August 1, 2002
U.N. Report Rejects Jenin Massacre Claim
By JAMES BENNET
JERUSALEM, Aug. 1 — The United Nations issued a cautious report today dismissing as unsubstantiated Palestinian claims that 500 people were killed when Israeli forces invaded a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin in April.
Stepping gingerly into a battle waged almost as fiercely in public relations as it was on the ground, the United Nations criticized both sides as putting Palestinian civilians at risk.
It suggested the Palestinian Authority was "inducing turmoil, chaos, and instability," and it criticized the Israeli army as inflicting "severe hardships" on Palestinian civilians through the use of curfews and other measures.
The United Nations study supported previously published accounts that 52 Palestinians were killed in the Jenin refugee camp, along with 23 Israeli soldiers. In one of the study's equivocal judgments, it reported that "up to half" of the Palestinian dead "may have been civilians."
The United Nations report, attributed to Secretary-General Kofi Anan, was based largely on published accounts and descriptions by humanitarian groups and other organizations, because Israel blocked the United Nations from conducting a first-hand inquiry unanimously sought by the Security Council. Israeli officials said that they had feared an investigation by the United Nations would be biased.
Today, Israeli officials seized on the study as validating their version of the fighting in Jenin, a battleground of the 22-month conflict now accorded nearly mythic status by both sides. The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that the report "overwhelmingly negates this Palestinian fabrication" of a massacre and "repudiates the malicious lies spread regarding the issue."
Palestinian officials, who had described the Jenin battle as a "massacre," called the report an important step but expressed frustration that the United Nations conducted a limited inquiry.
During the fighting in Jenin, Israeli officials estimated that up to 200 Palestinians may have died there, but the Israeli army later also put the number of dead at 52.
Israeli forces attacked Jenin as part of a West Bank offensive that began on March 29, after a suicide bomber from the Islamist group Hamas killed 29 people at a Passover seder in the seaside Israeli town of Netanya. The United Nations concluded that 497 Palestinians were killed during Israeli actions in Palestinian-controlled territory from the beginning of March until May 7, a far higher toll than previously reported.
The report criticizes a number of Israeli military practices employed throughout the West Bank this spring. Many of those practices, including curfews, have been put back into use in the current Israeli offensive in the same area.
The study found that about 1 million Palestinians were affected by 24-hour curfews imposed by the army, and that 220,000 lived under curfew for longer than a week "without vital supplies and access to first aid."
It accused the army of preventing students from attending school and of damaging 50 schools, destroying 11 of them. It said the army used 15 schools as military outposts and another 15 as "mass arrest and detention centers."
An Israeli diplomat defended the curfews as necessary to protect civilians as well as soldiers during army operations, which he said sought to avoid damage to Palestinian property. He said Israeli officials would "take note" of the report's criticisms and praised the study as "almost a fair judgment of events."
During the offensive, the Israeli army worked its way north through the West Bank, encountering increasingly fierce resistance as it moved from Ramallah to Nablus and finally, in a cool drizzle on April 3, to the Jenin camp, home to about 14,000 refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and their descendants.
Holed up in the camp, about 200 Palestinian gunmen battled for 10 days with a force of thousands of Israeli soldiers equipped with tanks, armored bulldozers, and anti-aircraft guns. After losing 13 soldiers to a Palestinian ambush, the army increasingly relied on the bulldozers to open wide lanes through the camp and finally used them to level a neighborhood where a remnant of Palestinians made their stand.
The United Nations study accused the "Palestinian militants in the camp" of adopting methods "which constitute breaches of international law" — an apparent reference to their hiding in a civilian area. But it said that "clarity and certainty remain elusive" about the response of the Israeli Defense Forces.
"Some human rights groups and Palestinian eyewitnesses assert that IDF soldiers did not take all possible measures to avoid hurting civilians, and even used some as civilians shields," the study reported. It also reported Israeli denials of such accusations.
The study concluded that the army blocked aid workers from reaching Palestinians in need and added that "it appears that" the army also "in some instances targeted medical personnel." As the report noted, Israeli officials have repeatedly said that the army kept aid workers and journalists out of the camp for their own protection, and they have denied charges of deliberately fire at ambulances.
The report criticized what it described as widespread destruction by the army of civilian property, including computers, of the governing Palestinian Authority throughout the West Bank. Such damage "did not appear to be related to military objectives," it said. The army has admitted to some vandalism by soldiers but denied any policy of destruction.
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