Israeli Army Accused of Atrocities

Khadra Samara, her family and closest neighbors lived in three adjacent cinder-block houses on Rwabe Street, a relatively quiet corner of the Palestinian refugee camp here.

For 17 terrifying hours this week, she says, the 30 unarmed neighbors fled on hands and knees from one three-story home to the next, huddling together as Israeli helicopter gunships, tanks and bulldozers reduced the buildings to rubble in methodical succession.

Israel’s fiercest assault of its 2-week-old West Bank operation dealt systematic destruction and random death to civilians as well as fighters in this militant Palestinian stronghold, according to displaced residents of the camp and relief workers in Jenin. The battle was all but over Thursday with the surrender of dozens of Palestinians, the last holdouts among an estimated 200 fighters.

According to the accounts, which couldn’t be independently verified, the Israelis fired on unarmed civilians, used them as human shields and obstructed medical workers trying to save the wounded. One camp resident, Ali Ramile, a 40-year-old truck driver, said he watched Israeli soldiers kill seven or eight disarmed Palestinian fighters execution-style and dump several loads of bodies in a mass grave within 100 yards of his home.

Brig. Gen. Eyal Shline, commander of the division that invaded Jenin, dismissed Palestinian allegations of atrocities during the fighting. The army denied that it had buried or removed Palestinian bodies, saying it feared that they might be booby-trapped.

“There was no massacre,” Shline said. “We could have taken the camp in one day. But we didn’t use planes or artillery” in order to spare civilians. “But someone who has decided to give up his village and use his children and elderly for terror is going to get hurt.”

Early today, the army estimated that hundreds of Palestinians were killed in fighting in Jenin. Palestinian estimates ranged up to 500. Dr. Hussam Sherkawi, Palestinian director of emergency services in the West Bank, said the death toll was at least 140 but cautioned that it was impossible to verify because rescue services hadn’t been permitted to enter Jenin.

Israel said its West Bank offensive was aimed at rooting out suicide bombers and other armed militants who inflicted heavy civilian casualties in Israel last month.

But interviews with more than a dozen Palestinians from the Jenin camp indicated a heavy loss of civilian life there. Nearly everyone interviewed said they had watched neighbors die from Israeli shelling or sniper fire, or at least seen bodies in the street.

And Palestinian human rights organizations, citing reports that they said came from camp residents and witnesses, have accused Israeli troops of executing prisoners and digging graves in the camp. There was no independent confirmation of the reports because Israel denies access to the area.

Jenin’s Al Razi hospital was struggling to cope with the West Bank’s worst bloodshed since the 1967 Middle East War.

“Ten days ago, we hoped someone could do something to save the refugee camp, but now the camp is gone,” said Dr. Ziad Ayaseh, the hospital’s director.

Israeli missiles took out several water tanks on the roof, threatening the hospital’s water supply, he said. The army siege blocked fuel supplies that power the hospital’s generator--the only source of electric power. The staff pharmacologist and urologist were slightly wounded by apparently stray army gunfire.

A 16-year-old boy was shot dead Thursday on a street in Jenin, half an hour after the army had lifted a curfew to allow the city’s residents to move about for the first time in five days, hospital officials say. A 52-year-old woman wounded Monday inside her home in the refugee camp bled to death before relatives could get her to the hospital Thursday, they said.

Sameh Abazeineh, an aide to Jenin’s mayor, said his 70-year-old neighbor died waving his arms in the air in a futile effort to stop an Israeli bulldozer from destroying his home in the camp.

Other residents reported seeing a tank round kill a neighbor who was recharging his cellular phone with his car battery and finding the body of a mentally disabled neighbor who had been shot and run over by a tank.

Riad Ghaleb, a 28-year-old produce merchant, said the Israelis targeted his entire camp neighborhood, Damaj, after three soldiers died there in an ambush. Helicopter gunships fired on rows of densely packed homes, killing two young boys in their home, he charged.

“After that, I saw five bulldozers and three tanks come in,” said Ghaleb, who walked out of the camp into central Jenin on Thursday. “Now there are no more houses in my neighborhood. It’s all a big highway now.”

The extent of destruction in the camp was unclear.

News agency reporters Thursday managed to tour a small corner of the camp, which had been off limits to journalists during eight days of combat. They saw widespread devastation--homes flattened by bulldozers, walls blackened by fire and the streets chewed up by armored vehicles. They saw no bodies in the streets.

Roughly one-third of Jenin’s 40,000 people lived in cinder-block houses on the refugee camp’s narrow streets. The army used bulldozers to knock down homes and clear the way for its tanks to corner the militants in a smaller and smaller perimeter in the camp.

One bulldozer also wreaked destruction in the center of Jenin as it moved behind a tank along Old Castle Street toward the refugee camp. Just before Ahmed and Bassam Fashafsheh’s stone home, the street narrowed and the tank couldn’t squeeze by.

Issam Fashafsheh, a relative, said he watched early this week as the tank fired a missile into the house, backed up and moved aside so the bulldozer could advance. The bulldozer knocked in the wall of the living room, killing the middle-aged couple and their 9-year-old son, Samira.

Their bodies were recovered and buried only Thursday, and a stench remained in the ruins of the home--a mound of rubble topped by a fallen television antenna and snaking electrical wires.

When Israeli troops entered the camp on foot to search homes for armed militants, they sent captive Palestinian men ahead of them at gunpoint to knock on the doors or break through the walls. The army has acknowledged the practice, saying it discourages armed resistance.

Ali Mustafa Sireh, 42, said he was working as such a door-to-door human shield in the refugee camp when, at the 10th house, he was shot in the knee by Israeli snipers who apparently did not see his captors. At that point, he said, the Israelis abandoned him, and it took four days for relatives to get him to the hospital.

But few experiences capture the terror of the assault like that told by Khadra Samara, 33, whose husband, Hisham, 40, is the Al Razi hospital’s cook.

She first noticed a tank outside her home at 11 p.m. Sunday, she said. At 11:30, it knocked down the front gate. “We screamed and lighted candles to make the Israelis aware that people were in the house,” she said, but the tank kept coming. It fired a missile into the second and third floors, she said, causing a bright flash, shattering the windows and sending all 15 people in the home to the ground floor.

The demolition halted until 5 a.m., when the household was awakened by the sound of a bulldozer outside. It slammed into the front of the house, crashing into a large bedroom in which the family had been sleeping, she said.

Houses in the camp abut each other, so Samara and her relatives hammered a hole in a side wall and broke in next door, where her sister-in-law’s family lives.

Less than an hour later, she said, that house came under attack, and 30 people crawled through to the next house in line, which had been abandoned. That refuge stood up until 3 p.m. Monday, when it fell after a three-hour bulldozer assault, she said.

“We moved from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen--wherever we thought was safest,” Samara said. “The children started vomiting. I phoned the hospital. My husband said to leave the camp immediately. I demanded an ambulance. He said the Israelis won’t let one through.”

It took them five more hours to talk their way through Israeli checkpoints and reach the hospital, waving white prayer scarves and dodging stun grenades from helicopters that followed them.

“I was so furious,” Samara said. “I felt like committing a suicide bombing against the Israelis.”

At one point, she said, she went to the kitchen of her collapsing home and picked up a cooking gas cylinder to use as a bomb. But she changed her mind after her 12-year-old daughter begged her not to do it.

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Additional photos from Jenin and the Middle East are available on the Times Web site at:https://latimes.com/jenin

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Jenin

Thousands of people live in the Jenin refugee camp, where many Palestinian fighters have surrendered and the Israeli military has full control. It has been the site of intense fighting and a base for Palestinian militant factions.

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Camp Facts

* Year established: 1953

* Population: About 13,000

* Resident employment: Agriculture around Jenin and jobs inside Israel

* Control: After redeployment of the Israeli army in 1995, the camp came under Palestinian Authority control.

* April 9, 2002: Attack kills 13 Israeli soldiers.

Sources: United Nations Relief and Works Agency; Times staff reports