The Battle That Defines the Israeli Offensive

It was 4 a.m. April 3 when the first Israeli soldiers crept into the Jenin refugee camp, the cinder-block houses looming pale and white in the darkness. Steeled to battle what they had been told was a garrison of armed terrorists, the soldiers advanced steadily northward through the camp, a riot of concrete buildings and narrow alleys sprawled over a gently sloping hillside.

The idea was to push downward, the soldiers recalled later, and drive Palestinian militants toward a ring of Israeli tanks surrounding the camp. Lt. Yoni Wolff was leading a squad of snipers when he heard a call go out from the tall, thin spire of a mosque.

“Here they come! Defend yourselves! Go kill the Jews!” a man screamed over the same loudspeaker used to call Muslims to prayer.

While Palestinian fighters laid traps and land mines and prepared to resist, the civilians--and there were many--hid in basements and caves.

So began the deadliest and most disputed episode in Israel’s 3-week-long West Bank offensive, an urban battle that left 23 Israeli soldiers dead--13 in one ambush alone--and scores of Palestinian civilians killed or wounded when their homes were shelled or bulldozed or when they were hit by Israeli gunfire. By Saturday, the count of bodies recovered was two children, four women and 36 men.

For Israelis, Jenin is a breeding ground for suicide bombers--one of whom, a woman, struck Jerusalem even as the battle raged in the camp. For Palestinians, Jenin is fast becoming a new rallying cry in their struggle. On both sides, the camp has emerged as the searing symbol of the Israeli offensive, the largest military operation in the Palestinian territories since the lands were captured by Israel in 1967.

And on both sides, a new offensive has begun: the battle for international opinion and the fight for the moral high ground. The stakes are high for Israelis and Palestinians alike, as each side fights to portray itself as a victim and where credibility is strained by propaganda.

What exactly happened in the Jenin camp has been cloaked in mystery largely because Israel for days banned the entry of rescue workers, journalists and other independent eyes. Reporters who circumvented the restrictions have pieced together the events at the camp through interviews with dozens of relocated refugees, survivors found in their homes and the Palestinian fighters and Israeli soldiers who did battle.

Faced with these limitations, the story is necessarily incomplete. The extent of the destruction in the camp and many details on how the battle was fought are clear; but it is still not possible to know, among other things, the way in which some Palestinians died and in what numbers they died.

The story of Jenin is a story of Israeli reservists, older men with careers and families and little or no training in urban warfare--the most dangerous and taxing form of combat--who believed that they were attacking a terrorist nest already emptied of its civilians. What they met were fierce resistance and terrified women and children.

The turning point came with the ambush of an Israeli platoon. Enraged and alarmed, the army from that moment on decided to fight a different way. Foot patrols and house-to-house searches were replaced with large-scale, unforgiving demolition of any building that might harbor gunmen.

Despite Palestinian claims that a massacre occurred here, there is no evidence, as yet, supporting the loss of hundreds of lives. The most egregious allegations--of summary executions, mass graves and hidden bodies--have not been proved.

And despite Israel’s claims that its army takes great care to protect civilian life, there is evidence of widespread destruction that did claim civilian lives.

Camp a Stronghold for Islamic Radical Groups

The camp, which sits just to the west of the town of Jenin, was established 49 years ago. It normally squeezes at least 13,000 people into an area roughly the size of six square city blocks. Buildings abut each other; tiny, winding alleys connect cramped neighborhoods. Radical Islamic organizations are especially strong here.

Israeli soldiers were told by army intelligence that only about 2,000 people were left when their offensive got off the ground. Most of those remaining were thought to be hard-core militants who had turned the camp into an armed fort, and the army still maintains that this was the case. Palestinian snipers had taken up positions in buildings. Homemade booby traps lined the streets. Cars were packed with explosives, ready to blow.

Almost from the moment that Lt. Wolff’s platoon of reservists from the army’s 5th Brigade neared the first buildings, they began taking fire. As they scrambled toward safety, a shot rang out from somewhere behind them. The platoon commander fell, wounded by a bullet to his neck.

Wolff, the second-ranking officer, suddenly found himself in charge of the assault. He led the 20 or so men into a building and began returning fire.

Sporadic, back-and-forth shooting lasted the entire day as Wolff and his men tried to secure the perimeter of the camp for the other squads slowly entering.

The Palestinians knew a battle was coming. They heard the explosions of tank cannons and heavy-caliber machine-gun fire, announcing the Israelis’ arrival. Many fled to the town of Jenin or to surrounding villages. The civilian men, women and children who stayed behind hoarded food for a long siege and hid in the relative safety of windowless rooms.

Bahaldin abu Hassen took cover in his basement with his elderly parents, his brothers, their wives and 10 children. Theirs was one of the first houses to be taken over by the troops. They heard the footsteps of the soldiers, who quickly found and confronted the family.

“Wain shabab?” “Where are the ‘boys’?” one of the soldiers demanded, speaking in accented Arabic and referring to the fighters.

“We don’t know,” Abu Hassen insisted.

Some of the soldiers took up positions in Abu Hassen’s two-story house, while others moved on. About a block away, they came to the home of Afaf Dusuky. She was in her mid-50s, a spinster who moved slowly.

When there was no reply at her door, Israeli soldiers blasted a basketball-sized hole into Dusuky’s metal front door, common procedure when someone fails to open up to military search.

Her body was recovered 10 days later, pierced with shrapnel, lying just inside the door on the concrete floor.

The Jenin camp was of special importance to the Israelis. Half of the 110 suicide bombers since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000 had come from Jenin, or at least received training there, according to the military.

In the early hours of the invasion, Wolff said, he and his men didn’t encounter civilians.

But on the second day, about 5 a.m., Wolff saw a man on his belly, crawling toward them. An enemy or civilian? He couldn’t be sure in a conflict where the enemy doesn’t always wear a uniform. Nor could he take chances.

“No one is supposed to be outside,” Wolff later recalled. “We saw a Palestinian man who is the perfect age to be a warrior crawling out of his house. You automatically suspect him. We had to shoot him.”

For the next seven days, the army made slow, painful progress down the hill toward the center of the refugee camp. They weaved their way down through two neighborhoods, Al Damaj and Al Hawashin, going house to house, door to door.

The Israeli army blared announcements twice a day in Arabic, promising safe passage to those who came out of hiding, along with offers of food and medical care.

The descent down the hill wasn’t easy. The army advanced only a few hundred yards some days. Snipers picked at them from behind walls and through windows. The soldiers found wires stretched across streets, ready to trigger homemade pipe and gas-cylinder bombs.

At one point, military officials said, soldiers arrested a 6-year-old boy ferrying three pipe bombs from one building to another.

Palestinian loudspeakers blared propaganda in Hebrew as the soldiers nervously made their way down the hill.

“Be careful--it’s going to be a graveyard. We have plenty of surprises for you,” one voice called.

In response, the military called in helicopter rocket strikes on specific windows and doorways. Most targets were selected by soldiers in the field who said they could see where the shooting was coming from.

On the fourth day of the invasion, Saturday, April 6, Ali Damaj, director of emergency services for the camp, looked out his kitchen window to see an 18-foot-tall armored bulldozer plowing toward his neighbors’ homes--and then his. In the space of minutes, the bulldozer chopped and churned and knocked six houses to the ground.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Damaj cried to his wife and children as the gargantuan machine came closer.

Abruptly, the bulldozer ground to a halt and retreated. Then a platoon of soldiers combed through, shooting as it went, Damaj said.

Damaj’s mentally disabled neighbor, Hassan abu Hattab, a father of three, refused to leave his home before it was bulldozed. Neighbors found his body with one bullet wound to his head, nine to his chest.

Damaj and his family took refuge with about 30 other people who crowded into one neighborhood house that had escaped pummeling. For most of the siege, they hid in one room, sharing water and bread, and every night tried to keep count of the explosions they heard from helicopters firing rockets. Damaj said that on the worst night, he thinks that he counted two a minute.

Damaj was determined not to flee, as many residents had done.

In his mind was the image of his parents, desperately escaping their home near what is now the Israeli city of Haifa in 1948, when Israel declared statehood and fought its war of independence. Furthermore, he reasoned, abandoning the camp would only make it easier for the Israelis to enter and kill the fighters.

As the soldiers approached the center of the camp, the landscape changed. Buildings stood even closer together. The streets grew narrower. Alleys snaked between two- and three-story homes.

There, the Palestinian fighters decided to make a final stand. They filled buildings around a small central plaza and waited.

“We were strong-willed,” fighter Gasan Haija recalled later as he recovered in a hospital from bullet wounds to the leg. “We all swore to die as martyrs.”

Gunfire Near Plaza on the Seventh Day

On the seventh day of the operation, Tuesday, April 9, Maj. Oded Golomb led a squad of reservists toward the central plaza. He turned up a narrow alleyway just before the plaza, entering a small courtyard surrounded by high buildings.

Gunfire erupted from every direction. Pipe bombs sailed through the air. The squad was trapped by relentless cross-fire. At some point, a suicide bomber detonated himself in the tight space.

Golomb was killed. Several of his men were dead or injured.

“We have a lot of wounded soldiers. We are trapped here. Please send more soldiers,” the squad’s radio operator pleaded.

An evacuation team headed by Capt. Yakov Azulai ran to free the men, but Azulai was shot and killed as he entered the alley. One of the medics was hit as he tried to reach the wounded men.

Finally, one platoon managed to fight its way into the building from which most of the fire emanated, killing all those inside.

The battle in the courtyard had taken two hours. The Palestinians had wiped out almost an entire platoon from the 5th Brigade, killing 13 and wounding six. It was the worst death toll since a September 1997 clash with Islamic guerrillas of the Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon, which left 13 commandos dead.

The way the Israelis read it, the ambush in the plaza proved that the Palestinians were holed up in the surrounding homes and could be extracted only with great loss of life. From that moment on, the bulldozers would crush any home believed to be a source of enemy fire.

“It was a turning point for us to understand that if we didn’t use a different kind of force, this place was going to be a graveyard for us,” Lt. Kobi Benshabat recalled.

That evening, several of the soldiers held a memorial service for a company commander killed seven days earlier. But clearly they were thinking of their comrades. Rami Meir, 41, a reservist who was also observant, opened his prayer book to lead the men but choked on his tears in the middle of the kaddish, a mourning lament.

He looked out of the corner of his eye and saw half the company weeping. “Someone else had to finish the prayer,” he later told a Web site.

The soldiers had occupied Hania Kabia’s house, overlooking the plaza, two days before the ambush. On the day it happened, she watched the soldiers crying in her living room. And then they brought out maps and aerial photography that showed every building, every yard in the cramped camp. Building after building was outlined with a marking pen.

Then the Israelis began leveling the homes. In many cases, families inside ran out, hands raised, as the concrete blocks turned to chunky dust. And some people didn’t make it out.

“After those soldiers were killed, they started bulldozing like crazy,” Kabia said later. Her place was spared because the soldiers used it as a post. Later, when the soldiers left, one of them left behind graffiti by a windowsill in Kabia’s living room. In Hebrew, it said, “I don’t have another land.”

Kabia and other Palestinians said that after the ambush, the Israelis stopped giving warning to occupants of homes about to be crushed. The Israelis say they did continue to give warning; besides, one officer said, it takes at least 20 minutes to demolish a building, allowing plenty of time to escape.

Rina Zayyed, 15, sitting at home with her father and brother, was one of those hit by Israeli fire. An Israeli gunship began firing on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery. Two fragments of the shell broke through the family’s living room window. One hit Rina in the chest. The man in the street, identified as Ameed Ali Amouny, 20, was killed.

Because they were afraid that the Israelis would fire on an ambulance--which the army says is sometimes used as cover for fighters and weapons--Rina’s relatives decided that the safest way to get her to the hospital was for her to play dead. They covered her with a sheet, removed a door from its hinges to use as a stretcher and carried her through the streets in a feigned funeral procession, saying, “Allah is great!”

Soon, the resistance began to collapse. On Wednesday, April 10, Mahmoud Tawalbeh, 23, a commander in the military wing of the radical group Islamic Jihad and purported mastermind of several suicide bombings, turned up dead.

The bulldozers fell silent, and the relentless helicopter fire ceased. The Israelis had won the battle of the plaza.

Of course, there was no plaza left to behold.

Vast Part of Camp Reduced to Wasteland

A vast portion of the heart of the Jenin camp had become a wasteland, a lunar landscape bereft of recognizable structures. Shards of concrete were piled 6 feet deep, burying body parts, clothing, children’s toys, prayer mats, all in a tangled mass. The carcasses of buildings loomed precariously on the edge of the wasteland, which reeked of death.

Palestinians estimate that 200 buildings were destroyed. The United Nations estimates that more than 2,000 refugees are homeless. It is not known how many bodies are rotting in the rubble.

On the last day of the Jenin battle, Jamal Hwei had run out of ammunition. He was ensconced in a building near the plaza with 28 other fighters, and things looked bleak.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In some ways, Hwei had once embodied what a future Palestine was to be. Raised in the refugee camp, he didn’t participate in the first intifada against Israeli rule, from 1987 to 1993, and instead went to Jordan to study. He returned to the West Bank in 1993 with an economics degree and set about working in the Palestinian Legislative Council, a governing body meant to herald the coming of a functioning state.

When the current conflict erupted in September 2000, Hwei took up a gun. He continued as a militant in the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. It isn’t clear whether Hwei formally belonged to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the most active Fatah militia and the one responsible for many of the suicide bombings. But he had crossed over to the realm of armed resistance.

On Thursday, April 11, convinced that he and the men with him were about to be killed, Hwei decided to surrender. To arrange the deal, he used his cell phone to call an Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, which helped negotiate his surrender. All 29 men were taken away by the Israelis, destined to join a total of 500 captured during the operation. The Israeli army says several top Islamic Jihad and Fatah militants are among those captured.

That wasn’t to be the fate of Yusuf Kabaha, better known as Abu Jendal. A veteran activist with the Palestine Liberation Organization who cut his teeth in Lebanon, Tunisia and other points of exile, Abu Jendal was a police commander who headed security for the Jenin camp. He appears to have been one of the main leaders of resistance to the Israeli invasion.

By popular account, he was captured on the last day of the battle, executed and left on a pile of dirt in the center of the camp for all to see, the marks visible on his wrists where the handcuffs had been. This incident cannot be verified, but Palestinians believe it universally. And the Israelis, who will not comment on a specific death, deny executing anybody.

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Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux contributed to this report.