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The Jenin camp was bound to be a killing zone. Both sides knew as much. Established in 1953 to provide temporary shelter for refugees still homeless after the 1948 war, the camp has 14,000 residents crammed inside a 2 1/2-sq.-mi. maze of attached cinder-block houses on streets barely wide enough for a Toyota, much less a tank. It is home to a fiercely nationalist tradition and some of the Palestinians' most successful terrorists. When the tanks came two weeks ago, Jenin's fighters were surrounded and outgunned but not outfought. In a radio broadcast, Hamas vowed to fight to the death. With the Israeli army busy in Ramallah and elsewhere in the West Bank in late March, the Palestinians had nearly a week to organize a defense--on their own turf, on their own terms. The slope of the camp favored their position at the crest. And their bombmakers expertly set about the delicate task of making every alley and building a lethal conquest for the Israeli attackers.
The 5th Brigade paid a heavy price on Tuesday, but by Thursday, when the Israeli military finally pulled back its armored curtain, the camp had been obliterated. Bulldozers and tanks had blasted a long, wide attack corridor through the camp. In a house-to-house, wall-to-wall onslaught of helicopter gunships, armor and infantry, Israeli forces say they killed at least 100 Palestinians and captured nearly 700 others, including some on Israel's list of terror suspects. The last group of 37 surrendered only after running out of bullets. Dozens of civilians perished, some crushed by falling walls, others in the cross fire. Palestinians put the total number of their dead as high as 500; the Israeli military says it lost 23 in all.
Israel's capture of Jenin was never in doubt. It will go some way toward sating Israeli hunger for revenge after the suicide attacks. But it isn't likely to halt the attacks. In Palestinian minds, Jenin will forever be a heroic stand, a Middle East Stalingrad.
Palestinians and some human-rights activists charge that Israeli troops massacred civilians and then covered up the evidence. When reporters were allowed into the camp on Thursday, there were no bodies to be found. Yet residents reported that dozens of corpses had been left in the streets for days, and later they directed reporters to what they said was a mass grave. "They want to hide their crimes, the bodies of the little children and women," Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat told the Associated Press. On Friday the Israeli Supreme Court barred the army from carrying out a plan to bury some of the camp's dead Palestinians until a hearing into the deaths could take place two days later.
Israel denied committing any atrocities and blamed the Palestinians' defensive strategy for the damage and civilian casualties. "A refugee camp is where there are people who are living with a humanitarian crisis," said Colonel Gal Hirsch, the Israeli army's chief of operations. "The Jenin refugee camp is a military combat position. It was set up that way because the Palestinians decided they wanted to fight us there. There wasn't a massacre there; there was a battle." The pattern of the Israeli attack was frighteningly direct. Helicopter gunships pounded areas where gunmen had taken positions. As the gunmen were chased closer to the camp's center, tanks, bulldozers and troops advanced on the areas that had been abandoned.