UN, HRW & AI: There was NO massacre at Jenin

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.