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PUBLICATIONS Report from Jenin Refugee Camp: Even Flies Reveal What the Israeli Army Wants to Hide by Hisham Naffa'a Al-Itihad daily, April 16, 2002 Translated by Kaled Forany Return to Publications List T his is the body of Ashraf Abu al-Hija'a, totally burned, totally black. It is lying down on the floor in the first room, on the second floor, right at the top of the stairs. The head is next to wall and the legs are at the entrance to the room. There are so many flies around because the corpse is so badly burned. There remains hardly a single identifiable feature from the face. If you attempt to get close, embarrassment and guilt push you away - away from gazing at death, from desecrating the dead. You take a break; you look away and then look again at who was once Ashram. The right arm is barely attached to the body. Fire has thinned down the legs so much that you clench your fists in trying to escape what your eyes must see. On the burnt pelvis are remnants of clothes, burnt fabric that is now no more than a few thick threads. The wall to the right is black charcoal. Near the window there is an opening large enough for the missile that entered and burnt this once safe home. We are in Jenin Refugee Camp. We are standing outside the house where the Israeli army killed Ashraf with a missile dropped from a helicopter. In the middle of the camp, in the Jurat al-Dahab quarter (literally means "ditch of gold"), you see the rubble of homes that have been destroyed among homes still standing. Don't let the latter fool you. Their insides have been destroyed by missiles coming through ceilings and walls. Reaching the refugee camp yesterday was unbelievable. Journalists, mostly foreigners, wanted to reach the village of Roummanah through Salim, an adjacent village. Roummanah has 400 refugees. After the army had released them, they found refuge in the village school, where they are currently living. Between Salim and Roummanah, there is a small dirt road. Salim is inside Israel and Roumanah is in the West Bank. The borders are marked by dirt. Although this may seem like a ridiculous border, from which you can see Roummanah, Zabouba and, when vision is clear, Jenin, we see on watch a patrol of Border Guards. Everyone is waiting for them to leave the place so we can make our way to Rommanah, which falls within a "military closed zone." We walk back to the house where we are waiting on the edge of Salem. Journalists begin to flock. A friend announces the arrival of two American journalists on their way to join us. At some point, waiting becomes unbearable. Our number is mightier than our hesitation. The patrol has left. "Why don't we start walking to Rommanah!" one journalist suggests. The response is clear. Most journalists are wearing bullet-proof vests. It is my first time wearing such a thing, very heavy, very cumbersome. "But it saves you from a bullet," one Portuguese journalist says. I tell myself, half-joking, "I prefer a bullet to walking in the midst of all this!" We take the dirt road and walk through orchards of olive trees towards Rommanah. Our eyes search the scene constantly. We can get caught by soldiers at any moment. Everyone waits for everyone else as we walk with almost total silence. Suddenly two young men wave at us from afar. We approach their Ford cars, fill them up and flood the drivers with questions. "Can we really make it to Jenin?" Our driver is calm. There are no signs of objection or resentment. "Let us check it out first." His idea is that we move towards Jenin and check out the "situation." The "situation" means of course, the occupation army. We run into a number of people along the road. The driver stops, asks about the "situation" and then continues on his way. We pass by the villages of Seelah, al-Yamoun and then reach Berqeen. The road goes down the hill and turns up again, where a tank is said to be watching. A hilltop and a man we approached both tell us that the road is "open." We stand at the top of the hill. We see a house and people getting outside as soon as they notice us. Typical of Arabic manners, a woman and her four sons invite us for a cup of coffee. A journalist among us asks about her sons, and the woman replies, "I have more of them. I feel strong." The woman's husband comes out and approaches us with anger. His angry words, it turns out, are not directed at us but at Israel and more so, much more so, at Arab leaders. He leans on the taxi and says, while pointing at his house, "Like

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I'LAM: Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel

that...they were shooting at us in the middle of the night." We reach Wadi Berqeen and from the hilltop we see Jenin Refugee Camp. A crowd of locals join us and begin to point, "See that burned house...See that that tank below...That is the camp there...Look at that house there. They poured down their missiles on it...We heard and saw.' One woman says to us, "Be careful, when the army sees cameras they will come to you...be careful." I ask her if they heard bombing today and she replies that today was quiet. "Strange is this calm with burnt houses all around," I say to myself. "But the destruction is huge inside the camp," she adds pointing to the middle of the camp. Now we began hearing gunfire. "This is coming from tanks," a boy announces with an expertise made possible by the Israeli occupation army. The pressing question now is how to enter the camp. A man looks at us angrily, "See those people going in...Go there... Take photos...Why are you late?!" He quiets and begins sobbing, while covering his face with his hands. Then he disappears. A long stretch of silence descends on us. Confused looks are all we can exchange between us. Then comes a voice, "They executed his two brothers after arresting them with three others." I then ask, "Is he Waleed's brother?" Yes, yes, is the answer. Waleed is one of the young men who was forced out of Rommanah and living in cruel conditions. He tells us of how he saw the army bring five men together and made them face the wall with hands above their heads. He saw everything. He was very close. A group of soldiers came and shot the five men. Waleed is terrified. Two of the executed men were his brothers. For a second, I thought of following Waleed's brother but I shied away. What can be said to a man mourning the death of his two executed brothers - cold blood execution. What "journalistic question" can be asked?! Next to me are standing three children. Until now we don't know if we are going to be able to enter the camp. I turn to Muhammad, one of the children with a dark face and a trembling right arm that reflects his shyness, a shyness that competes with his scarce words, "The bombs poked the houses and the bullets made sparks." He saw all this from his house. He saw and heard. I ask him about the people who left their homes. He points, "There...in the Damj quarter, the Hawasheen quarter and Jurat al-Dahab quarter...They destroyed all the houses. I saw many people leave. They walked on that road... children, elderly and women...many people." We begin descending towards the camp in a pick-up truck. We are packed in the back on a very steep road. We exchange greetings with a few residents we see along the road. We start walking among olive trees. The children lead us skillfully and caution us on the "tank below." The first houses that we reach have at their center one that is all bulletpocked. Its destruction is unmistakable. A bomb left it with a huge hole. One photographer hurries to take a picture of it. A young man tells him bitterly and sardonically, "Save the shots for what is ahead. You have not seen anything yet." I am next to a man asking me where I came from. His name is Muhammad and he is seventeen years of age. He was arrested among the mass round-ups that Israel conducted. I inquired about his parents, "I still don't know. I have been unable to return to our neighborhood." About his arrest, he said, "We were handcuffed for two days. For two days we had no food. Then they gave us food and water, a small piece of bread and a cucumber. This was supposed to last for another two days." We keep walking through the alleys of the camp. There are places where a single person can hardly fit. A group of children runs towards us. "At least there are some kids playing," one of us says. But this sentence fades away when we meet five women from the camp. One of them begins talking to us immediately...She tells of a body of a 16-year-old child. His name was Muhammad Bashir. The Red Cross just pulled him out...The woman describes the body's position very accurately, "At the door, you will see it as soon as you enter...It has been there for days but we could not reach it. We could not pull it out...Bombing and terror were constant." Umm Reyadd is crying, crying very hard. Her words disappear into her tears, "There was a handicapped child at his Uncle Rashid's house. They blew up the house on top of them. They blew it up...God is mightier than Israel." A man standing frozen next to me interrupts her, "God is mightier than the Arabs, the Arab leaders." Majida Mahameed speaks after sweeping away tears from her face, "They surrounded the house, filled it with dynamite. His uncle was in it and the blew it up." She is still talking about the handicapped boy. She is describing the scattered bodies all around. She saw five of them in one place. In another square, she estimates there were fifty bodies. "One night," Majida says, "the army put many families in one apartment, without food, without water. They had children. They began screaming and crying. The army came back to threaten them with dogs..." http://www.ilamcenter.org/publications/naffaa01.shtml (2 of 4) [6/22/2009 10:08:17 AM]

I'LAM: Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel

In Jurat al-Dhagab quarter, we stand atop a horrific view of destruction, rubble and destruction, iron supports are torn out of stones, cement and dirt. Household stuff is dispersed everywhere. Everywhere in this place, there used to be homes. Now, the army of Israel has leveled them to the earth. The remaining houses include some that are burnt, some with collapsed ceilings and others are rocket-blown, balconies hanging down, with naked metal stuffing...All are abandoned now. I see two ladies carrying stuff and coming towards us. They carry blankets, towels, sheets, all excavated from their demolished homes. "What have you seen inside the homes?" I ask them. "There are no homes. There is nothing, destruction upon destruction. You can't tell a bathroom from a living room." Then we hear voices, "Come here...There is a corpse...This is Ashraf...There is Ahmad Bashir...Down the square there are four bodies." Death surrounds the place. You see it in the destruction. You see it in the eyes around you. You see these people going around and around and not knowing what to do. When we come to see the body of the murdered Ashraf, a crowd of children gather in front of us on the stairs. The adults send them away. Suddenly a young man shouts, "Shaheeds (martyrs) are not for show-and-tell! They are not for show-and-tell!" I feel a terrible embarrassment. I don't know what to say or how to act. A woman rescues me when she embraces that young man and tells him, "Let the world see my beloved. Let the world see..." Another woman can no longer hold herself and begins shouting at him, "Anything but a young man crying! You cannot cry." I search for air and leave the place. Feras, in his early twenties, stands next to me outside the house holding a rosary. I ask him about the destruction, "There was bombing on us...People in their homes...Bombing from the aircraft. We felt it from all directions...Even when resistance stopped shooting a single bullet, the bombing continued." I leave Feras, without looking at him, when Kamal calls me. I go with him to a house, its entrance blocked by metal bars rising from cement rubble. There is another murdered young man in this house." We go up the stairs. We make it to a right hand room. A young woman stands at its corner watching the collapsed ceiling black like coal. I follow her gaze and see a head and shoulders...the rest of the body is covered by the ceiling that collapsed on it after an Israeli pilot killed him with a missile. A huge hill of rubble and cement cover much of Abdel Rahim Ahmad's 25-year-old body. The woman, his sister Huda, stands next to the covered body and can name nothing beyond her calamity, "Gone is the house, gone is my brother." The room is featureless. The metal fence around the balcony was tossed away and landed inside the room. From this balcony came the air that ventilated the smell of death around us. But it can't move the sight of murder away from our eyes. The ceiling is black, as if it were pained with black coal. The walls are partly burned. The floor is covered with rocks, stones, and dust. When I brush it a little bit, I am able to see the tiles, white tiles with black and dark-gray dots... How was this room before the massacre? When was the last time its occupants swept and mopped the floor? When did it come to be this heap of rubble? At what moment? What was Abdel Rahim doing when the Israeli pilot pushed the button? What did Abdel Rahim feel when the ceiling collapsed? Did he die quickly? Or did death walk in front of his eyes before he was killed? In one of the room's corners, I see the relics of a ventilator. Next to it I see a black box that was once a TV. Shreds of glass turned white when I brushed them. Perhaps this was a chandelier. The house owner told me a rocket destroyed it ten days ago...This means that Abdel Rahim has been under the rubble for ten days. I ask him about Abdel Rahim and he tells me that he was 25 years of age. He used to work in a shoe store. But I could not hear more about Abdel Rahim. I left the room. A girl came shouting: "They found Yahya (incidentally this Arabic name means the long-living one)... They found him alive." We run frantically searching for Yahya. He is inside one the houses and refuses to talk to anyone. We ask only to see him, without taking pictures. A woman comes to us and says, "Please leave him alone, he does not want to see anyone." I leave feeling that a story has been lost, but also feeling awfully and deeply embarrassed. At times I feel that my presence is an added burden - added to the calamity of the people. With insensitivity, as I conclude later, I ask a group of ladies if they have a supply of food and water. One of them explains to me how the army allows supplies in once and refuses them ten times. Suddenly a woman screams in my face: "We don't want supplies...We don't want anything...I want my son...my son!" She says this while screaming and holding her head between her hands. She does not cry at all. She screams in a way that makes me think that it was http://www.ilamcenter.org/publications/naffaa01.shtml (3 of 4) [6/22/2009 10:08:17 AM]

I'LAM: Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel

wrong to ask. Families here are searching for sons and husbands, the living and the dead, the arrested and the disappeared. There is no time now to ask about the condition of the living, their food and water. Here they don't ask about their lives. They ask about those whose fate remains unknown. At a different site of the Jurat al-Dhaab quarter there is no less horror. A large square that was once many homes. It became a store of rubble. The army came with bulldozers and erased the structure entirely. Everything was leveled to the ground. Whatever homes were not totally grounded had a ceiling falling down from one remaining wall. I listen to a conversation next to me. - Have you heard anything about Abu Yousif? - They found him inside his house. - And your father? - (Short silence, confusion and then): I went back home. It is destroyed. There is no sight of my father. In front me, I see young men working to remove stones with their bare hands. There are other tools besides them. The young Kamal points to some rubble and tells me, "I think there is a corpse over there." Really...There is the smell of decomposition, and a flock of flies around that one place. In Jenin Refugee Camp, flies alone are capable of finding the dead. They see the dead and lead us to them. Unlike all Israeli military correspondents who came here before us and convey to their readers what their military masters demand - these are the military masters that turn journalists to their spokespersons - even flies can reveal to us what they want to hide. One young man pokes his head inside the rubble to get out something that turns out to be a pillow. It is the body of tornup pillow, its sponge stuffing falling out. It makes me think of intestines. My thoughts are focused on what might be going under the rubble, over which flies insist on flying. Shortly after, I see a commotion...towards the road up the hill. One shouts out, "A tank!!" Panic surrounds us and another shout is heard, "Don't run, don't rush!" We leave the place, not knowing what the rubble hides. According to the witnesses, many bodies remain hidden under the rubble. We leave the site and stop at one of the alleys. There, a young man points toward the remnants of soldiers' food. I look at the pile of cartons and I see mineral water, empty plastic containers of fast food, foil "English cake" pans and many empty bags - all fast food. I imagine the picture: The soldiers are the grandchildren of the Nazis' victims, the Nazis' survivors. They have come here to consume food quickly and consume life quickly. This is the true image of Israel. The real Israel is not in the clean, lofty suburbs of Northern Tel-Aviv...It is not in the literary cafes and journalists' clubs...It is not its High Court. I saw the real Israel, its ugliness in the Jenin Refugee Camp on Monday, April 15, 2002. The rest remains decor for murder. Return to Publications List

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