Jenin death toll 56 - saddening, but no massacre

Jenin 'massacre' reduced to
death toll of 56

By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


JENIN, West Bank — Palestinian officials yesterday put
the death toll at 56 in the two-week Israeli assault on Jenin,
dropping claims of a massacre of 500 that had sparked
demands for a U.N. investigation.
The official Palestinian body
count, which is not
disproportionate to the 33 Israeli
soldiers killed in the incursion, was
disclosed by Kadoura Mousa
Kadoura, the director of Yasser
Arafat's Fatah movement for the
northern West Bank, after a team
of four Palestinian-appointed
investigators reported to him in his
Jenin office.
[Two weeks ago, when
European and particularly London
newspapers were reporting estimates of "hundreds"
massacred, Israeli sources in Washington said they expected
the Palestinian toll to reach "45 to 55."]
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggested yesterday,
in the wake of the Palestinian body count, that he may
disband a U.N. fact-finding team that was to visit the camp to
determine whether a massacre had taken place.
Mr. Annan was responding to a decision by the Israeli
security Cabinet earlier in the day not to cooperate with the
U.N. team.
The U.N.-Israeli dispute appeared unrelated to the
Palestinian admission there had been no massacre.
The Palestinians had suggested that most of the bodies
were buried beneath the rubble of houses bulldozed by Israeli
troops. No digging for bodies was taking place here, and
there was no stench that could have come from decaying
human flesh.
The earlier Palestinian claims had sparked international
outrage and prompted the Bush administration to press Israel
to accept a fact-finding mission by the United Nations, an
organization that the Jewish state regards as having a
pro-Palestinian bias.
Mr. Kadoura yesterday showed a reporter for The
Washington Times the official Palestinian list of those who
died. It contained 50 names. Six additional bodies, he said,
had not been identified.
He no longer used the ubiquitous Palestinian charge of
"massacre" and instead portrayed the battle as a "victory" for
Palestinians in resisting Israeli forces. "Here the Israelis, who
tried to break the Palestinian willpower, have been taught a
lesson," Mr. Kadoura said.
He insisted that Israel had tried but failed, thanks to the
heavy fighting, to destroy the entire warren of homes in the
camp that had housed 11,000 people.
The destruction, pictured graphically on television,
appeared linked to Israeli bulldozing of the houses from
which the remnant of the resistance forces were firing.
In fact, it covers the size of a large football field and
constitutes only about 10 percent of the housing in the camp,
and a far smaller proportion of the housing in the city, which
was largely left untouched by the Israeli incursion.
The figures shown to The Times included 233 injured
persons, mainly men. The figures revealed that 18 persons
had been injured and one had died after the fighting had
ended, the result of accidentally detonating either shells left
after the fighting, or booby traps that were set by Palestinian
gunmen throughout the camp.
A British expert attached to the International Red Cross
said these booby traps were almost identical to those used by
the Irish Republican Army.
The British claim suggested to analysts that IRA guerrillas
were schooled in terrorist weaponry and irregular warfare, as
were many radical guerrilla movements, in Palestinian, Syrian
and Iranian training camps in Lebanon.
From behind a desk bedecked by portraits of Mr. Arafat,
a string of past "martyrs" and of Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein, the Palestinian chief official in the city, who is also
the Fatah leader, portrayed in an interview the events as
another chapter in a long saga of resistance to foreign
invaders — from Crusader times onward — that, he said,
had made Jenin "the heart of Palestine" for centuries.
The propaganda war continues, meanwhile, in the refugee
camp itself. Families whose homes had been destroyed were
ordered to sit and lie inside tents pitched near the destruction,
to be available for interviews and filming with foreign
reporters and photographers. At dusk, with the press
opportunities concluded, they returned to houses offered to
them in the undamaged city or in the rest of the refugee camp.
Other young men, members of various factions, have been
on duty in the camp's narrow streets, eager to conduct
foreign correspondents to places where they say Israelis
killed militants after they surrendered or had been captured.
Others in the city say the resistance to the Israeli incursion
had been carried out by only about 10 percent of the militants
who had originally been in the area. Most had retreated into
the hills or into city back streets as the Israelis entered the
area, they said.
Families living in houses directly opposite the destroyed
area have told The Washington Times that Israeli soldiers,
who temporarily occupied their houses just before the final
battle began, treated them without violence and assured them:
"You will not be harmed."
They confined the 36 members of the Abu Khalil family to
two rooms, allowing them out one by one, and set up a
snipers' point upstairs through two holes in the wall — under
a family framed message in Arabic: "There is No God but
Allah and Mohammed is His Messenger."
They confiscated identity cards but left them on the table
before slipping out during the night.
At the United Nations in New York,
Undersecretary-General Kieran Prendergast said "a
thorough, credible and balanced report on recent events in
Jenin refugee camp would not be possible without the
cooperation of the government of Israel."
"Since it appears from today's Cabinet statement by Israel
that the difficulties in the way of deployment of the
fact-finding team will not be resolved anytime soon, the
secretary-general is minded to disband the team," he told
reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council.
Diplomats said Mr. Prendergast told council members that
Mr. Annan was leaning toward disbanding the three-member
team, which has been joined by numerous advisers. The
team, which was to have arrived in Jenin on Saturday,
remained in Geneva yesterday.
The Security Council is to take up the issue of whether or
not to disband the mission at a meeting today.
The United States put forward the resolution adopted by
the Security Council welcoming the dispatch of a U.N. team
to find out what happened in Jenin during the Israeli military's
attacks.
Israel initially agreed to the idea, but subsequently raised
questions over the composition of the team, its scope of
inquiry, who could be called as a witness and what
documents would be presented to the panel.
Mr. Prendergast said that "with every passing day, it
becomes more difficult to determine what happened" in Jenin.
U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said Mr. Annan was
considering whether to let the fact-finding team begin its work
in Geneva or "simply abandoning the mission on the
assumption that satisfactory terms of reference could not be
worked out."
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.