7 Days in what's left of Jenin - Postcards from Palestine at canadazone.com

Seven Days in What's Left of Jenin

1 May 2002

The following is a personal account of an experience in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the days after the conclusion of an Israeli operation that was, by its very results, the climax of recent invasions into Palestinians towns and cities in the West Bank. It is neither an article nor a report nor a story. It is simply words flowing from an arbitrary beginning to unfinished end. And it by no means a completed work - much is left to be written. The following account, in its entirety or in any part or excerpt related to the author’s personal experience, may not be retransmitted or otherwise used for mass-distribution without the expressed consent of the author. The account is indeed important, but not more so than the efforts and energies of those who inspired its formulation and to whom is owed a great amount of respect and sensitivity.

Much detail has been left out intentionally, such as civilian casualties, incriminating evidence of war crimes and extreme violations of human rights, and testimonies of surviving refugees. Such elements of what happened in Jenin are better left at this time to those organizations that will conduct formal inquiries into what occurred in the camp, and furthermore their exclusion does not detract from the tragic reality of the account I have given. Detail has also been specifically left out with regards to other individuals and organizations working in the camp at various times while I was there. I am referring only to myself in much of this testimony, using “I” instead of “we” in many cases, but that’s not to imply that I was alone among international volunteers in the camp. There were numerous others in the camp in these early days after the conclusion of the fighting, including those whose presence was much more critical than mine, but I will speak only for myself and those things and those details which I saw and did that I feel are pertinent to convey at this time and in this forum. I will preserve the anonymity of all others as long as they desire it.

The following account contains some graphic and disturbing details.

Seven Days in what’s left of Jenin

I painted a picture in my vivid imagination of a green springtime landscape with curvaceous hills, dotted with vaulted brushstrokes of olive trees and chaotic splashes of wildflowers against paler tones of limestone and grass. Perpendicular angles of stone village houses stood like lost sheep in a pasture of freshly tilled farmland under a hazy and cloudless blue sky. In the distance a small city was discernable mostly by the minarets of its mosques and the dust of its streets. Such is the view from almost any village in the north of the West Bank, where April aromas of rural Palestine match those of a Canadian forest meadow; a place where only grasshoppers break the silence.

But the artist in me threw this painting away, because all I could focus on was the blemish; the disfigured antithesis of artistic inspiration in the center of the landscape. This flaw of flaws was the Jenin Refugee Camp. But it wasn’t the artist in me, with his verbose narrative, that led me here; it was the human. The artist wants to make life a beautiful portrait, while the human knows, by its very existence, it can affirm the absence of beauty in life. And what more is the absence of beauty than the reflection of damnable devastation in the eyes of refugee sitting on the rubble of what’s left of his home. The artist finds a wealth of opportunity in the gray area that lies between the unreal and the real, and when he so chooses he can extend his canvas no further than the realm of the beautiful bliss of the imaginary world. If he disobeys his instinct, he can paint away the blemish with the single touch of his brush. But the human, as a mortal manifestation of the reality of life to which he is bound by his existential senses (no matter how hard he might try to direct his senses to the imaginary world), cannot draw a single breath of air outside of his corporeal world. So the artist and his vivid imagination stayed in the village, while the human and his monochromatic realism went to the camp.

I first entered the camp before the Israeli army lifted its closure, sneaking past military patrols with other aid workers and volunteers. The battle had days-long subsided, and there was an eerie sense of a ghost town in the camp carried by the dusty wind. The thousands of Palestinians who’d fled the camp during the invasion had yet to return, while the thousands more who had stayed barely poked their heads out of the windows of some of the frontier camp dwellings less affected by the demolition. Going deeper into the camp only revealed more and more destruction: buildings with bullet holes, buildings with shell holes, buildings missing walls, buildings missing floors and ceilings, and finally no buildings at all. In the center of camp, an area of perhaps 100,000 square meters, there was nothing but piles of rubble and rocks with miles of metal rebar twisting out of the uneven ground like vines in a jungle. No camera lens is wide enough to capture the breadth of this carnage, nor sharp enough to define every desolate detail of this concrete camp.

Inside this inner enclave of the camp I instantly smelled the stenches of smouldering plastic, open septic tanks, and rotting bodies permeating the air from all directions. Before the sun set on my third day in the camp I had helped Palestinian medical volunteers unearth several bodies from the ruins, and I saw more than fifty bodies in the morgue of the nearby Jenin Hospital. That number continued to grow over the ensuing days, but the total casualty count is not an endeavor for which I placed myself in the camp, and indeed it will be some time (if ever) before an exact total is known. Many bodies were charred beyond recognition and were pulled out of the rubble in pieces. Not all were buried underneath the fragments of bulldozed or shelled homes; some were lying where they had been killed inside the remains of structures still standing. Even long after the bodies had been located and dug up, the sickening smell of rotting corpses remained.

The fighting in Jenin Camp lasted, by the lengthiest figure reported, 9 days – from Thursday, 4 April to Saturday, 13 April. (More than one refugee I met in Jenin bragged that the camp’s meager resistance fighter force held out longer against the overwhelmingly superior military of the Israeli army than the combined militaries of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt during the June War of 1967.) But it wasn’t until Friday, 19 April that the Israeli army ended its closure of the camp and allowed official aid organizations and the thousands of displaced refugees back in. Before that day, many relief convoys were forced to leave their supplies of medicine, food, water, canned milk, and essentials such as diapers in Jenin city, cut off from the camp by the military closure. During these crucial days it was the efforts of international and Palestinian volunteers to carry these supplies in hand from the city to the camp, occasionally at risk from the Israeli army, to deliver them to those refugees most in need. After the camp was opened, the humanitarian crisis was slowly alleviated as broken and cluttered roads were quickly but haphazardly repaired to allow humanitarian goods to reach the people.

Jenin Refugee Camp is a hastily constructed stone and cement dwelling whose labyrinthal alleyway roads are narrow enough at some points so that a person can stretch out his arms and touch the walls of homes on either side. Bereft of parks, playgrounds, gardens, and soccer fields, the camp is largely dependent on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for schools, foodstuffs, and various supplies. Other international and Palestinian development organizations have provided several social clubs, activity centers, and even a few jobs. The adjacent city of Jenin is the camp’s vital support for infrastructure such as water, electricity, communications lines, medical care, and sewage disposal. For the approximately 16,000 residents of the camp, descendents of Palestinians who were forced to flee the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, unemployment is over 50% and nearly half the population consists of children.

What these refugees had to endure during the siege of their camp is almost indescribable, and certainly better told by the epic expressions on their faces than by any written words. When the many thousands returned to the camp or emerged from their tattered homes after the closure was lifted, the pain was self-evident as they began sifting through the wreckage of homes and buildings for precious possessions or lost loved ones. Around one destroyed building, a group of women and children attempted to retrieve kitchen items and family pictures, while in another part of the rubble a family dug restlessly for a tin can which contained a few hundred shekels. Many women were crying hysterically, lashing out in their anguish with venomous curses against those who had perpetrated this obliteration. On various rocks sat groups of old men and women, helpless to assist in the excavations and wearing the countenances of ultimate despair, perhaps not for the first time. But by and large the destruction in this part of the camp was so total that little hope existed to find the many cherished items which make a house a home.

Walking around the remains of the camp is nothing short of a surreal experience, and not in the least by the ironic but culturally appropriate greetings between the refugees of “Alhamdul allah ala salaameh” (“Praise God for your return home”). Several times I looked to the ground to see if the crunching noise beneath my feet was broken glass or bullet shells. While many of the adults rummaged through the debris for belongings, scores of children hunted for scraps of aluminum to sell for a few shekels. And everywhere I went in those first few days, many refugees, eager to tell me their tragic story and show me the evidence of what happened to them, grabbed me and pulled me aside. They need money and food and new homes and a life free from occupation and constant danger, but the only need we could really meet for them was to just listen, understand, and empathize – human being to human being.

(At this point in the story I would include excerpts from many of the testimonies of refugees, but they will have to remain muted for the time being. More than a few were told in the strictest of confidence, and revealing them in this private forum would compromise much of the painstaking work being done by various groups to document them.)

Throughout the mess of ground zero in Jenin Camp was the occasional story that brought tears of happiness instead of those of demoralizing sorrow. One family was reunited with their son after nine days apart during the chaos. They had been forced to flee the fighting in the camp while their son – one of seven children – was at a friend’s home. They waited and worried in torment while in exile in a neighboring village, fearing that their son may have been killed. Luckily, he had escaped with friends to another village outside Jenin, and upon the reunification of the family his mother could barely cease embracing him while she fought back the tears to tell us the story. In another case, a reported three Palestinians were discovered alive on Sunday, 21 April under some of the wreckage after being trapped for between five and nine days.

But good news was little and far between the ominous realities of the camp during and still after the Israeli operation. The most immediate and disastrous remnants of the battle were (and still are) the uncountable and in many cases undetectable unexploded ordnances remaining in the camp. These mines, booby traps, and especially non-detonated shells are literally littering the camp. In several cases they lie on some of the camp’s narrow roads while people simply step over or around them. But many more are hidden, and it takes only a shifting of the wreckage or an unaware footstep to set them off. On my first day in the camp, a 16-year-old boy had picked one up, not knowing what it was, and had most of his hand blown off when it exploded. Every day we heard several loud booms from in and around the camp, and another ordnance was discovered in a deadly way.

On Sunday, 21 April I was standing on a road next to a small vacant lot where two children were playing in the grass. I was not more than forty meters away when what seemed to be a partially buried unexploded tank shell (some claimed it was a mine) blew up. The horrors of the camp became more real than ever as I rushed towards these two kids who were not more than eight years old. One child took pieces of shrapnel in his face and chest, and he was sitting upright in the small crater formed by the explosion in such complete shock that he couldn’t even scream; his mouth and eyes remained wide open in an expression of unimaginable terror. The other child was slowly rolling back and forth on the ground, also in a terrifying silent shock. And beneath his bloodied clothing I could easily discern that his left leg had been detached at the knee. Ambulances arrived quickly, but there was little that could be done. I’ve been told that both children did not survive.

From suicide bombs one day and stray shells and bullets the next, more children – those humans who are best able to fit the boundless artistic realms into the perimeters of the experiential senses – are swept away in the violence. Thus both the artist and the human suffer from their loss.

After seven days of volunteer relief work and stretching the elastic of human compassion, I departed Jenin Camp. What had looked at first like a ghost town had become a crowded conglomeration of refugees, media, investigators, aid workers, doctors, activists, and war tourists. The landscape painting of the picturesque countryside was now (and in some ways forever) a nightmare of human suffering. The artist in me was shocked at what the human had discovered, and he put away his paintbrush and quietly succumbed to the darkness of the hour. He didn’t hear the grasshoppers or smell the wildflowers or take much notice of the rows of olive trees on the fertile ground. And he understood better than he ever thought he could about his world around him. He stood at the edge of his guarded gray area and peered at the horrors beyond. Such is the life of a Palestinian refugee in Jenin. Such is Palestine.