Republican News · Thursday 31 January 2002

Three months after the horror

Jenin 6 July

BY SILVIO CERULLI

Horror, despair, and madness still hover on the dusty breeze winding down the slope where the refugee camp lies. I first entered this nightmare called Jenin almost exactly three months ago. The city and its camp were undergoing their 15th day of Israeli attack, under strict curfew and at the end of their tether. Armed resistance had ceased eight days after the attack was first launched but the Israelis were still murdering innocent people. I had never seen anything like that before; it was one of my most painful experiences.

Three months later, little has changed and the destruction has remained "intact" thanks to Israel's refusal to allow appropiate equipment into the area. Decomposed bodies still lie under the dunes of rubble of Jeningrad, the district called Hanat al Hawashim at the centre of the camp, which no longer exists. To take a short cut along the hill, people have created a makeshift road amid the ruins; as people cross over they cast a hasty eye on what remains.

earthquake could not have caused more meticulous destruction. What meets the eye is a lunar landscape, a huge gaping tomb. Minutiae of ordinary human life are still trapped between twisted iron wires and tons of rubble flattened by tanks and bulldozers - a marble, a comb, a shoe. The local people have ceased to dig as they did before, often using only their bare hands, looking for traces of their belonging.

The only difference compared to three months ago is the people: children, women and elderly have left the shelters where they sought refuge during the 17 days of bombin in April. Sunken faces, sorrowful eyes, deeply wounded souls - but almost no signs of the adult male population.

Before the April invasion, 14,000 refugees lived here. According to local people, 1,200 are still missing. Of these, 700 are still detained in Israeli prisons. More than 150 corpses have been identified. Nobody knows the fate of the 500 Fedayeen who defended the camp against the vicious assault. Bodies have been burnt, bulldozed in the sewage system, hidden in mass graves.

Humanitarian aid, food and medicines barely manage to trickle through because of the hermetic closure of the Territories. Water and electricity have returned only to a few small pockets within the camp and the military oppression continues unabated. The windblown dust comes to rest on the entire city, greying its colours, choking its perfumes, ageing its hearts.

"The soldiers return here every night to arrest a few people, shooting, sacking, killing. But nobody here is afraid of their tanks and helicopters, we want to fight back, show them we are human beings who don't deserve this," says a woman who hasn't heard from her husband since he was deported by the IDF in April.

Last month, two children asked their father's permission to go and buy a bar of chocolate during an official curfew. As there were no Israeli troops in sight and the grocer's shop was around the corner, Jamil (11) and Ahmed (6) took their bicycle to get there. They were returning home when a tank surprised them from behind them, firing two shells at close range and killing the two brothers. Ahmed was buried with the chocolate bar clutched in his hands.

"Sharon and Bush arrived in the night and fired missiles from their helicopter, their soldiers shooting everywhere, thirsty for blood, Palestinian blood," asserts an old man sitting on the remains of his front door. It was centred by an Apache helicopter rocket, which landed in the living room. The walls, photographs and floral decorations are riddled with machine-gun holes. Like more than 1,400 people in the camp, he has lost everything and the house will have to be demolished.

The Baraha primary school is just on the top of Hawashim and offers an horrific view on Jeningrad. Kamal, a teacher, points to the house were 13 Israeli soldiers died in an ambush, the half-standing shack where a crippled man was murdered, the old railway station where dead bodies were piled up.

"I was arrested and detained for 18 days, beaten and tortured without interruption," says the elderly man. "They have killed two members of my family, deported my father. But we have resisted 30 years of British rule and 54 of Israeli occupation and we have only one road open to us. The road to independence and freedom."

Under the British Mandate (1918-1948) Jenin became the hub of Palestinian resistance. The British tried to raze the town to the ground but suffered a humiliating defeat. A local hero and the most revered figures in the city's history, the Muslim preacher who led the famous revolt against London's rule in the 30's, Izzadin al-Qassam, was from Jenin. The Islamic Hamas' armed wing has been named after him.

Israeli, like British, violence has failed. The last two suicide bombers/martyrs, who killed 23 people in Jerusalem, came from here. The ghosts of Jenin are destined to haunt the Israeli government indefinitely.

As Israeli Army generals themselves admit the failure of the April invasion of the West Bank, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given the green light for the construction of the "security fence" approved last winter. At the Jenin/Salem checkpoint, building on the fence has already begun.

It is a three-metre high concrete wall surrounded by electronic devices and electrified barbed wire (like that already built around Gaza). When it is completed in ten months, the 360 km long and 10 km deep barrier will cantonise the territories into a kind of bantustan without geographical continuity because of the presence of 240 army posts and dozens of jewish settlements. Each kilometre will cost around $1 million and there are numerous delays because, from Jenin, Hamas has fired upon the army and civilian workers employed in the massive project.

While the Israeli authorities call it "self-defence against terrorists", it really means legalising a military and economic apartheid. It seems to me that the Israelis, in the name of their own peace and security, are capable of perpetrating any kind of heinous crime with total impunity.

The wall, which will turn the West Bank in a patchwork of open prisons, is simply another such crime.

d the paradox is that the Israelis are well aware that, when all comes to all, only the birth of a truly independent Palestinian state has the power to bestow full legitimacy on Israel as well as to ensure the security and peace their continual wars of aggression have never been able to guarantee.