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April 23, 2002
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
April 20, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Drowning in a Sea of Apathy
Kristen
Schurr
Leaving
Nablus
Bernard Weiner
Israel and the Intifada
for Dummies
Jean-Guy
Allard
A
Coup Signed by Otto Reich
Chris Floyd
The "Grandeur" That Was Rome:
A Letter from the Front
April 19, 2002
Eric Flint
Free
the Books!
David Krieger
A Peace Proposal:
Bring in the Children
Jeff Paterson
Advice
to Recruits from
a Gulf War Vet
Jeffrey St. Clair
From Sen. "Lunkhead" to
Bush Energy Czar: A Year in the Life of Spencer Abraham
April 18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Latin
America's Dilemma:
The Propaganda of Otto Reich
Sam Bahour
Bush is Playing Russian
Roulette with Palestinians
M. Shahid
Alam
A
Colonizing Project
Built on Lies
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The New Crusade:
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April 23, 2002
Where
are the International Aid Organizations to Rescue Palestinians
in Jenin?
Israeli Army Continues to Shoot
at Palestinian civilians
By Brian Wood
in Jenin Refugee Camp
Via cell phone
For the last four days I've been in the Jenin
Refugee Camp trying to help in digging the corpses from under
the rubble. Every day more corpses are dug out, and somehow some
people still have come out alive. It has been quite miraculous
because some have been under their homes for two weeks. There
were three people yesterday I heard that came out alive. Today
one person came out alive.
The problem is that the people here don't
have the equipment to do this kind of rescue operation and they
are still receiving so little help from outside. They have only
three bulldozers working in the entire refugee camp removing
some of the rubble and getting closer to where the bodies are
and removing them by hand. In an area of four city blocks long
and two city blocks wide, there are two hundred homes that are
all completely destroyed. So this is where the majority of the
rescue operation is taking place.
Where is the Red Cross? The Red Crescent
is mainly the people that do a lot of the digging. Also involved
were some of the brothers of the victims and other family members
with the help of Red Crescent workers. But the Red Crescent workers
there are barely even trained. They are volunteers. They just
slap on rubber gloves and a mask over their face to try to protect
them a little bit from the horrible horrible stench and start
digging with small shovels. They are trying to remove whole houses
from on top of these people.
I can't understand why there is not more
help. Even Israelis. There is supposedly a peace movement in
Israel. Why can't they bring bulldozers over and take them into
Jenin Refugee Camp?
The Israeli army has been pretty much
out of the camp for three or four days, and just today five people
of the Red Cross from Britain showed up, specializing in rescue
operations. And they got a briefing about all the explosive ordinances
on the ground and in the homes from the Israeli army, Apache
helicopters and some of the booby-traps left by the Palestinian
resistance fighters.
The unexploded ordinances are being tripped
every day by people coming across them. There are dozens of injuries
in the last three days because people run across exploding devices
and they blow up. Today I just came from the hospital visiting
two ten-year-old boys. I'm a friend of their family. One is Assad
Ibrahim Arsal. He lost his left arm at the shoulder and both
of his legs are injured, barely still attached, in horrible condition.
We don't expect him to live, he looks horrible--he's the cousin
of one of my friends here. The other Palestinian boy is named
is Saed Sobhay Wahsh. He is also in pretty bad shape, but he
looks like he will survive. Both of his legs, torso and face
have a lot of cuts, burns, his eyes are sealed shut, pus oozing
out of his body. He will need a lot of treatment and time to
recover.
These two kids likely stepped on a land
mine in an area we recently observed about ten Israeli soldiers.
Every day, we hear two or three explosions a day and every time
we know exactly what happened. Every day several people are injured
by unexploded ordinances.
I can't understand why nobody is here
to help! There are a few Red Cross people that are running around.
The five Brits from the Red Cross, specially trained to find
live bodies, I suspect they're only going to find corpses. There
are two Norwegians, maybe with the United Nations, that are trying
to figure out where the exploding devices are. They mark the
area with spray paint and then supposedly are going to come later
and take some of these devices out. But this is two people in
a camp that is one kilometer square that was home to 15,000 people.
It has been days since the Israeli army
has moved out from the center that was home to 15,000 people.
I cannot understand why there are not hundreds of people from
aid organizations here in order to not only remove unexploded
ordinances but to offer assistance in digging into the rubble,
to offer humanitarian aid, food and water.
Right now, there is still no electricity
in the camp, there is still no water, because the Israeli army
bulldozed all the water lines--and they haven't been repaired.
There is literally almost no help from outside. Everyone is talking
about this here and we are all just amazed. Sometimes I have
a hard time working, in shock just wondering, "where is
everyone?"
Israeli Army Withdrawn? Though it's been
reported that the Israeli army has withdrawn from the area the
truth is that every day soldiers are shooting at people. The
Israeli army is just on the outskirts of the refugee camp--they're
just not in the center anymore. Soldiers are still all around.
If you draw a circle on a piece of paper, they're not inside
that circle but they're standing on the line.
Today, they were firing at everybody
who went through one particular valley that is one of the main
entrances of the camp, the one I use everyday. They were shooting
live ammunition from an armored personnel carrier at every single
person that moved through there. People are trying to go back
to their homes after trying to get some food or water.
They have closed the entire area from
Jenin to an Israeli town called Umma Sahem (spelling?) about
17 to 20 kilometres west of Jenin. They called this a "closed
military area". Apparently this is part of the plan to build
a buffer zone between the West Bank and Israel. Basically this
means they have confiscated hundreds and hundreds of acres of
more land and they do not allow anybody to come close to the
border.
Today there was only one road out of
Jenin where any person could come and go without getting shot
at. There are three entrances from the North (Northeast, Northwest,
North). The entrance from the Northeast was the only one that
could be used today. Some friends of mine tried to get out using
the Northwest entrance but they didn't even get close to the
checkpoint. The soldiers are literally standing on the edge of
the camp and the city and continue to fire at people. They don't
fire into the city or the camp but they fire at anyone who is
going in or out.
A future in Jenin Refugee Camp? Over
the next month my feeling is that there will be no rebuilding
process. Nobody is likely going to help the people to rebuild.
It's obvious, because for weeks nobody did anything to stop the
Israelis while they were destroying all this, even though the
much of the world knew what was going on. Now that this round
of destruction is finished, there is so much to build, to be
done, to clean up and to assist the people.
One big question to resolve is where
are all these people going to go? There are hundreds of families
without homes. They are staying with families and friends and
whatever, but nobody has even bothered to set up tents for these
people. Not the United Nations, the Red Cross or anybody. It's
the most astounding thing that I've ever seen in my life. It's
like a horrible earthquake that hit the entire area that caused
massive destruction and barely anybody is doing anything to help.
Generally when you see an earthquake, organizations raise millions
of dollars, food and clothing from all over the world. But here
there is literally nothing.
Even the Israeli peace activists who
a little over a week ago attempted to bring a convoy of food
to Jenin. Almost none of it got to the people. More bizarre is
that they tried back then when they couldn't come in and now
they can come in and they're not trying. It's just the most amazing,
dumbfounding experience I've ever had in my life.
With all this suffering I have the utmost
respect for the Palestinian people, especially in the Jenin Refugee
Camp for their resilience, to live and to try to live in peace
with the Israelis. They continue to do what they can with whatever
they have. They're an amazing people.
Documenting the massacre with one friend,
we have been interviewing refugees from the Jenin Refugee camp
who have been living in villages outside of the camp. We interviewed
almost two dozen people, getting very detailed stories from them
in order to reconstruct both their stories, what happened to
them in particular, but also the overall picture of the invasion
and destruction of the Jenin Refugee Camp. This is the most valuable
chore we can do right now.
This important task is actually quite
difficult right now because people are coming back to what was
their homes. They're homeless, with no food, they don't have
water, and you cannot just sit with them in a room for an hour
and get detailed stories from them because they are literally
looking for a place to stay, looking to survive.
So we are going to continue to try to
get detailed stories from survivors of this enormous massacre
and to continue to document this and turn these over to Palestinian
and perhaps some international human rights organizations. But
we need more help in this.
Nobody is doing the detail work that
we have being this far. The international organizations (like
the UN) come in and take brief statements and they get a little
bit but they don't get the whole detailed story like we're getting.
People need to pressure these international agencies to do more,
to at least help document what happened.
I wouldn't be surprised if international
aid organizations started to help rebuild. But this would be
pointless without addressing the root issues of this conflict.
They'll rebuild and a new group of fighters will emerge from
the Jenin Refugee Camp and there will be more Israeli invasions
that will destroy what is rebuilt. This continues to be the problem
here.
I remember I lived in Beit Jala in the
first invasion last August (2001). The European Union acted quickly
to broker a deal between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli
government for the Israelis to leave Beit Jala. But the first
thing I thought back then - why did no one address the issues?
There is no way to insure that the Israelis
aren't going to come back into Beit Jala. Sure enough they've
been back four times since August of 2001 and they're still there
right now! And the same thing in Jenin Refugee Camp -- tens of
millions of dollars will be spent to rebuild the camp and then
what?
Brian Wood
is a member of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace living
in Palestine with other internationals helping to resist Israel's
35-year military occupation of Palestine.
More information on his experience at: http://www.ccmep.org/palestine.html
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