Jenin
Jenin (جنين) is a Palestinian city in the West Bank. Jenin is located on the mountainous spine of northern Samaria, overlooking both the Jordan Valley to the east, and the Jezreel Valley to the north. Jenin is neither an ancient town nor a big one, and sports a population of a few tens of thousands.
Jenin was the center of civil unrest during the Great Uprising of Palestinians in the years 1936-1939; in particular, it was the base of the pioneer of Arab terrorism, Sheikh Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam (the Hamas military wing is named after him). It was also used by Qawquji's partizans, before they were pushed away by the British.
In the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the city was captured briefly by forces of Israeli Karmeli Brigade during the "10 Days' fighting" following the cancelation of the first cease-fire. For 19 years, the city was under Jordanian control; it was then captured by the Peled division on the first day of the Six-Day War of 1967.
The city was handed over by Israel to the control of the Palestinian Authority in 1996; as it turned out, however, radical Islamist elements began to assemble in the city almost immediately. For a while they were silenced by the Palestinian authority, but they were never openly acted against. At the start of the Second Intifada, the city became a central source for the dispatching of suicide bombers to Israel's North and Center. Almost 25% of all suicide bombings carried out in Israel during the Intifada originated in Jenin.
Operation Protective Wall
Jenin was entered by Israeli forces in early April 2002, as part of Israel's Operation Protective Wall. A battle took place there, about which conflicting reports were relayed. In order to minimize civilian losses, Israel chose not to bomb the spots of resistance using aircraft as it entered, but rather to take hold of the city using infantry. 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in the street fighting, 14 of them in a single day from a charge carried by a suicide bomber that triggered the collapse of a building. Overall, Israel said that its forces had killed 47 militants and 7 civilians.
As Israel's forces advanced, they reported that numerous buildings, passages and even bodies were booby-trapped, often prompting the use of bulldozers. Further findings included more than a dozen explosive-making labs, as well as bodies of foreign citizens, most of whom were Fatah operatives brought over from Jordan. The walls of many buildings were covered with posters hailing the suicide bomber "martyrs".
Initially, officials of the Palestinian Authority claimed that the Israelis had "massacred" 500 people. 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. On an incident filmed on May 1st, Israel Defense Forces filmed Palestinians carrying out a phoney funeral procession (the "body" was able to move on its own), raising further questions about whether the Palestinians are falsifying other evidence as well.
In late April and on May 3, 2002, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch respectively released their reports about the IDF incursions into Jenin. Both groups concluded that there was no massacre, agreeing with the total casualty figures provided by the IDF but reporting triple the civilian casualties. However both also concluded IDF's engagement tactics constitued war crimes, The Human Rights Watch report concluding:
- 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 ... Some of the cases documented by Human Rights Watch amounted to summary executions ... 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.
While focussing almost exclusively on the alleged Israeli war crimes, 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.
Critics say that the commissions included no urban or counter-terrorist warfare specialists, and therefore were inherently unable to assess the justifiability of the different actions of the IDF. In addition, they claim that the humanitarian organizations were rash to jump into conclusions without investigating thoroughly the conduct of the Palestinain guerilla forces in the area; finally, they claim that the very presense of armed guerilla forces among unarmed civilians was an impediment to their civilian status, a claim that was not specifically addressed in the reports.
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 enquiry on condition that it include anti-terrorism experts and limit its scope to events in Jenin. The UN refused to accept the second condition and ultimately disbanded its mission. Israel pointed out that the UN never agreed to giving the anti-terrorism expert full membership; it had never given the mission a strict mandate, and neither did it declare the mission solely investigatory (as opposed to having a judicial purpose). All three stand in violation to 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).