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UN, HRW & AI: There was NO massacre at Jenin
Since the Jenin "massacre" is raised in article after article (but then dropped when refuted, only to be re-raised elsewhere) I figure that a central point for this discussion is justified.
When, in heavy fighting, some civilians are killed (and many of them by their own side), it is not a massacre.
Sources:
http://www.efreedomnews.com/News%20Archive/Israel%20Palestine/The%20'engineer'.htm
[From the Egptian Al Ahram, an interview of a terrorist bomb-maker by Jonathan Cook]
|| "We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them," he said.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/04/22/jenin.fighter/index.html
|| Mardawi drew a map of the camp and talked about the course of the battle. Their weapons were guns and crudely made bombs and booby traps -- "big ones" for tanks and "others the size of a water bottle." He estimated 1,000 to 2,000 bombs and booby traps were spread through the camp.
http://www.time.com/time/2002/jenin/story.html
|| The Palestinian fighters had made their own preparations. Booby traps had been laid in the streets of both the camp and the town, ready to be triggered if an Israeli foot or vehicle snagged a tripwire. Some of the bombs were huge – as much as 250 lbs. of explosives, compared with the 25 lbs. a typical suicide bomber uses.
|| a senior Palestinian military officer has admitted to Time that some of those who died were killed by rubble from the exploding booby traps with which Palestinian fighters had honeycombed the camp... it was probably the gunmen's own booby traps that buried some civilians and fighters alive. There were bombs that were certainly big enough to wreck a cinder-block refugee house more devastatingly than a D-9 [bulldozer] ever could. ... It takes the D-9 at least half an hour to fully wreck a building. Israeli soldiers say they always called to residents to come out before the bulldozers went in. But even if the innocents were too frightened initially to leave, most would surely have done so as soon as the D-9 started its work.
Yet the terrorist bombs could demolish buildings instantly, thus burying/killing/trapping those inside who would have no chance to exit.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24668-2002May2.html
|| That hand-to-hand, door-to-door combat, in an intensely built-up shantytown, among dozens of houses booby-trapped by Palestinian fighters, should have yielded somewhere between seven and 21 scattered civilian casualties is nothing less than astonishing. It testifies to the extraordinary scrupulousness of the Israeli army, which lost 23 soldiers in the battle, precisely because it did not want to cause the civilian casualties that come with aerial bombardment, as has happened everywhere from Grozny to Kabul. And yet Israel was investigated precisely for defending itself against massacres that warrant no investigation.
AI and HRW completed their investigations in short order. The UN completed its investigation later. All concluded that there was no evidence of a massacre.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenin_massacre
|| In late April and on May 3, 2002, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch respectively released their reports about the IDF incursions into Jenin. The HRW report stated that it found "no evidence to sustain claims of massacres or large-scale extrajudicial executions by the IDF", and the Amnesty International report came to the same conclusion.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/middle_east/2165272.stm
|| UN says no massacre in Jenin
|| A United Nations investigation has rejected claims that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed in Israel's attack on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin.
Sources:
http://www.efreedomnews.com/News%20Archive/Israel%20Palestine/The%20'engineer'.htm
[From the Egptian Al Ahram, an interview of a terrorist bomb-maker by Jonathan Cook]
|| "We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them," he said.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/04/22/jenin.fighter/index.html
|| Mardawi drew a map of the camp and talked about the course of the battle. Their weapons were guns and crudely made bombs and booby traps -- "big ones" for tanks and "others the size of a water bottle." He estimated 1,000 to 2,000 bombs and booby traps were spread through the camp.
http://www.time.com/time/2002/jenin/story.html
|| The Palestinian fighters had made their own preparations. Booby traps had been laid in the streets of both the camp and the town, ready to be triggered if an Israeli foot or vehicle snagged a tripwire. Some of the bombs were huge – as much as 250 lbs. of explosives, compared with the 25 lbs. a typical suicide bomber uses.
|| a senior Palestinian military officer has admitted to Time that some of those who died were killed by rubble from the exploding booby traps with which Palestinian fighters had honeycombed the camp... it was probably the gunmen's own booby traps that buried some civilians and fighters alive. There were bombs that were certainly big enough to wreck a cinder-block refugee house more devastatingly than a D-9 [bulldozer] ever could. ... It takes the D-9 at least half an hour to fully wreck a building. Israeli soldiers say they always called to residents to come out before the bulldozers went in. But even if the innocents were too frightened initially to leave, most would surely have done so as soon as the D-9 started its work.
Yet the terrorist bombs could demolish buildings instantly, thus burying/killing/trapping those inside who would have no chance to exit.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24668-2002May2.html
|| That hand-to-hand, door-to-door combat, in an intensely built-up shantytown, among dozens of houses booby-trapped by Palestinian fighters, should have yielded somewhere between seven and 21 scattered civilian casualties is nothing less than astonishing. It testifies to the extraordinary scrupulousness of the Israeli army, which lost 23 soldiers in the battle, precisely because it did not want to cause the civilian casualties that come with aerial bombardment, as has happened everywhere from Grozny to Kabul. And yet Israel was investigated precisely for defending itself against massacres that warrant no investigation.
AI and HRW completed their investigations in short order. The UN completed its investigation later. All concluded that there was no evidence of a massacre.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenin_massacre
|| In late April and on May 3, 2002, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch respectively released their reports about the IDF incursions into Jenin. The HRW report stated that it found "no evidence to sustain claims of massacres or large-scale extrajudicial executions by the IDF", and the Amnesty International report came to the same conclusion.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/middle_east/2165272.stm
|| UN says no massacre in Jenin
|| A United Nations investigation has rejected claims that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed in Israel's attack on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin.
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>the Israeli army, which lost 23 soldiers in the battle<
so this means this is an acceptable situation? that it's pefectly o.k. that it happened? that the context within which it occurred is justifiable? that deaths of palestinian mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and israeli mothers, fathers, sons and daughters is a good thing as long as it's not a massacre? and that if it happened again no one should say "why do humans do this to each other?"
everything is so sick and broken and twisted in the middle east. now people on both sides debate the degree of tragedy...
64+ Palestinians killed in Jenin = lies, no massacre happened, just Palestinian propaganda, etc...
From my understanding, around 64 bodies of Palestinians were recovered in Jenin.
How many died there may never be actually known because the IDF blocked all entrance into there for days while they "cleaned up" the bodies. The IDF carried off many of the bodies for burial within Israel (as a prominent Israeli official said "we must bury the bodies before they bury us") and crushed others where they lay with bulldozers so that only fingers and toes could be made out.
Of the 64 bodies recovered, around 20 were thought to be resistance fighters and the rest women, children and elderly.
Significantly, Israel blocked a UN investigation into Jenin even after they had hand picked the people on that committee -- some will recall their insistence on having military investigators as they would be more understanding -- yet even those hand-picked investigators were still too much for Israel to allow in.
And the body count at Jenin does not include the people killed in other towns around the West Bank at the same time. All in all, Israel killed hundreds of people during that period of time in Jenin and the surrounding cities (Nablus, Bethlehem, and others).
And according to the UN/AI/HRW, the majority of the casaulties were fighters.
When a bus-full of innocent Israeli civilians are intentionally blown-up, a pre-meditated act of murder, it is indeed a massacre.
Yet Arab propagandists vow "revenge" for the Martyr who "sacrificed" himself.
So too is it a massacre when a terrorist opens fire with automatic weapon at a crowded civilian bus station.
Yet when the gunman is then killed by Israeli security forces, the Arab propagandists call this a massacre and vow revenge for his death.
There is simply no comparison between such barbaric acts of intentional murder and the unintended deaths of civilians at war, especially since many seem to agree that most of the Arab civilians in Jenin died as a result of bombs set by Arab terrorists.
While the Arabists here continue their calls for the destruction of Israel, cooler heads are prevailing in the mideast. Hopefully Abbas and Sharon can end the violence and return to the negotiating table and reach an agreement for peaceful coexistence.
If there was nothing to hide I don't understand this refusal of IDF to let anybody in Jenin.
Sure there is Arab propaganda, but you take for granted the Israeli media and Israeli friends don't use propaganda, and whatever they say must be the truth.
I wonder if any international media wrere able to go in and verify by themselves the veradicity of IDF and Israel government staments. And you yourself were you present to verify the facts.
There are plenty of incidents in which Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian civilians intentionally.
Even international peace activists aren't immune. How do you explain Bryan Avery being shot in the face by an Israeli soldier, or Tom Hurndall being shot in the back of the head by an Israeli sniper, or Caihome Butterly shot in the leg, Rachel Corrie crushed by a bulldozer, Ian Hook (UN worker) shot in the back and killed, James Miller (British cameraman) shot and killed in Rafah. And these aren't even Palestinians.
Now if Israelis are so bold as to kill internationals with such impunity and immunity to prosecution, imagine how little consideration they give to murdering Palestinian civilians in cold blood. They do this practically daily and the main difference between this and suicide bombings (other than the fact that one happens once a blue moon and the other is a daily occurrence) is that the media focusses on Israel's victims and almost completely ignores Palestinian victims of Israeli terror. Not only that, but they keep on repeating Israeli victims for days on end, so much so that anyone who keeps up with this stuff knows just how propandistic such coverage really is.
Examples of IDF killing Palestinians:
Suraida Saleh, a Palestinian-American woman aged 21 (born and raised in the US) was shot and killed while sitting in her car with her husband holding her baby. She was shot in the head and chest.
http://www.commondreams.org/news2002/0403-01.htm
14 Year old Baha Al-Bahesh was shot in the chest and murdered by an Israeli soldier in front of ISM witnesses. The Israelis claimed that he had a bomb, then went back on it and claimed he had a molotov cocktail, but ISM activists insist he was with them and not do A THING when an Israeli sniper to a bead on him and pulled the trigger.
http://www.squall.co.uk/squall.cfm?sq=2002092601&ct=9
Because the place was full of booby-traps and bombs, as the Arab terrorists themselves admit.
The IDF kept people out until its sappers had cleared the area. (And even then, several people were injured by bombs that were missed.)
> What was the reason not to let the UN inspectors when asked?
There was debate on the composition of the UN team. For some reason, Annan insisted on appointing 3 people, 2 of whom are known anti-Semites. In meetings, Annan then agreed to add a 4th member, an expert in urban warfare. He then reneged on this agreement which is why Israel refused to allow entry to the team.
> If there was nothing to hide I don't understand this refusal of IDF to let anybody in Jenin.
At this point, teams from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were already present.
This is a very troubling right-wing type of argument. If you have nothing to hide, then there's no problem if the police waltz into your house and search for drugs, right?
> you take for granted the Israeli media
I didn't quote any Israeli sources. I quoted CNN, Time and the Washington Post above -- and Al Ahram, an EGYPTIAN paper which interviewed an Arab terrorist bomb-maker who had managed to escape.
> How many died there may never be actually known
KL> There are no 64+ people killed. You're just trying to perpetuate the lie. There are no lists of missing people, etc.
Truth, were you going to support your previous lies or are you trying to change the subject?
Is there a list of missing people?
Of course, even there the "anti-Zionist" propagandists can do little to obfuscate the truth. They raise red herrings, but then post new lies rather than defend what they said. Here's an appetizer:
?> it's racist to refer to people fighting on their own land as 'terrorist'
Terrorism describs a MEANS. It doesn't matter if you or the perpetrators think that the ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS. Illegal combatants who intentionally target and murder innocent civilians at random are terrorists.
If they are or are not also "freedom fighters" is of no relevance.
?> you'd think that Jenin had to do with Palestinians killing Israelis in Israel.
It most certainly did. A large percentage of suicide bombers came from Jenin, where they were recruited, trained and armed. That the terrorists were able to put up such resistance (including the setting of 1000-2000 booby-traps and bombs) proves that they had a strong base in Jenin.
?> I cannot call someone a "terrorist" who decides to defend his home with light arms and booby traps
You consider 250 pound bombs to be "light arms"?
And they weren't defending their own homes. They had rigged the houses of others. As one bomb-maker complained to Jonathan Cook in an interview published by Al Ahram, it was the residents who led Israeli troops to many of the bombs so they could disarm them!!!
|| "We were betrayed by the spies among us," he says. The wires to more than a third of the bombs were cut by soldiers accompanied by collaborators."
?> Palestinians were forced into the ghettoes of Jenin as creeping (and illegal) Israeli settlements forced them off their own land.
BS on all counts. The "refugees" in Jenin date to 1948, when the area was under Arab rule. It was Arab governments (not Israel) that established all these camps.
?> Even as the IDF was bulldozing homes with people
As noted by senior PA military officials (quoted in Time), it takes a bull-dozer 30 minutes to demolish a house, giving occupants who may have ignored Israeli warnings to evacuate plenty of time to exit. A 250 pound bomb, on the other hand, will flatten a building in seconds. Most of the civilians killed in the rubble were victims of terrorist bombs.
Angie> This tell us that anywhere from five to 500,000 plus dead can be a "massacre".
Fool. It's not the number but how they are killed. No one was "massacred" at Normandy despite an enormous number of combat deaths.
The origin of the Jenin "massacre" lie originated with the "eyewitness" claim that Israel was methodically executing 500-3000 people.
When Arab forces ethnically cleansed all Jews from what became Trans-Jordan's "West Bank" and Egptian Gaza, taking no prisoners, it is correct to say that these populations were massacred.
When Arab terrorists set off a bomb in a beach disco in Tel Aviv, murdering 24 teenagers and young adults, it is a massacre.
When in heated fighting over numerous days 50 people are killed (a majority of them illegal combatants), it is NOT a "massacre" -- for otherwise you could just as well claim that 23 Israeli soldiers were also "massacred".