Untangling Jenin's Tale
For both Israelis and Palestinians, a deadly battle in a West Bank refugee camp has become a potent symbol of their struggle

The street is a new one, carved by a huge bulldozer out of what was once a narrow alley. It leads to a place where gunmen and tanks forged a new, terrifying chapter in the long wars of the Middle East. The alley was just three feet wide before the Israeli army sent its heavily armored Caterpillar D-9 down what is now a rutted track; as you walk along it, up a mild gradient toward Hospital Street, your feet raise little puffs of dust from the rubble of what were once concrete homes. The path is covered with the litter of war—broken sea-green ceramic tiles, a punctured cooking-gas cylinder, a thin foam mattress, a blond-haired baby doll. As you make your way into the camp, the snarl of traffic in the town and the calls of peddlers recede, and when you reach Hospital Street, all is silent. The Palestinians who live in Jenin Refugee Camp shuffle and gawk, still stunned by the battle that wrecked their houses four weeks ago.

There was a battle at the Jenin Refugee Camp. It was real urban warfare, as a modern, well-equipped army met an armed and prepared group of guerrilla fighters intimately familiar with the local terrain.

For both sides, Jenin has been added to the memories that invest the conflict in the Middle East with extreme bitterness. Because Jenin has become so potent a symbol, a new battle has broken out over what precisely happened there and what its wider significance will be.

A TIME investigation concludes that there was no wanton massacre in Jenin, no deliberate slaughter of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. But the 12 days of fighting took a severe toll on the camp. According to the U.N., 54 Palestinians are confirmed dead. An additional 49 are missing; it is unclear how many of them perished in the fighting and how many

either fled or were captured by Israeli troops. In the final count, there may well be fewer dead in Jenin than the 78 killed in Nablus Casbah in a battle that took place at the same time. But it is Jenin that has attracted worldwide attention because of the widespread destruction of property and because some of those who died during the fighting were mere spectators.

Human Rights Watch, which in a published report last week also concluded that no massacre took place, nonetheless documented 22 civilian deaths and said the Israelis used excessive and indiscriminate force during the operation. TIME found that as Israeli soldiers moved from house to house, they sometimes compelled Palestinian civilians to take the dangerous job of leading the approach to the buildings. On the other hand, a senior Palestinian military officer has admitted to TIME that some of those who died were killed by rubble from the exploding booby traps with which Palestinian fighters had honeycombed the camp.

But the accusations and their rebuttals do not capture the lessons of the battle. In Jenin the Israelis sent a message: there is no refuge, no haven, for those who send out human bombers to blow themselves and Israelis apart in restaurants and cafˇs. And the Palestinians sent their message in return: they can kill Israelis in Palestinian towns just as well as in Tel Aviv. Under the slabs of fallen masonry in Jenin is a new legend of martyrdom and heroism, one that will be used in years to come to stiffen the sinews of those who would fight against Israeli rule: a threat of armed force met by defiant resistance. Written in the twisted metal and crushed cinder block of Jenin is the new reality of an old conflict with no end in sight. This is how it happened:

THE ISRAELIS PREPARE

In the last week of March, Major General Itzik Eitan, Israel's Chief of Central Command, submitted his plan to take over the Jenin Refugee Camp to Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz. Both men knew it would be one of the toughest missions of Israel's Defensive Shield operation, which began March 28 in Ramallah when the Israelis surrounded the compound of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The Jenin camp, which is administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, has existed since 1953; 13,055 registered refugees live in a square whose sides are about 600 yards long.

Even by the standards of Palestinian refugee camps, Jenin is gruesomely special. Since the start of the Aqsa intifadeh in September 2000, the camp's activists, drawn from the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, have orchestrated at least 28 suicide attacks on Israeli targets. An internal document of Arafat's Fatah organization, written in September last year and captured by the Israelis during a recent sweep, characterized the camp's people as "ready for self-sacrifice with all their means ... It is not strange that Jenin has been termed the capital of suicide attackers."

TIME/CNN POLL

Do you think Israel has gone too far in its military response to attacks by Palestinians against Israeli soldiers and civilians in recent weeks, or don't you think it has gone too far?
Gone too far 46%
Has not gone too far 44%

If Israel does not withdraw its troops immediately from the West Bank cities, do you think the U.S. should cut off all or some of its economic and military aid to Israel?
Cut off all economic and military aid to Israel 27%
Reduce economic and military aid to Israel 33%
Keep economic and military aid to Israel the same 31%
Increase economic and military aid to Israel 1%

From a telephone poll of 1,003 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 10-11 by Harris Interactive. Margin of error is ±3.1%. "Not sures" omitted.

The Israeli authorities knew all about Jenin, and they knew those in the camp they wanted to take out. Their top target was Mahmoud Tawalbe, a 23-year-old father of two who worked in a record store but also headed the local Islamic Jihad cell. Tawalbe had launched numerous attacks against Israelis, including a shooting last October that killed four Israeli women on the main street of Hadera, a town north of Tel Aviv. Last July, Tawalbe had dispatched his 19-year-old brother Murad on a suicide mission to Haifa. (Murad lost his nerve and surrendered to Israeli police.) Other top Islamic Jihad targets in Jenin included Thabet Mardawi, who was behind a March 20 suicide bomb that killed seven Israelis on a bus.

Eitan planned to send his troops in from three directions. The 5th Infantry Brigade would close in through the town of Jenin, which abuts the camp to the north. From the southeast and southwest would come two thrusts—1,000 troops in all. The force would include units of navy seals, tanks, engineers to handle the roadside bombs that military intelligence predicted would line the alleys of the camp, and heavily armored bulldozers to carve paths for tanks.

Eitan ruled out an air attack; he feared giving the Palestinians the public relations coup of mass civilian casualties. His assessment: the army could take control of the camp in 48 to 72 hours. That turned out to be wildly optimistic.

On March 30, the 5th Brigade was mobilized. There was no problem of motivation; like most Israelis, the soldiers had been shocked by the suicide attack on a hotel in Netanya three days earlier, an atrocity that killed 28 Israelis sitting down for a Passover seder. The bomber had been sent by a Hamas cell based in Jenin. As the troops of the 5th Brigade arrived at their base in Ofer, north of Jerusalem, many wore civilian clothes, while some of those in uniform wore tennis shoes instead of boots. As they hauled their kit bags out of their cars, they could see hundreds of Palestinians who had been arrested during the Israeli sweep of Ramallah that began two days before.

The operations across the West Bank had stretched the Israeli army thin. By March 30, Israeli troops were already occupying Ramallah and Bethlehem. On Monday, April 1, they would go into Tulkarem and Qalqilya. The elite Paratroop Brigade was poised outside Nablus. The 5th Brigade, scheduled for Jenin, was made up of reservists mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, but the brass thought they could handle the tough assignment. "There were indications it was going to be hard," says Major General Dan Harel, the army's operations chief. "But we didn't think it was going to be so hard." The soldiers were supposed to head for Jenin on April 1, but rain and delays in shipping equipment forced Colonel Yedidia Yehuda, the brigade's commander, to wait until Tuesday, April 2. Around midnight, the Israeli tanks, which had massed west of the town, started to move in.

INSIDE THE CAMP

The Palestinian fighters had made their own preparations. Booby traps had been laid in the streets of both the camp and the town, ready to be triggered if an Israeli foot or vehicle snagged a tripwire. Some of the bombs were huge—as much as 250 pounds of explosives, compared with the 25 pounds a typical suicide bomber uses. On Day 2 of the battle, when the town had been secured but the fight in the camp was just beginning, a huge Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer rolled along a three-quarter-mile stretch of the main street to clear booby traps. An Israeli engineering-corps officer logged 124 separate explosions set off by the vehicle. In the camp,  the explosive charges were even more densely packed, and tunnels had been dug between houses so that Palestinian fighters could move around without exposing themselves on the street. Many noncombatants had fled; Israeli intelligence believes half the camp's residents had left before the troops arrived, and that by the third day of the battle 90% of the residents were gone. Even so, that left as many as 1,300 people inside the camp. According to leaders of Islamic Jihad interviewed by TIME, around 100 of those left were armed fighters.

The battle took shape in the environment that soldiers like least, in and around pinched alleys and houses, with ample hiding places and sniper positions. Inevitably, civilians were caught in the fray. Awad Masarweh, a 49-year-old laborer who works in Jenin's vegetable market, took shelter in his house on the edge of the camp near the U.N. Relief and Works Agency's school, on the side of the camp through which the 5th Brigade advanced. At the end of the first day, says Masarweh, there were 90 others in his home, which Palestinians deemed to be among the safest.

On April 17, more than two weeks after the battle began, Dr. Mohammed Abu Ghali, director of the Jenin Hospital, was allowed by Israeli soldiers to make his third foray into the camp to tend to victims. Abu Ghali saw the body of a man crushed by a bulldozer or tank track, his intestines spilling out. The doctor will remember Jenin. So will countless others, both Israeli and Palestinian. And in the Middle East, memory is the fuel that nourishes violence, revenge and unending hate. —TIME, May 13, 2002

Questions

1. Why did Israelis stage an attack on the Jenin Refugee Camp?

2. What were the results of this battle? What conclusions did TIME's investigation reach concerning charges of a massacre of Palestinians by Israelis?