulldozers were used mainly to widen streets, in Hawashin they razed the entire district. Throughout the 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. 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 troops used Palestinian civilians as human shields, a practice prohibited under international humanitarian law. In one case, IDF 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.
"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; IDF soldiers repeatedly prevented ambulances from reaching her home, located just a few hundred meters from Jenin's main hospital.
During the period the IDF 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, and continued to prevent humanitarian access to the refugee camp for days after military operations had ceased, despite great need.
Human Rights Watch has investigated and reported on violations of international humanitarian law by governments and armed groups in conflict situations around the globe, including most recently in Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, eastern Congo, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Colombia.
Human Rights Watch is preparing a separate report on those responsible for suicide bombings directed against Israeli civilians
www.hrw.org/press/2002/05/jenin0503.htm
Human Rights Watch
Comments
Hide the following 6 comments
Link to full report
03.05.2002 21:38
Human Rights Watch
Homepage:
http://hrw.org/reports/2002/israel3/israel0502.pdf
Working to Prove the Jenin Massacre
03.05.2002 23:04
Working to Prove the Jenin Massacre
by Conversation with Brian Wood in Jenin Refugee • Friday May 03, 2002 at 12:08 AM
I think the number of dead is a lot higher than any of the official estimates. There is a lot of evidence that Israelis removed bodies from the camp. There are even reports that the Israeli military admitted removing bodies. So there is an unconfirmed number of bodies that were taken by the Israeli military, an unconfirmed number in prison, an unconfirmed number of people under the rubble, and I don't even know if there is a confirmed number of people dead.
April 29, 2002 * 9 am (Palestine time)
CCMEP: Do you need internationals in Jenin?
Brian Wood: No, there is not much to do here, besides taking
testimonies.
CCMEP: Did you meet [?] from Human rights watch?
BW: He is reluctant to use the word "massacre" because it doesn't
really have meaning. Since he used the same word for Sabra and
Chatila, there is some definition in his mind. Unfortunately, there
is a report that is going to come out on Thursday that is probably
going to be pretty weak. Internationals interviewed him for hours. He
is a really a nice guy, very patient, answering all the questions
they wanted to ask. But our analysis is that what happened here is
going to be covered up, even by Human Rights Watch.
He said that there are only 52 people that were killed in this
refugee camp, and only 21 were civilians. He said they might be 80,
or maybe 100. But he said he has no evidence of people buried under
their homes, even though people have been uncovered from their homes
every single day.
CCMEP: How can he say that?
BW: I don't know. In his estimate, there were only 52 people killed.
But the day I got here two weeks ago, I saw six corpses rotting in
their homes, corpses on the street. We were walking over dead bodies
all the time.
CCMEP: Where are all the dead bodies?
BW: I don't know, it's still difficult to get numbers. A lot of
people said that the Israelis took bodies. There is a mass grave at
the hospital in Jenin-- 39 bodies were buried there because the
morgue was full. Two were buried in the street. There are at least 15
corpses that have been taken from the rubble�and that is a very
conservative estimate. I'm going to work on it in the next days. It
is really difficult to get numbers because of the lack of
organization here. It is a big problem, that's why we think it's
going to be covered up at the official level. So we are going see
what we can do about it.
CCMEP: How many have disappeared, and how many are dead?
BW: Unfortunately, the UN school is a disaster, chaos. People are
putting in their names in order to get food. It's going to be
inefficient. Part of it is internal. For example, the bomb experts
from the Red Cross, they were supposed to remove all the unexploded
ordinances. But one of the reasons they left after being here only
three days is because the Israelis would not allow them to bring in
the proper equipment they needed to remove the devices. Then they
told us that they needed to dispose of them in Israel, and the
authorities wouldn't allow them to do either, so it really curtailed
their efforts, and they left. Now the UN is taking [the job] over.
This signals to me that the UN is trying to do stuff that is
politically sensitive. In just three days, these [other] people
removed over 300 unexploded bombs.. But all of them are still here.
Now they are re-buried around the Jenin refugee camp. There are a lot
of booby traps.
CCMEP: How many internationals are still there?
BW: There are people coming and going [?]. The group was reduced to
three today.
CCMEP: Are there are systematic efforts to unbury homes or find more
bodies?
BW: All lot of these 200 homes had people inside of them when they
were bulldozed, so they're bound to keep uncovering corpses. I
wouldn't call it systematic, but when people have an idea that one of
their relatives are in there, or if a Red Crescent volunteer thinks
there's someone there, then they bulldoze the rubble and scoop it by
hand�it's just an incredibly slow process. You had four; five-story
buildings that were bulldozed, and all that rubble came down in a
pile, so there's a lot of rubble to go through. There are a lot of
homes that haven't even been touched yet, to see if there are people
under them. But I don't think that there's been a day since the
military left that they didn't find corpses buried under rubble--and
dig them out piece by piece.
CCMEP: Do you hear any more estimates about the number of people they
think they'll find?
BW: Nobody has any idea. Human Rights Watch estimates that 4000
people have been made homeless, 200 homes destroyed. I think about 15
percent of the camp was razed. But there are a large number of houses
that have other problems now�like gaping holes in walls, tank shells.
People might still be living in them, but they are unsafe, or heavily
damaged. Human Rights estimates that there were 14,000 people living
in here, so if 4000 people are now homeless, then one quarter of the
camp became homeless because of this invasion.
CCMEP: Where are they living now?
BW: With family in other parts of the camp, or other cities.
CCMEP: Do you have any idea how many are still in prison?
BW: A lot. Just in the last few days, a few people started coming out
of the two main prisons in the camp, and we're going to start talking
to them, hopefully today. The treatment in prisons is really bad.
Beaten constantly. A lot of them are in their underwear still from
weeks ago. They are given very little food, beaten, interrogated,
beaten. But nobody really knows the numbers that would tell the story.
CCMEP: How's the food and water situation in the camp?
BW: There are still people who really don't have anything�everything
they had was either stolen or destroyed. There's just a little bit
of running water. There's still no electricity. Since the military
pulled out, then you can get more food into the camp, or go into the
city, so the food situation is better. But there are still people
whose resources have been completely destroyed.
CCMEP: Is there still a presence of Israeli military?
BW: (chuckles) Yeah, they still make their presence known. F-16's are
always flying overhead, Apache helicopters just to scare us,
especially in the morning. There are still tanks all around. On a
daily basis, they let people know that they are still there.
CCMEP: Do you believe there was a massacre?
BW: Yesterday we were talking casually to a Palestinian, and he
said, "All I do all day is think about my friends. I found a picture
yesterday of me and six or seven of my friends, and they're all
dead." I think the number of dead is a lot higher than any of the
official estimates. There is a lot of evidence that Israelis removed
bodies from the camp. There are even reports that the Israeli
military admitted removing bodies. So there is an unconfirmed number
of bodies that were taken by the Israeli military, an unconfirmed
number in prison, an unconfirmed number of people under the rubble,
and I don't even know if there is a confirmed number of people dead.
There are only families who know that their members are missing�they
don't know if they're dead or in prison. Our work here is to gather
the evidence, and show that there was a massacre.
CCMEP: Any idea how long you are going to be there?
BW: I think I'm going to be here for a little while, at least a
couple more weeks. The Jenin Refugee Camp is not like any other place
I've been in Palestine. The people here are strong, they're informed
and alert�they're fighters. They're going to stand up to the Israelis�
they'll get bulldozed, but they're going to stand up to them. Great,
great people.
add your comments
the latest from the massacre field
by mourner • Friday May 03, 2002 at 01:06 AM
JENIN, the hidden massacre!
add your comments
israel=terrorisme
by bill • Friday May 03, 2002 at 01:39 AM
lorsqu'on tue des enfants , on n'est pas seulement des terroristes mais des monstres...
sharon le boucher et bush le charognard sont de vrais vampires qui sucent le sang de toute la planète terre
add your comments
Oui Bill!
by # • Friday May 03, 2002 at 05:11 AM
C'est vrai. Sharon a été prévu par Nostradamus. Il est l'homme avec l'"chapeau" bleu et cette chose bleue est son
yamakah. Il est un homme des mensonges et de la déception.
add your comments
© 2000-2002 Palestine Independent Media Center. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the
net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Palestine IMC.
kuva upp
phony rights watch
04.05.2002 00:28
HRW have been used as a propaganda first-strike weapon all over the world. check them out in Macedonia before the NATO coup, and elsewhere.
Every now and then they produce half-credible material, just to keep their hand in, but for the most part, they are the agents of empire.
but don't listen to me...go to their site. Check out who they are.
Try tenc.net for interesting expose on HRW--if you can still get tenc.net in U.K.- British libel law is being used to try shut them down for exposing ITN's laughable coverage of Yugoslavia- before the bombs.
naked emperor
hrw: behind the hype
04.05.2002 00:40
claudius
Homepage:
http://www.tenc.net/articles/treanor/hrw.htm
Human Rights Watch
04.05.2002 10:48
The article regarding HRW's Macedonia article is written by Jared Israel, a man who is defending Serbian war criminals, notably Milosevic. Ask yourself how objective he is. Israel has no proof of the allegations that HRW 'a joint venture of George Soros and the State Department'. Indeed, if it was, then why does Noam Chomsky use HRW material extensively in his books?
Among its recent campaigns, it has criticised the US for opposing an international criminal court to try war criminals (such as the Israeli military), campaigned against the death penalty in US states, the racism of the US penal and criminal justice system, castigated US military aid to governments engaged in serious human rights abuse, highlighted human rights abuse of the Guantanamo Bay detainees ... the list goes on. Hardly an adjunct of the military-industrial elite.
Bear in mind that human rights organisations like HRW and Amnesty are not ideological, they refuse to take donations from governments and their sole aim is to make governments conform to those treaties and conventions they have signed up to. Like any organisation, they can get it wrong some times and they own up to it. However, don't dismiss them as government stooges simply because they have not confirmed the propaganda you may have swallowed.
Dan Brett
and the same
05.05.2002 17:38
did the zionazis eat them, after sacrifice ??
toe joe