IDF Terrorizes Jenin

Excerpted from Israel/Occupied Territories-Human Rights Watch Report, Jenin, May 3, 2002.

Evidence suggests that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) committed war crimes in the military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, Human Rights Watch charged in a report issued today after a week-long investigation.

"The abuses we documented in Jenin are extremely serious, and in some cases appear to be war crimes," said Peter Bouckaert, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch and a member of the investigative team.

On April 3, 2002, the IDF launched a major military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, home to some fourteen thousand Palestinian refugees. An estimated eighty to one hundred armed Palestinians took part in the fighting. Israel claims the camp had been the launching ground for many of the suicide bombings that have killed and maimed over one hundred Israeli civilians in recent months. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly condemned this deliberate killing of civilians. Palestinian armed militants had also planted many explosive devices in the camp prior to and during the IDF incursion.

Among the twenty-two civilian deaths documented during this investigation were the following:

• Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man who was shot and then run over by IDF tanks on April 10 as he was moving in his wheelchair equipped with a white flag down a major road in Jenin;

• Thirty-seven-year-old Jamal Fayid, a paralyzed man, who was crushed in the rubble of his home on April 7 after IDF soldiers refused to allow his family the time to remove him from their home before a bulldozer destroyed it;

• Fourteen-year-old Faris Zaiben, who was killed by fire from an IDF armored car as he went to buy groceries when the IDF-imposed curfew was finally lifted on April 11; and

• Fifty-two-year-old Afaf Disuqi, who was killed on April 5 by an explosive charge that IDF soldiers had placed at her front door as she went to open it for the soldiers.

In one case involving a wounded Palestinian militant, IDF soldiers for several hours prevented medical help from reaching him. The soldiers then killed the man, who had been left close to a hospital near the camp and was no longer armed or taking active part in the fighting.

Human Rights Watch also found evidence of indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force by the IDF. U.S.-supplied helicopters fired anti-tank missiles and other ordinance into the camp, in some cases making insufficient efforts to identify legitimate military targets and avoid hitting civilian houses. The helicopters struck many houses in Jenin refugee camp that were inhabited only by civilians, and where no Palestinian fighters were present. In one of many such cases, a tank shell and two helicopter-fired TOW anti-tank missiles hit the house of Kamal Tawalba, a father of fourteen children, on April 6. No fighters were present in the home. When Tawalba and his family tried to leave their burning home, IDF soldiers in the vicinity shot at them.

In another case, a sixty-year-old woman was killed when a helicopter fired a missile directly into her top-floor apartment although there were no armed Palestinians in the building or the immediate vicinity.

...Human Rights Watch also documented cases in which Israeli troops used Palestinian civilians as human shields, a practice prohibited under international humanitarian law. In one case, IDF soldiers forced eight civilians to shield them by making them stand on a balcony while the soldiers fired at Palestinian gunmen. Kamal Tawalba and his fourteen-year-old son were among them. Tawalba described how the soldiers kept them for three hours in the line of fire and used his and his son's shoulders to rest their rifles as they fired.

"...As in our prior investigations of IDF operations, we also found numerous cases where the IDF coerced Palestinian civilians to take part in military operations," Bouckaert said. "Palestinian civilians were forced, sometimes at gunpoint, to accompany IDF troops during their searches of homes and to carry out some of the most dangerous tasks during these searches."

During most of "Operation Defensive Shield," the IDF blocked emergency medical access to Jenin camp. Soldiers repeatedly fired on Red Crescent ambulances, and in one case shot to death a uniformed nurse, twenty-seven-year-old Farwa Jammal, who had come to the assistance of a wounded man. In another case, fifty-eight-year-old Mariam Wishahi died in her home thirty-six hours after she was injured by shrapnel; IDF soldiers repeatedly prevented ambulances from reaching her home, located just a few hundred meters from Jenin's main hospital...

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