Jenin: The human rights activist's view

The dead bodies were laid out in the dirt outside the wrecked hospital in the Jenin refugee camp where workers with surgical masks over their faces waited to load them into open-backed trucks. The smell of death was so overpowering that children hid their faces with their shirts and some of the journalists covered their mouths and noses with strips torn from their clothing.

A young man weeping uncontrollably into the arms of his friend stood nearby, and an old woman shouted through tears of rage, "stop taking pictures." A man smeared with blood from the bodies nearby led her away.

I counted 27 bodies there, behind the hospital. Emergency-relief workers had just brought some of them there from inside the devastated camp, though not all had yet been recovered.

I watched as another group of men dug up more bodies from makeshift graves behind the hospital where some of the dead had been buried temporarily during the siege. The Israeli army had prevented their families from giving them a proper burial. It also prevented medical relief and ambulances from coming into the camp.

I interviewed the chief doctor at the Shifa Surgical hospital in the city of Jenin and verified this information with three other doctors and ambulance drivers. No, there was no shortage of blood or oxygen in their hospital. Why? Because it was not allowed in to help the wounded in the neighboring refugee camp. In fact, when the ambulance drivers attempted to go in anyway, Israel Defense Forces soldiers fired on them.

Emergency food aid was allowed in only after the IDF left. I spoke to people from Save the Children and Doctors without Borders whose outrage at the situation could barely be contained.

Walking through Jenin that day was surreal. What had been a crowded refugee camp was now a wrecked, bulldozed mass of destruction unlike anything I had ever seen or even imagined.

Between 13,000 and 14,000 people lost their homes and all of their possessions during the indecently named operation "Defensive Shield." Nothing is left in the former Jenin camp except ruins. The interior of the camp is a moonscape of rubble and dirt, flattened beyond recognition. A woman rummaging through a pile of concrete said to me that she could not even tell where her former home had been.

The houses along the perimeter of the camp are still standing in a semicircle. They have been so completely destroyed inside that no one could again live in them.

Tank shells blew huge holes into the external walls leaving gaping wounds that afforded one a view inside bedrooms and kitchens -- the wreckage of people's former lives. Broken glass lay scattered everywhere along with chunks of concrete that would fall randomly from the ceilings, many of which had holes in them from missiles and tank shells.

Soldiers had in some instances burned family photographs. In one house, flour for making bread had been dumped on the kitchen floor along with all of the kitchenware. Soldiers had scribbled offensive graffiti inside the walls of many of the homes: in one, a Star of David with hateful words written in it filled up part of a living room wall; in another, a picture of the Dome of the Rock being blown up stained the wall of a staircase. On a bathroom door someone had scribbled in Hebrew "if you need to take a piss, go upstairs" where a child's bedroom was.

There was garbage strewn everywhere inside the houses where soldiers had taken over. The IDF had cut all electricity and water to the camp. In some of the houses soldiers had defecated inside refrigerators or kitchen pots and urinated into the sinks. In the camp mosque the loudspeaker from the minaret, from which a muezzin calls his people to prayer, had been vandalized and defecated in.

Walking was unsafe in Jenin, whether you were outside picking your way through blasted blocks of cement and wire, or inside trying to step over destroyed furniture, scattered and torn clothing, or broken household items. A television set had been shot. The speakers of a stereo had bullets in them. Were these appliances also considered terrorists, I wondered.

I watched in horror as a small family shack at the edge of the camp burst into flames after a loud explosion. A missile fired from an American-made helicopter had not exploded when it landed in the house three days previously. The family mercifully escaped, but nothing remains of their belongings. Throughout the camp one could find spent ammunition, used bullets, tank shells, the remnants of missiles, and more -- the fingerprints of Israel's crime.

Worse, however, were those that were lying unexploded, half-hidden from view, waiting for the unsuspecting child to stumble across them -- which happened on a number of occasions.

Do not tell me that this was a humanely carried out military operation in defense of Israel. I was there. I spent two days and a night in Jenin's ruins immediately after the Israelis pulled out. I saw people desperately searching for remnants of their former lives; heard people begging for information about loved ones killed, missing, or taken away to prison; listened to a story of how four men were summarily executed, their hands tied behind their backs while they were made to kneel outside at a wall.

Soldiers fired bullets into the back of their heads at close range. Different individuals repeated this story to me at different times but with the same details. I watched as children wandered aimlessly around the expanse of debris with expressionless, traumatized faces. I smelled the putrid smell of death coming from heaps of rubble where houses had been blown up on top of their inhabitants. I still lack the words that can fully express the horror of what I saw.

Perhaps my photographs will do a better job; they can at least document what I have written here.

Do not tell me that Israel was defending itself from "militants, terrorists, and gunmen" in Jenin. The Palestinians of Jenin were defending their own homes on their own land, a land that has been illegally occupied for 35 years.

Israel has no legal or moral right to be on that land. It has no legal or moral right to murder people for opposing this occupation. It has no legal or moral right to keep building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land and to continue stealing the resources of this land. It has no legal or moral right to continue depriving this people of their basic humanity.

But, for the record, the Palestinian people do have the right, under international law, to resist this barbaric occupation according to U.N. General Assembly Resolution 42/159; Dec. 7, 1987.

If Ariel Sharon and his government want the deadly and horrible suicide bombings in Israel to stop -- if indeed the Israeli government truly cares about its own citizens' lives and security -- it will end the occupation unilaterally today. It is in their hands.

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(Jennifer Loewenstein is a human rights activist who has worked on the Palestinian-Israeli issue for more than 20 years. She has just returned from 2 months in the Gaza Strip, where she worked in the Jabalia refugee camp. It was from there that she went to Jenin on April 19-20. Read the view of an Israeli reservist who took part in Defensive Shield at upi.com.)