About this research
A Human Rights Watch
team of three experienced researchers spent seven days in Jenin
from April 19, 2002 to April 28, 2002 to research this report. The
team interviewed over one hundred residents of Jenin refugee camp,
gathering detailed accounts from victims and witnesses and carefully
corroborating and cross-checking their accounts with those of others.
Human Rights Watch investigators also collected information from
other first-hand observers of the events in the Jenin refugee camp,
including international aid workers, medical workers, and local
officials. The research also included information from public sources,
including Israeli governmental sources, about the incursion. However,
the IDF has not agreed to Human Rights Watch's repeated requests
for information about its military incursions into the West Bank
and Gaza Strip. Although Human Rights Watch's research has been
extensive, we do not pretend that it is comprehensive. Further inquiry
is still in order, particularly as the excavation process proceeds,
and if Israel ultimately decides to make its soldiers involved in
the operation available for interview.
Summary
On April 3, 2002,
the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched a major military operation
in the Jenin refugee camp, home to some fourteen thousand Palestinians,
the overwhelming majority of them civilians. The Israelis' expressed
aim was to capture or kill Palestinian militants responsible for
suicide bombings and other attacks that have killed more than seventy
Israeli and other civilians since March 2002. The IDF military incursion
into the Jenin refugee camp was carried out on an unprecedented
scale compared to other military operations mounted by the IDF since
the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in September 2000.
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. Israel also has
a legal duty to ensure that its attacks on legitimate military targets
did not cause disproportionate harm to civilians. Unfortunately,
these obligations were not met. Human Rights Watch's research demonstrates
that, during their incursion into the Jenin refugee camp, Israeli
forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian
law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes.
Due to the dense urban setting of the refugee camp, fighters and
civilians were never at great distances. Civilian residents of the
camp described days of sustained missile fire from helicopters hitting
their houses. Some residents were forced to flee from house to house
seeking shelter, while others were trapped by the fighting, unable
to escape to safety, and were threatened by a curfew that the IDF
enforced with lethal force, using sniper fire. Human Rights Watch
documented instances in which soldiers converted civilian houses
into military positions, and confined the inhabitants to a single
room. In other instances, civilians who attempted to flee were expressly
told by IDF soldiers that they should return to their homes.
Despite these close quarters, the IDF had a legal duty to distinguish
civilians from military targets. At times, however, IDF military
attacks were indiscriminate, failing to make this distinction. Firing
was particularly indiscriminate on the morning of April 6, when
missiles were launched from helicopters, catching many sleeping
civilians unaware. One woman was killed by helicopter fire during
that attack; a four-year-old child in another part of the town was
injured when a missile hit the house where she was sleeping. Both
were buildings housing only civilians, with no fighters in the immediate
vicinity.
The IDF used armored bulldozers to demolish residents' homes. The
apparent purpose was to clear paths through Jenin's narrow and winding
alleys to enable their tanks and other heavy weaponry to penetrate
the camp interior, particularly since some of these had evidently
been booby-trapped. However, particularly in the Hawashin district,
the destruction extended well beyond any conceivable purpose of
gaining access to fighters, and was vastly disproportionate to the
military objectives pursued. The damage to Jenin camp by missile
and tank fire and bulldozer destruction has shocked many observers.
At least 140 buildings-- most of them multi-family dwellings-- were
completely destroyed in the camp, and severe damage caused to more
than 200 others has rendered them uninhabitable or unsafe. An estimated
4,000 people, more than a quarter of the population of the camp,
were rendered homeless because of this destruction. Serious damage
was also done to the water, sewage and electrical infrastructure
of the camp. More than one hundred of the 140 completely destroyed
buildings were in Hawashin district. In contrast to other parts
of the camp where bulldozers were used to widen streets, the IDF
razed the entire Hawashin district, where on April 9 thirteen IDF
soldiers were killed in an ambush by Palestinian militants. Establishing
whether this extensive destruction so exceeded military necessity
as to constitute wanton destruction or a war crime should be one
of the highest priorities for the United Nations fact-finding mission.
The harm from this destruction was aggravated by the inadequate
warning given to civilian residents. Although warnings were issued
on multiple occasions by the IDF, many civilians only learned of
the risk as bulldozers began to crush their houses. Jamal Fayid,
a thirty-seven-year-old paralyzed man, was killed when the IDF bulldozed
his home on top of him, refusing to allow his relatives the time
to remove him from the home. Sixty-five-year-old Muhammad Abu Saba
had to plead with an IDF bulldozer operator to stop demolishing
his home while his family remained inside; when he returned to his
half-demolished home, he was shot dead by an Israeli soldier.
Human Rights Watch has confirmed that at least fifty-two Palestinians
were killed as a result of IDF operations in Jenin. This figure
may rise as rescue and investigative work proceeds, and as family
members detained by Israel are located or released. Due to the low
number of people reported missing, Human Rights Watch does not expect
this figure to increase substantially. At least twenty-two of those
confirmed dead were civilians, including children, physically disabled,
and elderly people. At least twenty-seven of those confirmed dead
were suspected to have been armed Palestinians belonging to movements
such as Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades.
Some were members of the Palestinian Authority's (PA) National Security
Forces or other branches of the PA police and security forces. Human
Rights watch was unable to determine conclusively the status of
the remaining three killed, among the cases documented.
Human Rights Watch found no evidence to sustain claims of massacres
or large-scale extrajudicial executions by the IDF in Jenin refugee
camp. However, many of the civilian deaths documented by Human Rights
Watch amounted to unlawful or willful killings by the IDF. Many
others could have been avoided if the IDF had taken proper precautions
to protect civilian life during its military operation, as required
by international humanitarian law. Among the civilian deaths were
those of Kamal Zgheir, a fifty-seven-year-old wheelchair-bound man
who was shot and run over by a tank on a major road outside the
camp on April 10, even though he had a white flag attached to his
wheelchair; fifty-eight year old Mariam Wishahi, killed by a missile
in her home on April 6 just hours after her unarmed son was shot
in the street; Jamal Fayid, a thirty-seven-year old paralyzed man
who was crushed in the rubble of his home on April 7 despite his
family's pleas to be allowed to remove him; and fourteen-year-old
Faris Zaiban, who was killed by fire from an IDF armored car as
he went to buy groceries when the IDF-imposed curfew was temporarily
lifted on April 11.
Some of the cases documented by Human Rights Watch amounted to
summary executions, a clear war crime, such as the shooting of Jamal
al-Sabbagh on April 6. Al-Sabbagh was shot to death while directly
under the control of the IDF: he was obeying orders to strip off
his clothes. In at least one case, IDF soldiers unlawfully killed
a wounded Palestinian, Munthir al-Haj, who was no longer carrying
a weapon, his arms were reportedly broken, and he was taking no
active part in the fighting.
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. Human Rights Watch received
many separate and credible testimonies that Palestinians were placed
in vulnerable positions to protect IDF soldiers from gunfire or
attack. IDF soldiers forced these Palestinians to stand for extended
periods in front of exposed IDF positions, or made them accompany
the soldiers as they moved from house to house. Kamal Tawalbi, the
father of fourteen children, described how soldiers kept him and
his fourteen-year-old son for three hours in the line of fire, using
his and his son's shoulders to rest their rifles as they fired.
IDF soldiers forced a sixty-five-year-old woman was forced to stand
on a rooftop in front of an IDF position in the middle of a helicopter
battle.
As in prior IDF operations, soldiers forced Palestinians, sometimes
at gunpoint, to accompany IDF troops during their searches of homes,
to enter homes, to open doors, and to perform other potentially
dangerous tasks. In Jenin, such coerced use of civilians was a widespread
practice; in virtually every case in which IDF soldiers entered
civilian homes, residents told Human Rights Watch that IDF soldiers
were accompanied by Palestinian civilians who were participating
under duress. The forced use of civilians during military operations
is a serious violation of the laws of war, as it exposes civilians
to direct risk of death or serious injury.
Human Rights Watch has so far found no evidence that Palestinian
gunmen forced Palestinian civilians to serve as human shields during
the attack. But 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.
During "Operation Defensive Shield," the IDF blocked
the passage of emergency medical vehicles and personnel to Jenin
refugee camp for eleven days, from April 4 to April 15. During this
period, injured combatants and civilians in the camp as well as
the sick had no access to emergency medical treatment. The functioning
of ambulances and hospitals in Jenin city was severely circumscribed,
and ambulances were repeatedly fired upon by IDF soldiers. Farwa
Jammal, a uniformed nurse, was killed by IDF fire while treating
an injured civilian. In at least two cases, injured civilians died
without access to medical treatment. Direct attacks on medical personnel
and the denial of access to medical care for the wounded constitute
serious violations of the laws of war.
During the period that the IDF directly controlled Jenin camp,
the Israeli authorities were obliged under international humanitarian
law to take all feasible precautions to protect camp civilians from
the dangers arising from hostilities, and to ensure to the maximum
extent possible under the circumstances that the civilian population
had access to food and medical supplies. In practice, however, 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. This
blockage continued from April 11 to 15, after the majority of armed
Palestinians had surrendered. Human Rights Watch investigated and
found no evidence to sustain reports that the IDF had removed bodies
from the refugee camp for burial in mass graves.
Every case listed in the report below warrants additional thorough,
transparent, and impartial investigation, with the results of such
an investigation made public. Where wrongdoing is found, those responsible
should be held accountable. There is a strong prima facie evidence
that, in the cases noted below, IDF personnel committed grave breaches
of the Geneva Conventions, or war crimes. Such cases warrant specific
criminal investigations with a view to ascertaining and prosecuting
those responsible. Israel has the primary obligation to carry out
such investigations, but the international community also has a
responsibility to ensure that these investigations take place.
