False Allegations of a Massacre
Initially, officials of the Palestinian Authority claimed that the Israelis had deliberately massacred 3,000 people, and were burying them in mass-graves. Some advocates of Palestinian nationalism claimed that "the Jews" were starting a "Holocaust" against Arabs. Many Western news agencies reported these claims uncritically and without confirmation. However, on April 30, Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the northern West Bank dropped the death toll to 56 people, including armed combatants. Further investigation by the United Nations and international reporters cconfirmed that only 52 Palestinians where killed in the opperation, 22 of whom were civilians.
On May 2nd, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) filmed adult Palestinians carrying out a mock funeral procession. The funeral was fake and the "body" was able to get up and walk. This raises the question whether the Palestinians falsify other evidence as well. On May 8th, 2002, The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment issued a press release [1] stating that it was only Palestinian children playing "funeral". Israeli groups reject this claim outright.
Human Rights reports
In late April and on May 3, 2002, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch respectively released their reports about the IDF incursions into Jenin. The HRW report stated that it found "no evidence to sustain claims of massacres or large-scale extrajudicial executions by the IDF", and the Amnesty International report came to the same conclusion. They agreed with the total casualty figures provided by the IDF but reported triple the civilian casualties. However the HRW report also stated that "Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes", Amnesty International concurring. The HRW report concluded
- However, many of the civilian deaths documented by Human Rights Watch amounted to unlawful or willful killings by the IDF ... Some of the cases documented by Human Rights Watch amounted to summary executions ... Throughout the incursion, IDF soldiers used Palestinian civilians to protect them from danger, deploying them as "human shields" and forcing them to perform dangerous work ... the IDF prevented humanitarian organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, from gaining access to the camp and its civilian inhabitants-despite the great humanitarian need.
While focussing mainly on the actions of the IDF, it adds that:
- Palestinian gunmen did endanger Palestinian civilians in the camp by using it as a base for planning and launching attacks, using indiscriminate tactics such as planting improvised explosive devices within the camp, and intermingling with the civilian population during armed conflict, and, in some cases, to avoid apprehension by Israeli forces.
The report notes that:
- The presence of armed Palestinian militants inside Jenin refugee camp, and the preparations made by those armed Palestinian militants in anticipation of the IDF incursion, does not detract from the IDF's obligation under international humanitarian law to take all feasible precautions to avoid harm to civilians ... Unfortunately, these obligations were not met.
Israeli critics of the report pointed out that commissions included no urban or counter-terrorist warfare specialists, and therefore believe they were unable to assess the justifiability of the different actions of the IDF. They furthermore found that the humanitarian organizations were rash to jump into conclusions without investigating thoroughly the conduct of the Palestinain guerilla forces in the area. Moreover, they felt that although terrorists are civilians by definition, they were still combatants, which made their status different from that of the unarmed civilians. Finally, the human rights bodies had not investigated the incidents in which ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent and equipment of other aid agencies were accused of being used by Palestinian militants to transport weapons and gunmen, thus allegedly voiding their nonbelligerent status as defined in the Geneva Convention.
To settle the contradictory claims, a fact finding mission, was proposed by the United Nations on April 19 2002. Israel initially agreed to co-operate with the enquiry, but put up a set of conditions to do so. Among these were that the mission should include anti-terrorism experts, that UN desisted from its right to prosecute Israeli soldiers for potential violations of international law and limited its scope exclusively to events in Jenin. The UN refused to accept the last two conditions and ultimately disbanded its mission. Israel argued that the conditions on which the UN proposed the mission were unfair, as the UN never agreed to giving the anti-terrorism expert full membership, it had never given the mission a strict mandate, and neither did it declare the mission solely investigatory (as opposed to having a judicial purpose). All three stand in violation to the UN's own principles (as stated in the "Declaration on Fact-finding by the United Nations", A/RES/46/59 of December 9, 1991). In a subsequent report by the Secretary General, the UN has confirmed that no massacre took place.
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