[Washington Post - 4/12/02] JENIN, West Bank, April 11 -- There is the Fashafsheh family. According to their relatives, the mother, father and 9-year-old son were killed when an Israeli tank fired a shell through their living room in downtown Jenin and an Israeli bulldozer plowed into the thick walls of their home, smashing it down on top of them.
There is Rina Zayyed, 15, who said she was struck in the chest by a bullet as she sat at home with her father and brother. An Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery, she recounted, and a fragment hit her.
And there is Khadra Samara, 33, who said she shepherded more than a dozen children as she fled from house to house to house in the adjacent Jenin refugee camp, under repeated assault from Israeli bulldozers and missiles that, house by house, nearly toppled the walls on top of them.
These are some of the stories people told today in Jenin.
The northern West Bank town, along with its refugee camp, has been the scene of the fiercest fighting in the two weeks since Israel's army launched attacks on Palestinian cities and towns, vowing to eliminate what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called a terrorist infrastructure. Today for the first time, reporters journeyed into town during a break in the Israeli-imposed curfew to see and hear what occurred.
Many refugees who had fled to town to escape the camp's dusty streets and cinder-block hovels where the bloodiest fighting unfolded said their homes had been pulverized. They described bodies lying in the streets.
"There are uncountable numbers of houses that have been destroyed," said Riad Ghaleb, 28, a produce seller from the camp. "When you see them, you go crazy. The helicopter fired so many rockets at our neighborhood because three soldiers were killed there in a house near where I live."
From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the Israeli army lifted the curfew it has imposed on Jenin for more than a week. It was the first time since last weekend that people in the town had been permitted out of their homes. The adjacent refugee camp -- now largely empty and shell-shattered -- remained locked down.
In those hours, movement on the roads was allowed but still risky. Shortly after 10 a.m., an Israeli tank opened fire with its heavy machine gun on a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, Fares Einad Zaben, who had ventured too close, doctors at Jenin's Razi Hospital said. The boy was hit in the chest and died.
Several dozen outgunned Palestinian fighters surrendered to Israeli forces in the refugee camp today, apparently the last holdouts in the week-long battle. Israeli officials have estimated that 150 to 200 Palestinians died in the camp. Some Palestinians put the figure closer to 500 but acknowledged they had no hard count because the camp has been closed off by Israeli forces. Nearly 700 Palestinians were arrested in the camp, including many fighters.
Sporadic gunfire continued throughout the day in Jenin, much of it by Israeli tanks and armored vehicles firing heavy machine guns and soldiers shooting assault rifles. The shooting seemed a means of enforcing the curfew, which has emptied the streets of Jenin, even with its refugee-swollen population of at least 30,000.
Palestinians emerged from their houses during the four-hour respite to gawk at the razed houses and shattered facades downtown. On Old Castle Street, where the Fashafsheh family lived, their corner house, with its walls three feet thick, was a wreck, half of it shorn away and turned to rubble. In the crater that was once the family's living room, the stench of death hung in the air.
About 9 a.m. one day last weekend, an Israeli tank fired a shell into the house without warning, according to neighbors. Then an Israeli armored bulldozer pulverized the wall, possibly to clear a passage for the tank to pass. Ahmad Fashafsheh, 50, his wife, Sameera, and their son Hisham were killed. Two other sons, 11 and 13, were hurt.
Issam Fashafsheh, a relative who lives across the street, watched the scene. "I heard the kids screaming, then the bulldozer came and started destroying the house," he said. "They were entombed under the wall in their living room where they sat."
Neighbors dug the corpses out of the rubble and covered them with a white sheet. It was only this morning, when the Israeli curfew was lifted, that the Fashafshehs were buried.
"I'm not mourning the death of my relatives because there are so many others to be mourned," Issam Fashafsheh said.
Shortly before 2 p.m., when the curfew was reimposed, the streets suddenly started to empty. At 2:30 p.m., an Israeli armored vehicle drove through town, firing bursts from its heavy machine gun. There was no sound of return fire.
After curfew, perhaps the only functioning institution in Jenin was the little Razi Hospital, just south of the town center. Lacking water and short on diesel fuel to power its generator, the 30-bed hospital struggled to meet basic needs.
The Israeli military has permitted no regular ambulance service. The staff has been on duty for 10 days straight. Two doctors were hit by gunfire in an upstairs room. And so the hospital has survived by improvisation. Unable to call for ambulances to transfer badly injured patients to larger hospitals, Razi's one general surgeon has twice in the last week operated by phone calls from the operating room.
Once it was a man shot in the head. The surgeon, Jaffar Azzam, 32, said he operated with real-time telephone advice from a Swiss Red Cross neurosurgeon in Ramallah, another West Bank town about 30 miles to the south. A day later, Azzam said, he was on the phone with his old professor in Jordan, a vascular surgeon, soliciting advice to save a teenager's arm after he had been hit by Israeli gunfire.
"I tried my best and, God help us, his arm was saved," Azzam said. "He would have lost the arm. The clock was ticking."
But for most of the week, the hospital has been a nerve center for bad news.
"A few days ago a woman called from home and said, 'I'm in labor,' " said Ziad Ayaseh, the hospital director. "I told her what to do, but she said the child was not breathing. I said, 'He's dead. You can put him on the list of the martyrs like those in the refugee camp.' "
When the curfew was lifted today, the family of a 52-year-old Palestinian woman arrived with her corpse. The woman had been shot in the face and chest by helicopter gunships, her family said; they needed a death certificate.
Khadra Samara, 33, the wife of the hospital cook, said she was inside her home on Rawabi Street in the refugee camp about 11:30 Sunday night when an Israeli bulldozer approached and tore through the front gate and began slamming into the house.
"We started screaming and lighting lamps and candles so they'd know someone was inside," she said. "We were 15 women and children. . . . But as we screamed, a missile was fired at the house, destroying the second and third floors. The whole house shook, there was a flash of light, and all the windows were blown out."
In a panic, Samara called her husband at the hospital and pleaded for help. Inexplicably, the bulldozer backed off. But before dawn Monday it smashed into the house again, shaking the cinder-block walls of the bedroom where the children were sleeping.
"The top of the wall started to give, and I started grabbing the kids and hauling them away from there," she said. "They destroyed the house with everything in it. We didn't even take one T-shirt for one child."
Samara tried to get out the front door, but found it was blocked by rubble. She handed the children through a side window into a neighbor's house.
"I was so furious I wanted to make a suicide bomb and use it on them," she said. "I picked up a cylinder of cooking gas to carry with me so I could blow it up. I was so scared I was screaming. I thought I was going to die.
"When I picked up the cylinder my daughter said, 'Mom, don't do it! For God's sake don't do it!' "
The second house provided little respite. An hour after they took refuge there, the bulldozer came again. They fled to a third house; it came under attack from missiles fired by helicopter gunships.
"From 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. we ran from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, wherever we thought was safest to go. The children became sick from fear and started vomiting," Samara said.
They finally emerged waving white scarves. By that time, with residents of the two other houses having joined the group, they counted nearly 30 women and children. The soldiers held them for three hours, then let them go, Samara said.
"We walked for a half-hour from the camp into the town," she said. "Israeli helicopter gunships dropped stun grenades to scare us."
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[posted 4/14/02]
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