Jenin report shot down

Palestinian officials have rejected a United Nations report on Israel's assault on a West Bank refugee camp, which said it found no evidence that Israeli troops had committed a massacre there.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said mass killings of civilians had clearly taken place when Israel attacked the Jenin camp in April.

He called Israel's actions a war crime.

The report disputed a claim by Erekat in mid-April that some 500 Palestinians were killed. It said that figure "has not been substantiated in the light of the evidence that has emerged".

The Israeli authorities did not allow the UN to visit Jenin to research its report, but investigators from the independent Human Rights Watch organisation who did visit the site shortly after the fighting ended found prima facie evidence of war crimes.

The UN report said the overall number of Palestinians killed was 52 - around half of whom may have been civilians - while Israel lost 23 soldiers.

Erekat reacted angrily to the findings, saying: "The UN should have used the word 'massacre' or 'war crime'.

"The Israeli massacre in Jenin's refugee camp clearly happened and this is a war crime and crimes against humanity also took place," he said.

The report has been long awaited by Palestinians and by human rights groups but it contained little new information. It accused both the Israeli Army and Palestinian militants of endangering the lives of civilians.

Human rights groups said the report was seriously flawed.

Israel praised the report, which it said was brought about as a result of false Palestinian propaganda.

"The report overwhelmingly negates this Palestinian fabrication and repudiates the malicious lies spread regarding this issue," said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Daniel Taub.

Allegations of a massacre have obscured the issue from the moment they were first made by Palestinian officials without evidence.

An investigation by the Independent inside Jenin shortly after the fighting unearthed numerous corroborating accounts of atrocities.

Of the victims whose stories were published in May, only Fadwa Jamma, a Palestinian nurse who was shot through the heart while trying to tend a wounded man, is mentioned in the new UN report. She was in full uniform and could be clearly seen.

Faris Zeben, 14, who was shot dead by an Israeli tank when he went shopping after the curfew was lifted, is not mentioned.

Nor is Afaf Desuqi, killed when Israeli soldiers blew open the door of her house as she tried to open it for them.

Nor Kemal Zughayer, shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road in his wheelchair.



There is no mention of evidence found by both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that extrajudicial killings of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers took place. The UN report is carefully worded and deliberately draws no conclusions, but only compiles evidence.

"We don't say there was a massacre. We don't say there wasn't a massacre," said a UN official briefing reporters. "We deliberately avoid using words like massacre, which have a high emotional charge but no agreed definition. In any case we have not been in a position to make judgments."

The report came about after the debacle when a fact-finding mission mandated by the UN Security Council was refused access to Jenin by the Israeli authorities - who originally said they would co-operate.

"Of particular concern is the use, by combatants on both sides, of violence that placed civilians in harm's way," the report says, accusing Palestinian militants of establishing bases in the heavily populated Jenin refugee camp, and the Israeli Army of using heavy weaponry on the camp.

"That the Israeli Defence Forces [Army] encountered heavy resistance is not in question," the report reads.

"Nor is the fact that Palestinian militants ... adopted methods which constitute breaches of international law ... Clarity and certainty remain elusive, however, on the policy and facts of the IDF response ... The Government of Israel maintains the IDF clearly took all possible measures not to hurt civilian life ... some human rights groups and Palestinian eyewitnesses assert that IDF soldiers did not take all possible measures to avoid hurting civilians, and even used some as human shields."

The use of Palestinians as human shields by the Israeli Army in Jenin has been extensively documented, both by human rights organisations and reporters who were on the scene. The report is at its clearest on Israel's blocking ambulances' and medical workers' access to the wounded, a breach of the Geneva conventions.

"There is a consensus among humanitarian personnel who were present that the delays endangered the lives of many wounded and ill," it says.

Miranda Sissons, a co-author of the Human Rights Watch report on Jenin, said: "The UN's report is seriously flawed. It could have done much more and it doesn't move us forward in trying to establish the truth."

America has welcomed it.

"It does confirm what we felt all along, which was that there was no massacre in Jenin," said John Negroponte, the US ambassador to the UN.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: " ... I think it is clear that the Palestinian population have suffered and are suffering the humanitarian consequences which are very severe."

Palestinian Cabinet Minister Nabil Shaath called the survey an important step. "I know it doesn't satisfy everybody and it wasn't done in the way it should have been done.

"But still it identified what happened in Jenin as a war crime."

- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS

Feature: Middle East

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