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Who counts the numbers of "dead Arabs"?
What withdrawals? Khaled Amayreh, in Nablus, reports on the Israeli army's orgy of killingAs Al-Ahram Weekly went to print, the Israeli occupation army was continuing to bar the media and rescue teams from accessing the Jenin refugee camp, where, according to unconfirmed reports, a massacre of genocidal proportions has been taken place against largely unarmed Palestinian refugees, uprooted from their homes in 1948.
Survivors reached via mobile phones speak of hundreds of civilians killed and more injured as a result of the Israeli army's sustained blanket bombing and strafing from the air for the past eight days. Some early estimates suggest that the number of civilians killed may have reached 300.
With rescuers and medics prevented from reaching the victims by the Israeli army, the body count is expected to continue to rise.
Israeli forces used Apache helicopter gunships to launch more than 50 raids on the fragile shanties of the camp and its narrow alleyways. Tanks and ground-to-ground missiles bombarded the camp's centre, inhabited by over 15,000 civilians, in addition to scores of activists who have vowed to resist till martyrdom.
Having failed to crush the resistance, despite the overwhelming force mobilised, the Israelis bulldozed homes in order to widen the camp's alleyways sufficiently for tanks to pass through. A number of Palestinian civilians were reportedly crushed to death by the bulldozers.
A woman, whose son was killed Friday, described the situation at the camp on 6 April.
"We were inside the camp, inside our homes, while everywhere around us was being shelled. In the streets we could see a few dead bodies and many peopled injured from the shelling. They were close, but we couldn't reach them because of the danger. Many houses were destroyed. We stayed there for five days, with no electricity, no food and no water."
The woman went on: "They [Israeli soldiers] led us away from our homes under gun- point all the way to where they had gathered all the men, women and children together. Then they forced the men to strip to their underclothes. We had to wait and wait, sitting on the ground for hours. The soldiers would spit on us. Then they took the men away; we don't know where."
According to Dr Mohamed Abu Ghalieh of the Jenin public hospital, the Israeli army refused to allow medics to reach the wounded, who were only 10 metres away from the hospital entrance.
"When we tried to reach two wounded young men just outside the hospital, the soldiers fired shots over our heads and pointed their guns at us, saying they would kill us if we moved any further."
"An hour later," added the doctor, "after the soldiers made sure that the two people had bled to death, they signalled to us that we could now go to them."
Dr Khalil Jabarin, the chief physician at the Al-Razi Hospital at the outskirts of the refugee camp, related a similar story.
"They shot a person standing at the entrance to the hospital. He was pleading with us to save his life. When the nurse and I moved, the soldiers shot over our heads, threatening to kill us. They continued to bar us from saving him until, two hours later, the young boy had bled to death."
On 8 April, the Israeli army allowed a single ambulance access to the camp for the first time in 10 days. However, as the ambulance evacuated three badly injured people from inside the camp, Israeli troops held up the ambulance and violently snatched two of the injured, claiming they were terrorists and were under arrest.
"I can say without any exaggeration that the camp has been reduced to an extermination camp. The Israeli army is destroying everything and killing everybody," Jamal Abul- Haija, a resistance leader at the camp, said via a cellular phone.
He added that "when the dust settles, you will see the scope of the carnage, and the ball will then be in the court of the International Court of Justice at the Hague."
Despite the murderous rampage, the Israeli army has so far failed to control the camp. On 9 April, the resistance fighters reportedly killed as many as nine Israeli soldiers by detonating land mines in the camp's narrow alleyways as the soldiers were advancing toward its centre. The deaths brought to 24 the number of Israeli soldiers killed since the start of Operation Protective Wall 10 days ago.
A modicum of apprehension was voiced by some Israeli officials at the possible unfavourable international reaction to the massacre.
The Israeli English language newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, on 9 April quoted Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as admitting that "what happened in Jenin was a massacre."
Nonetheless, the Israeli army seems unaffected by the huge number of civilian casualties.
One high-ranking officer, however, declared contemptuously on Israeli television on 8 April, "I'm not going to count the number of dead Arabs, it doesn't make a difference for me if they are five or 50 or 500."
A similarly murderous onslaught targeted the old town of Nablus. Lasting for six days, the attack caused massive destruction of the ancient Casbah centre, in addition to the killing of more than 50 people, including many women and children, who were crushed under the rubble of their homes, or killed in indiscriminate bombardment.
As in Jenin, the Israeli army behaved in criminal disregard of international humanitarian norms by preventing rescue teams from reaching the wounded and the dead for five days.
"The occupation army wanted to make sure that the wounded die of their wounds," said Nablus governor, Mahmoud Al-Alul, whose house was vandalised and subsequently destroyed by the invading forces.
Numerous other buildings in Nablus were destroyed, including a seven-story building outside the nearby Balata refugee camp, where the Israeli army indulged in wanton acts of rampage and ransacking.
Having come under mounting international, and especially American, pressure to withdraw from Palestinian towns, the Israeli army announced on 9 April that it was withdrawing its troops from the two northern towns of Tulkarm and Qalqilya.
Palestinians dismissed the withdrawal as "theatrical" and "staged for TV cameras only," pointing out that Israeli tanks only moved a few hundred metres away from the centres of the two towns, mainly to appease the Americans.
In fact, far from withdrawing from re- occupied population centres, Israeli forces continued to invade additional Palestinian towns.
On 9 April, the Israeli army overran the small town of Dura, 12 kilometres south-west of Hebron. Upon entering the town at dawn, the first thing the invading troops did was open fire on a group of people leaving a mosque, after dawn prayers, killing at least two. A third Palestinian was killed later that day as he stepped out of his home.
Meanwhile, Israeli snipers took over high buildings, using rooftops to shoot and kill passers-by on the streets.
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