US group says Israelis guilty of war crimes in Jenin camp

The Times
May 03, 2002
From James Bone in New York

AS ARAB efforts to force Israel to accept a United Nations inquiry collapsed, an investigation by America's leading human rights group concluded that Israel committed "war crimes" but no massacres in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin.

The week-long inquiry by Human Rights Watch identified 52 Palestinians who were killed during the Israeli offensive - far fewer than original Palestinian estimates.

Of the dead, it said that 22 were civilians, "including children, physically disabled, and elderly people". At least 27 were suspected to have been armed Palestinians belonging to movements such as Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades or to the Palestinian Authority's police force. The status of the other three could not be determined. The group said it did not expect the death toll to rise by much.

"Human Rights Watch found no evidence to sustain claims of massacres or large-scale extrajudicial executions by the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) in Jenin refugee camp," it says in a report being released today.

The group did, however, accuse Israel of "unlawful and wilful killings", using "indiscriminate and disproportionate" force in firing from helicopters and razing houses with bulldozers, and said that soldiers forced Palestinians to serve as "human shields".

An impoverished invalid named Kamal Zghair, 57, who slept in a petrol station in Jenin, for instance, was shot dead on a major road when he ignored a curfew even though he had a white flag attached to his wheelchair. His body was then run over by an Israeli tank, and a friend could identify the body only from the socks.

Another disabled man, named Jamal Fayid, who was paralysed, was crushed in the rubble of his home after Israeli soldiers refused to allow his family time to remove him from the house before a bulldozer destroyed it.

Human Rights Watch said that about 4,000 people, more than a quarter of the population of the refugee camp, were left homeless when Israeli bulldozers leveled about 140 buildings and damaged about 200 more.

The group's three investigators also documented Israel's use of Palestinian civilians as "human shields", which is specifically outlawed by international humanitarian law.

Israeli soldiers occupying a large house opposite the main UN compound in Jenin, for instance, forced four brothers, a father and his 14-year-old son and two other men to stand in front of them on the balcony while they fired at Palestinian gunmen, resting their rifles on the civilians' shoulders. "The abuses we documented in Jenin are extremely serious, and in some cases appear to be war crimes," Peter Bouckaert, one of the investigators, said.

"Criminal investigations are needed to ascertain individual responsibility for the most serious violations."

Lieutenant-Colonel Olivier Rafowicz, the Israeli Army spokesman, dismissed the report's findings, charging that the Palestinian gunmen used their own people as shields in a refugee camp from which 28 suicide bombers were sent into Israel.

"It bears asking, when a country is fighting a war against terror, how is it that those who are engaged in fighting terrorists come under criticism, while the perpetrators of the terror are not subject to scrutiny," he said in a statement.

Danny Ayalon, an adviser to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, said: "I flatly reject the war crimes charge. It was a war zone. It was full of booby traps and explosives." The Israeli Army "did everything to be reasonable".

An Arab attempt to force Israel to accept a formal UN inquiry ended in a shambles in the early hours of yesterday when European and Latin American nations acted to save the United States from casting a bitterly divisive veto in the UN Security Council.

Arab nations withdrew their draft resolution threatening Israel with sanctions when it became clear that it would not muster the nine votes needed to be approved by the 15-nation council. Israel seemed likely to escape with a much milder rebuke.

The Security Council remained deadlocked yesterday over a proposal to send a simple letter to Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, noting his decision to disband the UN fact-finding team "with deep regret". Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian representative, insisted a resolution was necessary and said that the proposed letter was not serious enough.

Arab ambassadors threatened to summon a special session of the General Assembly, where the United States does not hold a veto power as it does in the Security Council, to condemn Israel.

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