Independent History & Research Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816

Lest We Forget

The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians


The Israeli Genocide in Palestine, March 29 - April 18, 2002

Compiled by Michael A. Hoffman II


More "Holocaust Hypocrisy"

Israelis Forbid War Crimes Investigation in Jenin

While Analysis and Investigation of World War Two-era German war crimes is never ending


April 18

A Palestinian boy who was wounded by Israeli troops, stands downcast amid the ruins of the Jenin refugee camp, April 18, 2002

April 18, 2002: A Palestinian searches for a relative among the bodies of 35 Palestinians killed by the Israelis in Nablus

  Irish nurse in clash with Israeli soldiers: A nurse from west Cork (Ireland) has told how she and a group of volunteers had warning shots and a grenade fired at them by Israeli soldiers as they tried to reach a refugee camp in Nablus. Palestinian members of the groups were beaten by the soldiers, she added. Mary Kelly, 24 other international volunteers and six Palestinian medical staff were allowed to pass through an Israeli checkpoint but were then stopped by tanks. "Two Israeli tanks approached us and fired warning shots. We stopped and formed a circle around the Palestinians. The Israeli soldiers threw a percussion grenade and the situation began to get ugly. They pushed us to the ground and beat and kicked the men. I was knocked down," Ms Kelly said. "Our aim was to visit Balata camp where the food and water situation is very bad. The unconfirmed toll there is 25 injured and 17 dead," she added. Having just visited the Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, she added that there were "79 bodies in the hospital, some of them in the dairy truck because the morgue is full." Source: Irish Times. April 18, 2002.


April 17

April 17: Red Cross workers cover the remains of a Palestinian woman killed by Israeli soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp

An Israeli soldier fires on a church in Bethlehem, April 17, 2002


April 16

"A Form of Ethnic Cleansing"

"Whatever is ultimately discovered about the carnage committed by Israel's forces, enough is known to implicate Sharon for a form of ethnic cleansing--purposefully destroying the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves. The systematic destruction of the signposts of nascent Palestinian statehood--statistics bureaus, education ministries, electricity and water supplies--is aimed at further uprooting a refugee population." Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times, April 16, 2002

April 16, 2002: A Palestinian survivor sits in what used to be her living room, before her home in the Jenin refugee camp was destroyed by the Israeli army. Using helicopter gunships, F16 fighter jets, tanks, and bulldozers, Israeli forces launched a pogrom against Arab villages on the West Bank beginning March 29, as part of a policy of collective punishment of the Palestinian people

In Jenin, amidst the shattered apartment houses and wreckage of a hellish, Israeli-bombed landscape, Palestinian women ford a stream, created when a watermain was smashed by rampaging Jewish soldiers

Amid the ruins of Jenin, the grisly evidence of a war crime

A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the center of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins. A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shoveled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks.

In one nearby half-wrecked building, gutted by fire, lies the fly-blown corpse of a man covered by a tartan rug. In another we found the remains of 23-year-old Ashraf Abu Hejar beneath the ruins of a fire-blackened room that collapsed on him after being hit by a rocket. His head is shrunken and blackened. In a third, five long-dead men lay under blankets. A quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland, littered now with detritus of what were once households -- foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes, tin cans, children's toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing. We stared at a mound of debris. Here, he said, he saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank. We could not see the bodies. But we could smell them.

A few days ago, we might not have believed Kamal Anis. But the descriptions given by the many other refugees who escaped from Jenin camp were understated, not, as many feared and Israel encouraged us to believe, exaggerations. Their stories had not prepared me for what I saw yesterday. I believe them now.

Until two weeks ago, there were several hundred tightly-packed homes in this neighborhood called Hanat al-Hawashim. They no longer exist. Around the central ruins, there are many hundreds of half-wrecked homes. Much of the camp - once home to thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war - is falling down. Every wall is speckled and torn with bullet holes and shrapnel, testimony of the awesome, random firepower of Cobra and Apache helicopters that hovered over the camp.

Building after building has been torn apart, their contents of cheap fake furnishings, mattresses, white plastic chairs spewed out into the road. Every other building bears the giant, charred, impact mark of a helicopter missile. Last night there were still many families and weeping children still living amid the ruins, cut off from the humanitarian aid. Ominously, we found no wounded, although there was a report of a man being rescued from beneath ruins only an hour before we arrived.

Those who did not flee the camp, or not detained by the army, have spent the bombardment in basements, enduring day after day of terror. Some were forced into rooms by the soldiers, who smashed their way into houses through the walls. The UN says half of the camp's residents were under 18. As the evening hush fell over these killing fields, we could suddenly hear the children chattering. The mosques, once so noisy at prayer time, were silent. Israel was still trying to conceal these scenes yesterday. It had refused entry to Red Cross ambulances for nearly a week, in violation of the Geneva Convention. Yesterday it continued to try to keep us out. Jenin, in the northern end of the occupied West Bank, remained "a closed military zone", was ringed with Merkava tanks, army Jeep patrols, and armored personnel carriers. Reporters caught trying to get in were escorted out. A day earlier the Israeli armed forces took in a few selected journalists to see sanitized parts of the camp. We simply walked across the fields, flitted through an olive orchard overlooked by two Israeli tanks, and into the camp itself.

We were led in by hands gesturing at windows. Hidden, whispering people directed us through narrow alleys they thought were clear. When there were soldiers about, a finger would raise in warning, or a hand waved us back. We were welcomed by people desperate to tell what had occurred. They spoke of executions, and bulldozers wrecking homes with people inside. "This is mass murder committed by Ariel Sharon," Jamel Saleh, 43, said. "We feel more hate for Israel now than ever. Look at this boy." He placed his hand on the tousled head of a little boy, Mohammed, the eight-year-old son of a friend. "He saw all this evil. He will remember it all." So will everyone else who saw the horror of Jenin refugee camp. Palestinians who entered the camp yesterday were almost speechless.

Rajib Ahmed, from the Palestinian Energy Authority, came to try to repair the power lines. He was trembling with fury and shock. "This is mass murder. I have come here to help but I have found nothing but devastation. Just look for yourself." All had the same message: tell the world.

Source: The Independent (U.K.) April 16, 2002

Inside the Camp of the Dead

"Rarely...have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life"

Bashir died in agony. The hands of the 23-year-old Palestinian are clenched into tight fists, his body charred. He lies buried under rubble and cement, his head twisted towards the door as if crying out for help. His tomb is a wasted house that crashed around him after the Israelis tried to bulldoze it to make a road. Next door, up a blackened stairway and across shards of glass, is the body of Ashran Abu Hadel, also 23. Someone tried to pull him out of the rubble but gave up. His arm lies straight out, as though he tried to push himself away from the cement as he lay dying.

Elsewhere in the Jenin refugee camp I saw bodies of men who were clearly fighters, replete with ammunition belts and other paramilitary trappings. Bashir and Ashran had nothing. The refugees I had interviewed in recent days while trying to enter the camp were not lying. If anything, they underestimated the the carnage and the horror. Rarely, in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.

This was not only a town of fighters, as Israeli soldiers told me. It was a town of women, children and old men, who have seen the camp grow into a warren of ramshackle homes over half a century. Amnesty International called for an immediate investigation into "the killings of hundreds of Palestinians", saying crucial evidence may be destroyed as Israel "continues to impede access".

Throughout the camp, which the Israelis called a production line for terrorists, there is the stench of death, of bodies that have been rotting in the sun for days. Everyone who survived the fiercest battle of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield has a terrible story to tell. They take your hand and lead you into their houses across bulldozed mounds of rubble including photo albums, clothing, toys and pillowcases. There, there are more bodies, burnt or twisted grotesquely, caught off guard by sudden death. Nothing prepares you for the smallness of a dead body.

The dead are everywhere. Kamal Anis, a labourer, leads us to an area called Harat al-Hawashim, a mound of rubble the size of four football pitches where 200 houses once stood. He says the Israelis levelled the place; he saw them pile bodies into a mass grave, dump earth on top, then ran over it to flatten it. There are still bulldozers and tanks at work, sending us fleeing into destroyed buildings. There is the sound of children crying. There are people looking for survivors under rubble.

"We have passed dark days," says Aisha, whose house was turned into a snipers' nest and base for 50 soldiers. "What we have passed through, I cannot describe to you but I will remember all of my life."

"What my son told me is that when they get older, they will resist occupation because they have seen this," says Aisha, a mother of five. For five days since the last Palestinian fighters surrendered the Israelis have prevented us from entering this camp, saying it was booby-trapped. Thirteen Israeli soldiers died in an ambush in its narrow alleys last week. The Army is still seeking to keep us out. I write this, hiding from an Israeli tank 50 meters away, inside the home of a man called Jamal who, in a state of shock, shows the destruction of his once-grand home...

Yoni Wolff, 26, an Israeli lieutenant who has spent weeks here, told me that no deliberate destruction had taken place and that the soldiers had killed only terrorists. But the hundreds believed dead were not all fighters. Buried under the rubble are the bodies of women and children whose houses caved in around them. "We destroyed the infrastructure of terror," Yoni boasted. He said the camp was empty, that civilians had fled and that it was booby-trapped. He said he saw no bodies of civilians, and that it was a successful operation.

To reach this "successful operation" we had to run through olive groves, dodging from tree to tree because of an Israeli sniper. I have seen demolished houses before. I have seen wells stuffed with bodies. I have seen civilians terrorized and living under siege. But what remains of Jenin camp is a wasteland of death... "I saw some children who were wounded take four days to die, bleeding to death because there was no one here to tend them," says Fahdi Jamal, a 30-year-old laborer.

Soraya and Harej, small sisters living in a ruined house with electrical wires hanging from the ceiling and a tank round through the living room wall, do not know their father is dead. Their mother does not know either but their aunt does; she heard it on the radio. "They stripped him and shot him," she says. "We can't tell his wife, she is too sick. She thinks he may still be alive." Ramsey, 28, who returned from Germany to be with his family, leads us to where five fighters lie dead inside a house, shot in the head. Flies swarm around and the smell is overpowering. For Muslims, whose custom dictates burial within 24 hours, this is the ultimate degredation.

"There is no justice, no ethics to this war," says Abu Bashir who is 70 years old. He points at a photo album heaped with the other trash. "This was someone's life, now it is gone, do you understand?" he shouts. Down the road, near Harat al-Hawashim, Abu Salim, who has passed 50 years in this camp, wanders though the rubble in shock. "What did they do?" he asks. "What did they do?"

Source: The Times (London), April 16, 2002


April 15

Arab cattle: Palestinian civilians, many of them women, some with infants, are herded through an Israeli army "checkpoint" at Kalandia, in the city of Ramallah, April 15, 2002. If Jews anywhere in the world were made to endure such conditions, there would be howls of outrage from the White House and media over the "Nazi-like" treatment. But when the Israelis herd the Palestinians like cattle, it's considered entirely fitting by Jewish supremacists such as "Holocaust Survivor" Elie Wiesel, who today, April 15, gave a speech in in Washington D.C., congratulating the Israelis on their pogrom


April 15

UN Commission on Human Rights Condemns Israeli Mass Killings in Palestine

On April 15, the United Nations human rights commission condemned "mass killings" of Palestinians and demanded the end of "acts of mass killings perpetrated by the Israeli occupying authorities." The Geneva-based Commission on Human Rights ruled that the Israelis were guilty of "gross violations" of humanitarian law and the commission upheld the "legitimate right of Palestinian people to resist." The Commission on Human Rights expressed grave concern at "the killing of men, women and children" in West Bank refugee camps, among them Jenin, where Israeli troops of massacred Palestinian women and children.

"A United Nations vehicle with supplies of flour and sugar had been denied access to the (Jenin) camp, as well as the Red Cross. 'For over a week now,' one senior UN official said, 'the Red Cross and the UN have made strenuous efforts to receive permission to enter the camp. Especially for the Red Cross, this is an unheard-of situation for a government to refuse access in this way. The only assumption that we are making, regrettably, is that someone had something abominable to hide.' An Israeli soldier told a journalist that the Red Cross had been granted access to the camp but had refused. The UN official responded: 'This is a blatant lie." Source: "The Times" (London), April 15.

April 15: Neighbors extract the body of a Palestinian woman, Zoha Ifreiteh, from the rubble of her bulldozed home, after discovering the body of her sister, Rasha, yesterday. The two sisters were killed by the Israelis on April 3, in Nablus.

There is a growing body of testimony that since April 3, the Israeli army's rampage at the Jenin refugee camp, was marked by massive war crimes. Eyewitness Baha Awad, a paramedic with a the local ambulance, saw soldiers go ahead and bulldoze a house in Jenin with a retarded Palestinian man inside. His parents ran out, screaming that their mentally handicapped son was still stuck inside the structure. He was buried alive by the Israeli bulldozer anyway. Kamel Ali testified that his 20 year old son and his son's friend, were struck by an Israeli rocket April 5, killing both young men. Ali said neither was armed. On April 8, Ali himself, and four other men, were rounded up by Israeli troops. One of the four Palestinian captives was fluent in Hebrew. He said that he overheard the Israeli soldiers talking about whether to execute the Palestinians in a shop or in the street. Mai Ziat told how a refugee from the Jenin camp had arrived at her doorstep describing how he had seen seven captive Palestinian men executed at close range by Israeli troops.

A Palestinian resident of Jenin, Luka Tomei, saw a Palestinian man shot down in the street by Israelis. "He had no guns. He said: 'I want a doctor. I want to go to the hospital. They shot him." She also testified that an Israeli sniper shot down an elderly Palestinian lady.

Palestinian officials and aid workers have testified that many Palestinian civilians were slaughtered by the Israelis in Jenin. Some Jews have been determined to conceal the Palestinian casualty toll by any means necessary. The Israeli Supreme Court on April 14 denied a demand by human rights groups to stop the mass burial of Palestinian bodies in pits, which has been the practice of the Israeli army thus far.


April 14

Palestinian children desperate for water after the Israeli army intentionally smashed water tanks and supplies in their neighborhood, collect water from a broken pipe in the Palestinian village of Dhahreiah, near Hebron, April 14, 2002. Because of the Israeli siege and blockade, many Palestinian children had been forced to drink sewage water, or urine mixed with powdered milk.

April 14, 2002: In the Jenin hospital last week, two Red Cross officials were targeted by an Israeli sniper. One, a former British officer, testified that one of three bullets fired into the hospital passed between him and a Canadian assistant. He retrieved the bullet and identified it as Israeli army issue.

Hurriya Kureini heard the roar of a huge, armored, D-9 bulldozer smashing through the wall of her home in Jenin, just after hearing the sound of US-made "Hellfire" missiles streaking from an Apache helicopter gunship firing at Palestinian homes elsewhere in he rneighborhood.

Kureini managed to lead her children out a window before her house came crashing down. Once out on the street, the Israelis ordered her and the children to stand in front of Israeli tanks. Her three sons, the youngest 15, were blindfolded and kidnapped. She also spotted the bodies of two of her neighbors, Feridi Asaadi, 80, and her daughter Lena, 40, lying in the doorway of their home. As of April 14, 2002, two of her sons are still in Israeli "custody," meaning that the Jewish kipnappers are either still torturing them or that they have been summarily executed.

Ali Mustapha Abu Sani, a 42 year old Palestinian school teacher testified tohe wholesale bulldozing of Palestinian homes by Israeli tanks and D-9 bulldozers. He says many families were wiped out. He provided the names of those who died in this way: "The household of Abu Naif Zagrah," says Ali Mustapha with certainty. "The households of Mazen al-Ghul and Abura al-Ghul." He continues: "Abu Jawad Narseh and Abu Jawad al-Asmar."

Maaz Staty, age 22 , says his mother died in this way, her home bulldozed with her inside. Witness Isa Weshaky mentions his cousin, Ataf Dasouki, aged 52, who opened the door of his home when commanded to by Israeli soldiers, and was then shot down.

"Israeli officers...interviewed by Ha'aretz (Israeli newspaper)...admit the Palestinian claims of extensive damage, including the bulldozing of houses. They admit too that Israeli soldiers fired on ambulances to drive them away from recovering the wounded." Source:"The Observer," (U.K.), April 14, 2002.

Tanks and Apache helicopters are enforcing a round-the-clock curfew. The Israeli stranglehold on the town is not only complicating humanitarian efforts, it is preventing any detailed scrutiny of the Israeli massacre in Jenin, where at least 500 Palestinians were killed, according to eyewitnesses. Ahmad al-Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) said witnesses had seen Israeli army trucks bringing bodies to a mass grave near the Adam bridge across the Jordan river. According to the The Times (London): "The Israeli Army has acknowledged that bodies of 'terrorists' were removed for burial in unmarked graves at what General Ron Kitry, an army spokesman, referred to as 'the enemy cemetery' in the Jordan valley.' -The Times, April 14, 2002.

Israelis have paid no heed to international laws that ban collective punishment and provide for the protection of civilians. Instead, Palestinian civilians in Jenin were strafed by machineguns. Buildings sheltering Palestinian civilians were bombed from the air and shelled by tanks. "What would the world reaction be if an Arab army treated Israelis - or anyone else - like this?" said Palestinian Khaled Sala'am.

"...fighting is the wrong word. It suggests a parity of violence"

A reporter's testimony: "We had driven to the outskirts of Jenin a week ago (April 7) for the first time. It was strange how small the city seemed, set among the green hills of the West Bank, surrounded by rich farmland and thick olive groves. A resident pointed out the camp itself..By then the fighting had been raging for five days. We watched the Israeli armor pouring in, and from a rooftop in the adjoining village of Wad Burqin, we watched the fighting. But fighting is the wrong word. It suggests a parity of violence. Instead, what we could see was a long-range assault, unequal in every part. We could see the tanks maneuvering and shelling houses from the plain. We could hear them firing from the ridge behind us. Most shocking, however, were the Apache helicopter gunships that hovered like an angry swarm above the city, approaching, often in pairs, and firing bursts of cannon-fire every five minutes into the camp. Every now and then they would fire a pair of missiles which would explode and send a plume of darker smoke above the white haze of gunsmoke already hanging above the camp. We learn the consequences of these strafing runs five days later. Dr Zaid Ayasi, director of the hospital, tells us that many of the civilian victims that he knows of were hit by helicopter fire in those few days. Slipping deep into the city on Friday (April 12), despite a curfew and its designation as a closed military zone, we are surprised to encounter large groups of Palestinian men all heading in the same direction. Following them discreetly, we are approached by a man who will only give his name as Hussam. He calls us to accompany them and talks rapidly at us as we walk. An hour earlier, Hussam tells us, the Israelis had come with their armored personnel carriers and loudspeakers and ordered every man who was between the age of 15 and 55 to gather in a central location. The men are too scared to disobey. And so we watch them leaving their homes and gathering in their hundreds, snaking in a long line towards a pale blue arch across the highway...Among them is a local journalist. I do not have time to get his name before the Israelis chase us away. He asks us to intercede on his behalf and shows us his press card to prove his bona fides . We are forced to tell him that we are as much in danger of being arrested as he. --Peter Beaumont, The Observer (U.K.), April 14, 2002.

The Israelis last week ordered the Palestinian population to leave Jenin refugee camp, roughly half a mile wide and three miles long, now a moonscape of blood-soaked rubble. Of the 13,000 Palestinians crammed into Jenin before the Israeli "incursion," fewer than 5,000 are left.

Nablus. Israeli destruction inflicted on Nablus, the largest Palestinian city, with some 20,000 inhabitants includes the Shuabi family and the family home. Among the buildings destroyed by Israeli tank fire or bulldozers in Nablus was the ancient casbah home of the Shuabi family. The Shuabis were still inside their home when the Israelis attacked. On April 13, rescue workers who had been digging through the rubble for days, found the bodies of three of the Shuabi children and their mother. The body of their father, Samir Shobi, was found April 12. Three other family members also were killed. On April 13, rescuers found two other members of the Shuabi family still alive. Rescuers pulled Abdullah Shuabi, 68, and his wife, Shamsa--from their living room, which was under a mass of stone and dirt. Neighbors of the Shuabis said Israeli bulldozers came to the front of the Shuabi home and began attacking. The house collapsed, with the family inside. "They were shouting, 'Help us! Help us!' " neighbor Amani Ghanem said of the crushed family. Three generations of the Shuabi family were buried alive. The confirmed Shuabi dead include: Omar Shuabi, 85, his daughters, Fatima and Abir, and his son, Samir; Samir's pregnant wife, Nabila, and the couple's three little boys, Abdallah, Azam, and Anas.

Rev. Economus George Awwad, 56, pastor of Saint-Dimitrios church of Nablus, inspects damage to his church two days after it sustained an Israeli bombardment on April 14. The church's two prayer rooms were heavily damaged by fire and its windows smashed by the anti-Christian, Israeli forces

Rokaya Hinno said she saw Imad Kasua trapped under the ruins of his home, bleeding to death. The Kasua house was one of several private homes that had been hit by Israeli fire in Nablus. Catholic and Muslim shrines were also attacked by Israelis in Nablus. The local Muslim house of worship, the Saladin Mosque, was rammed. Two rooms of the 250-year-old St. Demetrius Catholic church were severely damaged by Israeli tank fire, said Father Economus George Awwad. The 56-year-old priest saved his own life by crawling out of the structure, as the barbaric Israelis bombarded it.


April 13

War Crimes Coverup Continues

The killings in Jenin ended on April 11, but the Israeli Army continues to bar the outside world from the scene of the carnage. Before Ali Khatib left Jenin on April 11th, he saw dump-trucks filled with the remains of the Palestinian houses bulldozed by the Israelis. Inside those houses, the Palestinian father of eight said, were dead Palestinians. Inside the trucks, mixed in with the rubble and the concrete, were their remains. "There were ten or fifteen trucks," he said. "After the Israelis bulldozed the houses, they scooped everything up. Then they drove away." One man spoke of receiving a call on his cell phone on April 11 from a Palestinian family trapped beneath the rubble of his bulldozed home inside the camp. On April 12 the family's phone went dead. On the morning of April 12, Israeli Army General Ron Kitrey confessed in a brief moment of candor: "very likely several hundred Palestinians were killed." His statement has since been withdrawn and "clarified" by the Israeli army. A combination of an Israeli ban on the media and the clever method the Israelis have devised for disposing of the bodies of hundreds of their victims, almost guarantees there will be no holocaust-like photos of mounds of Palestinian cadavers. The Palestinian people are so much rubbish in the view of the Americans and Israelis. It is fitting therefore that their remains should be disposed of in this anonymous and secretive manner, "mixed in with the rubble" of a demolished refugee camp. In this way the always media-savy Israelis spare themselves the kind of opprobrium their minions in media, government and education forever heap on the Germans.

Collective punishment: An Israeli tank rolls through the rubble of a Palestinian apartment house in Jenin, April 13, 2002, in the course of Israeli attacks on civilian homes in Jenin, part of the Zionist policy of collective punishment of "Amalek" -- the entire Palestinian nation


April 12

The "Incidental" Palestinians

Palestinians say that the United States has written off Palestinian civilian casualties as incidental: "You foreigners make much of Israeli civilian deaths,' said Bashir Abu Walid, a neighbor of Manal Sofran, a woman who was shot to death by Israeli soldiers April 10. 'Every Israeli death is a big event. But we are just statistics. Because an Israeli soldier does it, it is not terrorism. Why not?"

Manal Sofran, a Palestinian housewife, was shot twice in the head by Israeli soldiers in Ramallah on April 10, while calling her husband Sami and their four children to come in from the garden of their three-story apartment building. She leaned out from the window. She spied five soldiers by a nearby wall, the neighbors recalled, and feared they might shoot at moving objects. 'She was right,' said Tom Kay, one of the neighbors. 'But she was the object, and it was clear the soldiers could see her.' Her last words were 'Oh, Sami,' said grieving relatives who received visitors at a wake today. Israeli soldiers enforce a strict curfew, to the point where a Palestinian mother or child who sticks his or her head out a window risks losing it.

Palestinians cite examples of the kind of attacks Ramallah residents believe exemplify the Israelis wanton killing of civilians--people who were shot the week of April 8---one died in a taxi after delivering a female relative to Ramallah Hospital to give birth. Soldiers shot another in the chest as he stood in front of his home; a third was killed trying to drive relatives out of Ramallah to their home villages; a Palestinian paraplegic in a wheelchair was shot.

Ramallah city hall was ransacked and its second floor burned. Deeds, tax receipts, building permits and other documents important to governing a city disappeared. The possibility that deeds were destroyed is particularly important in an area where successive Israeli governments have confiscated property on the grounds that the owner possessed no documents. 'You will have to kill every one of us,' shouted Umm Khaled Yahya, an old woman in a scarf who shouted at Israeli soldiers for 10 minutes without letup.

Israelis shelter bloodiest battlefield from eyes of media and aid groups

"...countless dead bodies"

"Israeli troops continued their strenuous efforts to prevent independent witnesses entering the bloodiest battlefield.... With Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, arriving in Jerusalem last night the soldiers blocked the United Nations, the Red Cross and the media from entering the 'closed military area' (Jenin)...Some journalists were detained. One had his press card ripped up. Footage filmed by a television cameraman was confiscated. The few pictures that did emerge from the camp showed scenes of devastation. Refugees leaving the northern West Bank city talked of misery, horror and death inside the camp which formerly housed 13,000 residents. They spoke of 'countless dead bodies' and men being executed at close range...An international group representing the UN, the Red Cross and the Norwegian Government, who were given assurances by the Israeli Defense Force that they would be allowed inside the camp, were turned away. Their cars were illegally searched and their cameras confiscated...one member of the group said... 'I asked one commander what exactly it is that they want to hide as I have never known of UN people not being allowed in before.'

"There are still several thousand people inside the camp, with no communication with the outside world....Latest reports from refugees include stories of executions of civilians and bulldozers piling dead bodies into a pit. The city is destroyed, damaged even more than other West Bank cities...In a white villa in Yaomu, a village outside of Jenin, hundreds of refugees have arrived in the past few days, white-faced, tearful, and clutching cheap plastic suitcases. Inside are remnants of their pitiful lives. Most of the residents of Jenin camp are children and grandchildren of those Palestinians who lost their properties after the war of independence and as a result, they know no other way of life than the squalor and poverty of a refugee camp. Now they are refugees once again, this time from the teeming camp that they call home."

--TheTimes (London), April 12, 2002

Israeli Army Brig Gen Ron Kitrey admitted that "hundreds" had been killed in Jenin. --"Breaking News," The Times (London), April 12, 2002 16:08

Israeli Terror in Jenin

Tanks and bulldozers attacked inhabitated homes

Palestinian civilians were used as human shields

"Israel's fiercest assault of its 2-week-old West Bank operation dealt systematic destruction and random death to civilians as well as fighters in this militant Palestinian stronghold (Jenin), according to displaced residents of the camp and relief workers in Jenin...the Israelis fired on unarmed civilians, used them as human shields and obstructed medical workers trying to save the wounded. One camp resident, Ali Ramile, a 40-year-old truck driver, said he watched Israeli soldiers kill seven or eight disarmed Palestinian fighters execution-style and dump several loads of bodies in a mass grave within 100 yards of his home...interviews with more than a dozen Palestinians from the Jenin camp indicated a heavy loss of civilian life there. Nearly everyone interviewed said they had watched neighbors die from Israeli shelling or sniper fire, or at least seen bodies in the street....

"Ten days ago, we hoped someone could do something to save the refugee camp, but now the camp is gone,' said Dr. Ziad Ayaseh, the hospital's director. Israeli missiles took out several water tanks on the roof, threatening the hospital's water supply, he said. The army siege blocked fuel supplies that power the hospital's generator--the only source of electric power. The staff pharmacologist and urologist were slightly wounded by apparently stray army gunfire. A 16-year-old boy was shot dead Thursday on a street in Jenin, half an hour after the army had lifted a curfew to allow the city's residents to move about for the first time in five days, hospital officials say. A 52-year-old woman wounded Monday inside her home in the refugee camp bled to death before relatives could get her to the hospital Thursday, they said. Sameh Abazeineh, an aide to Jenin's mayor, said his 70-year-old neighbor died waving his arms in the air in a futile effort to stop an Israeli bulldozer from destroying his home in the camp. Other residents reported seeing a tank round kill a neighbor who was recharging his cellular phone with his car battery and finding the body of a mentally disabled neighbor who had been shot and run over by a tank. Riad Ghaleb, a 28-year-old produce merchant, said the Israelis targeted his entire camp neighborhood...Helicopter gunships fired on rows of densely packed homes, killing two young boys in their home, he charged. 'After that, I saw five bulldozers and three tanks come in,' said Ghaleb, who walked out of the camp into central Jenin on Thursday. 'Now there are no more houses in my neighborhood. It's all a big highway now.'..

"News agency reporters Thursday (April 11) managed to tour a small corner of the camp, which had been off limits to journalists during eight days of combat. They saw widespread devastation--homes flattened by bulldozers, walls blackened by fire and the streets chewed up by armored vehicles... Roughly one-third of Jenin's 40,000 people lived in cinder-block houses on the refugee camp's narrow streets. The army used bulldozers to knock down homes and clear the way for its tanks...One bulldozer also wreaked destruction in the center of Jenin as it moved behind a tank along Old Castle Street toward the refugee camp. Just before Ahmed and Bassam Fashafsheh's stone home, the street narrowed and the tank couldn't squeeze by. Issam Fashafsheh, a relative, said he watched early this week as the tank fired ...into the house, backed up and moved aside so the bulldozer could advance. The bulldozer knocked in the wall of the living room, killing the middle-aged couple and their 9-year-old son, Samira.

"When Israeli troops entered the camp on foot to search homes for armed militants, they sent captive Palestinian men ahead of them at gunpoint to knock on the doors or break through the walls. The army has acknowledged the practice, saying it discourages armed resistance. Ali Mustafa Sireh, 42, said he was working as such a door-to-door human shield in the refugee camp when, at the 10th house, he was shot in the knee by Israeli snipers who apparently did not see his captors. At that point, he said, the Israelis abandoned him, and it took four days for relatives to get him to the hospital.

"But few experiences capture the terror of the assault like that told by Khadra Samara, 33, whose husband, Hisham, 40, is the Al Razi hospital's cook. She first noticed a tank outside her home at 11 p.m. Sunday (April 7), she said. At 11:30, it knocked down the front gate. 'We screamed and lighted candles to make the Israelis aware that people were in the house,' she said, but the tank kept coming. It fired a missile into the second and third floors, she said, causing a bright flash, shattering the windows and sending all 15 people in the home to the ground floor. The demolition halted until 5 a.m., when the household was awakened by the sound of a bulldozer outside. It slammed into the front of the house, crashing into a large bedroom in which the family had been sleeping, she said. Houses in the camp abut each other, so Samara and her relatives hammered a hole in a side wall and broke in next door, where her sister-in-law's family lives. Less than an hour later, she said, that house came under attack, and 30 people crawled through to the next house in line, which had been abandoned. That refuge stood up until 3 p.m. Monday, when it fell after a three-hour bulldozer assault, she said. 'We moved from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen--wherever we thought was safest,' Samara said. 'The children started vomiting. I phoned the hospital. My husband said to leave the camp immediately. I demanded an ambulance. He said the Israelis won't let one through.' It took them five more hours to talk their way through Israeli checkpoints and reach the hospital, waving white prayer scarves and dodging stun grenades from helicopters that followed them."

--L.A. Times, April 12

Trails of Destruction, Tales of Loss

"There is the Fashafsheh family. According to their relatives, the mother, father and 9-year-old son were killed when an Israeli tank fired a shell through their living room in downtown Jenin and an Israeli bulldozer plowed into the thick walls of their home, smashing it down on top of them. There is Rina Zayyed, 15, who said she was struck in the chest by a bullet as she sat at home with her father and brother. An Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery, she recounted, and a fragment hit her....'There are uncountable numbers of houses that have been destroyed,' said Riad Ghaleb, 28, a produce seller from the camp. 'When you see them, you go crazy. The helicopter fired so many rockets at our neighborhood because three soldiers were killed there in a house near where I live.'

...Shortly after 10 a.m. (April 11) an Israeli tank opened fire with its heavy machine gun on a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, Fares Einad Zaben...The boy was hit in the chest and died...On Old Castle Street, where the Fashafsheh family lived, their corner house, with its walls three feet thick, was a wreck, half of it shorn away and turned to rubble. In the crater that was once the family's living room, the stench of death hung in the air. About 9 a.m. one day last weekend, an Israeli tank fired a shell into the house without warning, according to neighbors. Then an Israeli armored bulldozer pulverized the wall, possibly to clear a passage for the tank to pass. Ahmad Fashafsheh, 50, his wife, Sameera, and their son Hisham were killed. Two other sons, 11 and 13, were hurt. Issam Fashafsheh, a relative who lives across the street, watched the scene. 'I heard the kids screaming, then the bulldozer came and started destroying the house,' he said. 'They were entombed under the wall in their living room where they sat.' Neighbors dug the corpses out of the rubble and covered them with a white sheet...At 2:30 p.m. (April 11), an Israeli armored vehicle drove through town, firing bursts from its heavy machine gun. There was no sound of return fire.

After curfew, perhaps the only functioning institution in Jenin was the little Razi Hospital, just south of the town center. Lacking water and short on diesel fuel to power its generator, the 30-bed hospital struggled to meet basic needs....Two doctors were hit by gunfire in an upstairs room...the family of a 52-year-old Palestinian woman arrived with her corpse. The woman had been shot in the face and chest by helicopter gunships, her family said; they needed a death certificate.

Khadra Samara, 33, the wife of the hospital cook, said she was inside her home on Rawabi Street in the refugee camp about 11:30 Sunday night when an Israeli bulldozer approached and tore through the front gate and began slamming into the house. 'We started screaming and lighting lamps and candles so they'd know someone was inside,' she said. 'We were 15 women and children...But as we screamed, a missile was fired at the house, destroying the second and third floors. The whole house shook, there was a flash of light, and all the windows were blown out...before dawn Monday (April 8) it (the Israeli bulldozer) smashed into the house again, shaking the cinder-block walls of the bedroom where the children were sleeping. 'The top of the wall started to give, and I started grabbing the kids and hauling them away from there,' she said. "They destroyed the house with everything in it'... Samara tried to get out the front door, but found it was blocked by rubble. She handed the children through a side window into a neighbor's house. 'I was so furious I wanted to make a suicide bomb and use it on them,' she said. 'I picked up a cylinder of cooking gas to carry with me so I could blow it up. I was so scared I was screaming. I thought I was going to die. When I picked up the cylinder my daughter said, 'Mom, don't do it! For God's sake don't do it!' The second house provided little respite. An hour after they took refuge there, the bulldozer came again. They fled to a third house; it came under attack from missiles fired by helicopter gunships. From 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. we ran from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, wherever we thought was safest to go."

Washington Post, April 12, 2002


April 11

More than 5,000 Palestinians are interned in Israeli concentration camps as of today

Bethlehem: Franciscan Father David Jaeger, spokesman for the Custodians of the Holy Sites, said that the Israelis have cut off electricity and water to the part of the church controlled by his order. "The situation is dire," he said. "We have been unable to persuade the Israeli government to restore water." The NY Times of April 12 reports: "A day after an Armenian monk was shot, apparently by an Israeli sniper, priests living inside said they were well aware of the danger. When Greek Orthodox monks leave their monastery to enter the church, they must cross an open-air courtyard inside the complex, Father Parthenios said. The younger monks do not allow the eldest one - a slow-moving 82-year-old - to make the journey because they fear he could be shot by Israeli snipers. When the younger monks make the trip, they rush."

Jenin: Peter Hansen, the director of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said in a statement that Israeli tanks and bulldozers had intensified their destruction of houses in the refugee camps here. CBS News reported on its April 11 evening news broadcast that Israelis are concealing the bodies of their Palestinian murder victims by bulldozing them into mass graves in Jenin so they will not be used as part of "Arab propaganda." The Israeli Army denied all such charges. "It was difficult to assess the claims and counterclaims, because Israeli forces were still turning journalists away from Jenin today (April 11)." NY Times, April 12.

Palestinian children in the al-Amari refugee camp react to news of the Israeli massacre of their family, April 11, 2002

Nablus: A five-hour Israeli attack here took place April 11, involving rockets, helicopter cannons and tank shells. As dawn came, the deadly barrage halted and Israeli army loudspeakers announced in Arabic to Palestinian men, "Put your hands up and come out. Otherwise we will kill all your women and children." Palestinian men walked out of the al-Ein refugee camp, obeying Israeli orders to either submit to a round-up or have their families killed. Watched by their children, as the men, aged 16 to 45, were humilated by Israeli troops, their hands in plastic manacles within the sights of tank machineguns. Holding their identity cards, the men waited to be herded into to the makeshift concentration camps established by the Israelis for more than 5,000 Palestinian males, some of whom will be tortured and other shot. As in other West Bank towns and camps, reports of beatings and executions of Palestinian prisoners were widespread, as Palestinian children were forced to drink sewage and piles of Palestinian corpses were seen being cleared by bulldozers. On the other side of the street here in the al-Ein refugee camp, Palestinian wives and mothers screamed that their homes had been devastated and families wiped out by the bombardment. "They hit my house with a rocket and we had ten children inside!" wailed one Palestinian mother.

In the Arab World: Across the Arab world - where TV news footage of Ariel Sharon's unleashing of state terror has been a good deal more graphic than what we have seen on our own screens - millions have demonstrated their fury at what is taking place, while their western-backed rulers have turned their guns on the streets, killing and injuring protesters from Bahrain to Egypt.


April 10

Excerpts from Binyamin Netanyahu's Speech to the US Congress

"...it is only a matter of time before suicide bombers will terrorize your cities."

Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu gives the U.S. Congress their marching orders, Capitol Hill, April 10, 2002

"I am concerned that the State of Israel, that has for decades bravely manned the front lines against terror, is being pressed to back down...unintentional loss of Palestinian life...is the tragic but unavoidable consequence of legitimate warfare. No one, of course, would dare suggest that the United States was the guilty party in World War II because German casualties, which included millions of civilians, were 20 times higher than American casualties. So, too, only a twisted and corrupt logic would paint America and Britain as the aggressors in the current war, because Afghan casualties are reported to have well exceeded the death toll of September 11...what has destabilized the region is not Israeli action...but rather the constant pressure exerted on Israel to show restraint...it is only a matter of time before suicide bombers will terrorize your cities." --Former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, now Sharon's emissary to the US Congress, Capitol Hill, April 10, 2002

"...let Israel finish the job." Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), L.A. Times, April 10, 2002

Jenin: "There is no massacre there (in Jenin)," said Sharon's head liar, Raanan Gissin. "The dead are armed men who were fighting to the death."

"Reports from the (Jenin) camp, home to 15,000 refugees living on less than half a square mile, told of civilians fleeing in panic, of heavy shelling and homes in flames. The dead included civilians and fighters, residents said." L.A. Times, April 10, 2002

The army descended on the camp (Jenin) last Thursday (April 4), bulldozing houses on its perimeters to clear a path for its tanks, and hacking through the walls with sledgehammers to form tunnels for ground troops. 'They came with giant sledgehammers, and they destroyed the walls from one side to the other, said a metal worker who lives in the camp...The soldiers then hauled men out of the captured homes, beat them, bound their hands and blindfolded them, stripped them to their underwear, and shipped them off...They beat my brother - 100 times they hit him with their batons, on his shoulders, his stomach and his back." -The Guardian (U.K.), April 10, 2002. "My mother and brother were shot by helicopter gunships and were bleeding to death and could not be saved." -Abdullah, 26 year old Palestinian witness in Jenin, quoted by The Times of London, April 10, 2002. Omar abu Rashid, a Jenin businessman whose house overlooks the camp from half a mile away, said he saw five bulldozers demolish several hundred of the camp's 2,000 to 2,500 homes."...about 500 Palestinians had been killed in Jenin and in Nablus..." L.A. Times, April 11, 2002.

Today, April 10, Israeli tanks and helicopters shelled, bombed and strafed helpless Palestinian civilians in the Al Ain refugee camp, outside Nablus, destroying homes and killing more than a dozen people thus far. Yet the Jewish supremacist headlines in the media of the West today are: "Bus Bomb Kills Eight Israelis. " It was the same story yesterday, when the deaths of 13 Israeli soldiers made the front page headlines throughout the West, while the killings of scores of Palestinians in Jenin was reported as an after-thought: "...it is difficult to escape the notion that many in the media, Jews and non-Jews alike, lean to the view that Arab life is cheap."--Robert Scheer, columnist, L.A. Times, April 9.

Israelis Raze Historic Casbah in Nablus: From one end of what had been the ancient casbah to the other, the residents of Nablus searched through the rubble that had been their homes and cried for help because one relative or another was buried in it. "I have two aunts still underneath," cried Bashar Fratiekeh, pointing to a pile of rocks. "The whole house collapsed on us. It was 200 years old!" After four days of Israeli bombing and shelling, the casbah, as the centuries-old architectural treasure at the center of Nablus is known, has been utterly destroyed by Israeli barbarians. Palestinian survivors wander dazed through the ruined streets, recounted indiscriminate bombing by helicopter gunships and fighter jets firing volley after volley into the densely packed civilian residences in the casbah. They bombed all the night," said Muhammad Abu Hatham, 52, a shopkeeper. "There were many killed this morning (April 10)." One exoticword was on Palestinian lips. Children, pointing to the collapsed walls of their homes cried: "Apache, Apache!" The Israeli Army had used American-made Apache helicopters furnished by US taxpayers, to fire missiles and automatic weapons into their homes. "They killed my son right in front of my eyes," said Mahmoud Abdel Zallul, pointing to a bloodstained patch of dirt at his feet. "He was a peaceful person."

Palestinian youths sit atop the rubble that was once their house, surveying the destruction wrought by Israeli bombardment of civilian centers in the West Bank city of Nablus, April 11, 2002

The moonscape that is now the casbah is not unique to Nablus. The devastation in civilian areas inflicted by Israeli tanks, bulldozers, helicopters and jet fighters has created an eerie moonscape of ruin from Bethlehem to Jenin. The images are unforgettable: blocks of storefronts smashed by rampaging tanks in Tulkarm, broken pipes gushing precious water, flattened cars in fields of shattered glass, electricity poles snapped like sticks, solitary walls where homes formerly stood, immense holes where Israeli bombs pierced office buildings. April 10, the awesome D-9 Israeli bulldozers attacked Jenin, erasing whole stretches of densely crowded concrete apartment houses. The extent of the latest Jewish spasm of destruction in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus and Jenin is massive and unprecedented. The Gaza airport is laced with deep trenches, the nascent Palestinian seaport is destroyed. "In 1999 we were building new infrastructure, roads, apartments, a seaport, strategic projects," said Muhammad Shtayyeh, the director of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, PECDAR, talking of development that was now gone with Sharon's fiery wind.The infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state - roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines - has been eradicated by the Zionists. The weeping of the Palestinian mothers and children, the piles of corpses of little boys and girls and infants are grim testimony to a calamitous Israeli terror which "terror fighter" Bush funds, and which-- throughout the Easter weekend and up until April 2-- he publicly extolled.

In Bethlehem on April 10, an Israeli sniper shot a monk, Armin Sinanian, 22, at the Church of the Nativity. The Israeli liars told their typical Talmudic lies, accusing Palestinians of gunning him down, but late April 10 Israeli military officials said in a statement that the Israeli sniper may have"accidentally" shot the monk. Finally, on April 11, in the face of mounting evidence, "...a senior Israeli military official said that an Armenian monk who was seriously wounded in the besieged Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem had apparently been shot by an Israeli soldier." (The Guardian, April 11, 2002).

Supremacy breeds segregation: "Israel must establish physical barriers separating the main Palestinian population centers from Israeli towns and cities."-Binyamin Netanyahu, former Israeli prime minister, Jerusalem Post, April 11, 2002. Along with Jewish supremacy comes the imposition of racial segregation in the "only democracy in the Middle East." In Palestinian areas near new "buffer zones," Sharon's plan calls for including dozens of Palestinian hamlets within Israeli areas of control. The communities would be annexed. About 400,000 Palestinians would fall under permanent Israeli jurisdiction. One vulnerable town is Baka Gharbiya, along the border with the West Bank. Palestinians there regard segregation glumly. Even before the current Israeli onslaught starting March 29, the town's streets were virtually empty. Baka Gharbiya is cut off not only from "Israel," but from the rest of the West Bank too, by Israeli ditches and army checkpoints. Israelis have created special entry permits for Palestinians who want to travel there from other parts of the West Bank. Only Jewish settlers pass freely through Baka.

Israelis living close to Palestinians have greeted segregation with enthusiasm. Bat Hefer is an Israeli city of 6,000 residents, near Palestinian Tulkarm. Bat Hefer is a pioneer in racial segregation. Bat Hefer first put up a wall in 1995 to keep Palestinians out. Lately, it extended and raised its wall, upgrading it with electrical wire and video. It is about a mile long. It cost almost $2 million. Nahum Itkovitz, head of the regional Israeli council, claimed credit for building the wall. "I believe separation is the best way to give quiet to Israelis in the middle of the country. It's too easy for Palestinians to come over. We won't need a wall in the fields. We'll need only electric fences and alarms."

Segregation of the Palestinians has a long history. Soon after the 1967 conquest of the Palestinian West Bank, Israeli officials drew up plans to settle Jews on the edge of the West Bank, creating walls between the West Bank and Jordan, to the east, and between the West Bank and Israeli land, to the west. So while leading Jewish activists in America are responsible for court orders ending racial segregation between blacks and whites; and opposing effective immigration controls in America, in the Holy Israeli State, the Master Race enforces segregation with a vigor that would astound even George Wallace. But that can't be racist or hateful, because anything the Master Race does is terrific and to say otherwise is " rabid anti-semitism."

Question: Do Israeli attacks in March and April of 2002 on Palestinian villages, ghettos and camps conform to the definition of war crimes under international law?

Reply: Yes. First and most obviously because these attacks have resulted in the mass murder of non-combatants. Second, because they constitute invasion and occupation of the land of the Palestinians. Thirdly, because they represent collective punishment of the Palestinian people as a whole, rather than a police function of using detection to locate and arrest specific terrorist suspects. International law, codified in the Geneva Convention, severely restricts armies from involving civilian populations in military actions. But the Israeli view is that every Palestinian is "Amalek," a member of the nation which, in the Old Testament, God called on the Israelites to exterminate, "man, woman, and suckling child." The Israeli Army chaplain Shmuel Derlich has openly labeled the Palestinian people as Amalek, as have dozens of other influential Israeli rabbis.

In this context, let us take, by way of illustration, what is happening in Bethlehem. On April 4 Jiha Abu Ajour, a young Arab mother, gave birth to her first child in her home in the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. The newborn had breathing problems, but the Israeli Army refused to allow ambulances to enter the refugee camp. Hours later an ambulance finally came to bring the baby to the hospital, where he died soon after. Later that night, under a curfew and the threat of snipers, relatives of the baby boy sneaked out of the camp to a nearby cemetery to bury him.

When the Israeli Army invaded Bethlehem it placed the entire civilian population under siege. This is tantamount to putting the entire population of Harlem under siege because black terrorists are planting bombs in Manhattan. The world would never tolerate it. But due to the sub-human, "Amalek" status of Palestinians, they can be treated in this manner with impunity, while the world preoccupies itself with moaning over the ghosts of the Nazi "Holocaust."

The people in Dheisheh refugee camp are short of water, food and milk for their children. Those who are fortunate enough to have stashed supplies prior to the Israeli invasion now hunker in crowded rooms away from windows exposed to Israeli gunfire. Those who have no food wait in desperation for Red Cross workers to supply them. Israeli tanks and soldiers raid the streets, and shotThe people in Dheisheh refugee camp are short of water, food and milk for their children. Those who are fortunate enough to have stashed supplies prior to the Israeli invasion now hunker in crowded rooms away from windows exposed to Israeli gunfire. Those who have no food wait in desperation for Red Cross workers to supply them. Israeli tanks and soldiers raid the streets, and shots are fired in all directions. A safe corner in a Palestinian home today can be a deathbed tomorrow. Palestinian civilians cannot step outside for fear of being shot by an Israeli sniper. Human beings are not treated in this manner. Amalek is. Collective punishment of an entire population is not only a racist Jewish war crime, it is insane. A Palestinian Catholic priest interviewed on American TV April 9, said that before the latest Israeli rampage beginning March 29, there were about 15 Palestinian suicide bombers. "After this," he said as he waved his arm over acres of destruction and piles of dead bodies, "there will be 1500."


April 9

"We will continue until we make this camp (Jenin) submit.' -Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Eitan, chief of the Israeli army central command, in a briefing for reporters in Jerusalem, April 9.

Jenin refugee camp used to be a poor but peaceful community of 13,000 on a West Bank hillside overlooking a fertile plain. But five days of relentless bombardment by Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships have left large parts of it in ruins and Palestinians bleeding to death in its alleys for lack of medical care. The army has now seized control of most of the camp and is butchering its residents. Residents who have fled to safe havens outside say decomposing bodies litter its narrow alleys. They spoke of seeing wounded Palestinians moaning for help. The Jewish army is using bulldozers to crush homes, with families still inside them, in Jenin's Al Hawashin neighborhood.

At least 200 Palestinians are reported as having been killed in Jenin alone, but the headline on the front page of today's edition of the New York Times reads, "13 Israeli Soldiers are Killed." Jewish blood is redder and their life is preferable, says leading Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg and the U.S. media concurs. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who affiliates with the Lubavitcher Jewish supremacist hate group, said today that "...Arab responsibilities are to stop what he said was news media incitement of hatred against Jews." (NY Times, April 9, 2002).

The U.S. proxy, Saudi Arabia, on April 9 saved the U.S. from the consequences of its own support for Israeli genocide. Crude oil prices fell almost 3 percent after Saudi Arabia said it would ensure that consuming nations had enough oil to cover any losses caused by a 30-day halt in exports by Iraq. Iraq called the halt to protest the Israeli genocide. The oil boycott hit the genocide-supporters where it hurts, in their pocketbooks, since they have no conscience when it comes to otherwise contentedly watching Palestinian mothers and children shot to death by state terrorists. But the Saudis have rescued Bush and the American economy--temporarily anyway.

April 9, 2002: Israeli troops take a break from their mass murder of Palestinian women and children to mark "Holocaust Remembrance Day" on April 9, with ceremonies around the country for the "Six Million" Jews "killed by the Nazis."

The "Holocaust" is the justification used repeatedly by Jewish spokesmen to justify the killing of Palestinian civilians: "The world stood by while Jews were slaughtered in 'The Holocaust.' Today, the Israelis say they will do whatever it takes to ensure the security of a Jewish state."

The security of the Judaic racial-religious national state is the prime purpose of "Holocaust" propaganda. Nazi war crimes against Jews in the past are the Jewish excuse for Israeli war crimes against Palestinians now. Implicit in this monstrous and homicidal equation is the superiority of Jewish lives over non-Jewish ones, as decreed by the racist rabbis and their hate-filled Talmud, Judaism's holiest book.

Body of Khalid Jarour, 23, a Palestinian killed by Israeli troops in Bethlehem, April 9

The sister of Khalid Jarour holds Khalid's daughter during his burial


April 8

The Bethlehem Church Fire and the Talmudic Injunction to Lie

Smoke billows from the left side of the Church of the Nativity complex in Bethlehem, April 8. Israelis opened fire on the sacred site, causing the blaze

Objective observers of the Israeli scene have long noted the distinct Israeli penchant for lying, the more outrageous the better. This heritage of lies is, sad to say, of religious origin. The Talmud, Judaism's holiest book, decrees: "Jews may use lies ('subterfuge') to circumvent a Gentile" (Baba Kamma 113a).

We observe this institutionalized lying in a disturbing case in Bethlehem April 8 where Israeli soldiers started a blaze in the Basilica of St Catherine, adjacent to the Church of the Nativity. Israelis lie and say their "troops are under orders not to fire at holy places" such as the Church of the Nativity, which is revered as the birthplace of Jesus Christ. Palestinians fleeing shoot-on-sight Israeli tanks and snipers have found haven in the church complex for nearly a week, along with a group of monks and nuns.

To explain the fire, this is the grostesque cover story Jewish propagandists are distributing to the media: "Palestinian gunmen provoked a fire which broke out near the Church of the Nativity on Monday (April 8). Gunmen opened fire from a belltower, wounding two Israeli border policemen in a nearby rooftop look-out, an army officer told Reuters news agency. He said the Israelis returned fire and a smoke grenade started the blaze in a second-floor meeting hall overlooking the Basilica of St Catherine, adjacent to the Church of the Nativity. One Palestinian gunman was shot dead in the battle. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said today that his soldiers would not 'defile the holiness of the site."

Now, here is the truth: Israeli soldiers tried to storm the building by a roof, opening fire and throwing stun grenades into the church compound. That ignited a fire in the church. So it was Israeli soldiers who started the fire. The Franciscan pastor inside the church, Father Amjad Sabbara, told the BBC that the Palestinian man killed by the Israelis was not shooting at them but had been trying to douse the flames. The Israeli soldiers killed him because he was trying to extinguish the flames and save the church. After the Palestinian was murdered, the blaze burned for an hour before Israeli forces allowed firefighters access to extinguish it, destroying altar cloths and ceremonial cups and damaging mosaics inside the Basilica of St Catherine. The exterior of the Church of the Nativity has been scarred by Israeli gunfire. A spokesman for Catholic monks in the Holy Land testified that Israeli soldiers were guilty of an "indescribable act of barbarity." Israelis had broken their international obligations and risked "long-term and incalculable" consequences, Father David Jaeger said. Christian clerics from Jerusalem were prevented by Israelis from entering Bethlehem on April 8 to investigate.

The Israeli liars however, received an important buttress for their tale. The NY Times, in its April 9 edition, in an article by Joel Brinkley, upheld the Israeli army's propaganda lies about what happened in Bethlehem April 8. Brinkley wrote: "In Bethlehem, Israeli troops exchanged fire on Monday with Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity, said to be the birthplace of Jesus, scarring the exterior of the ancient building." Brinkley made absolutely no mention of what Christian clerics at the scene had said about the attack, but relied solely on the Jewish government's "version" of events in Bethlehem. Thus, in the "newspaper of record," which is a bastion of perpetual publication of "Nazi Holocaust" fare, the Israeli sacrilege against the Bethlehem church will look like a measured response to provocative gunfire from Palestinians inside the church. If this had been a revered synagogue that had come under fire from an Arab army, then the attack would enter the universal human rights calendar of eternal mourning and commemoration, and the N.Y. Times would give it front page attention, along with hand-wringing rhetoric about the "rising tide of anti-semitic violence." The rising tide of Israeli anti-Christian violence is, of course, not an issue for the Zionist-owned "newspaper of record."

Another example of Jewish lying is in the realm of human shields. The Israelis grab Palestinians and hide behind them as they raid Palestinian areas. Palestinian Kamal Taleb testified that on April 6 Israeli soldiers ordered residents at gunpoint to walk in front of Jewish troops as the soldiers raided homes. A neighbor also testified that they were ordered to enter several homes to shield the soldiers from gunfire or booby traps. The Israeli army lamely denies that their soldiers use Palestinians as human shields. Here is the transparent lie they tell: The Israeli army acknowledges they have "on occasion ordered Palestinians to 'guide' them in their searches. Sometimes they take them to bring them to the next house, not to shield them," the Jewish army spokesman said. "Guide them." Ha! What liars, just like their father (John 8:44).

Yossi Kelin Halevi, a columnist for the L.A. Times wrote on April 8: " ...mainline churches continue to ignore Israeli fears and offer simplistic judgments..It is time for mainline churches to reconsider their anti-Israel bias, which undermines the credibility of Jewish proponents of dialogue and jeopardizes our historic reconciliation...in their obsessive attacks on Israel, some churches are inadvertently reawakening old anti-Semitic instincts that, since the Holocaust, much of Christianity has tried to uproot. For example, an Episcopalian church in Scotland, seeking to express solidarity with the Palestinians, has just unveiled a painting showing a crucified Jesus flanked by Roman and Israeli soldiers."

Medical workers examine the bodies of four Palestinians who were slaughtered by Israeli soldiers in Nablus, April 8, 2002

Israeli soldiers in Palestinian territories can operate with impunity. There's no accountability. There's no investigation. - Jessica Montell, executive director of the human rights group B'Tselem, quoted in the Washington Post, April 8, p. A10.

Jenin refugee camp heavily bombed: Israeli forces have demolished Palestinian homes in densely populated Jenin, including several with families still inside them. Palestinian civilians who spoke by telephone reported U.S. made Apache attack helicopters continuously hovering overhead. "Since 7 a.m., I have been counting about 40 rockets being shot on refugee camps," said Najeh Jarrar, a college professor who was cowering with his wife and childin their home. "We don't know where the bullets will fall."


Media Watch

Feigned Ignorance: Mathews and Fleishcer

Chris Mathews, host of TV's "Hardball," feigning ignorance, asked the following question, April 7, of his Palestinian guest: "Has there ever been any civilian who was ever deliberately killed by the Israeli Army?"

Mathews' ludicrous "amnesia" is reminiscent of an exchange during a White House Press Briefing with Ari Fleischer on April 3, 2002. Reporter Russell Mokhiber's question to Fleischer : The other day, when you were asked why you don't condemn Israeli killing of innocent Palestinians -- as terrorism, why the President doesn't condemn it as terrorism -- you (Fleischer) said, "Well when a Palestinian blows himself up in a cafeteria, he's intending to kill innocents. But as for Israel, there are times when in military operations, innocent lives are lost."

A number of human rights groups, including B'Teselem, have documented how Israel targets Palestinian civilians. Most recently, a 21-year Palestinian American, Suraida Saleh, on Friday (March 29), was shot down (dead) in Ramallah. She was a passenger in a car. Her husband was driving. Her husband is a journalist. A group of Israeli undercover agents... they're called Mustarabeem -- were at the intersection, and just opened fire on the car. If that fact pattern is correct, why doesn't the President condemn that as terrorism?

American Mother Shot Dead By Israeli Soldiers


April 7

Israeli forces pounded the Palestinian cities of Nablus and Jenin today. Tank shelling and helicopter missile attacks on Palestinian civlians in the refugee camp in Jenin also continued today for the fifth straight day:

"You see them as you come down the last mountain before the city of Jenin, a swarm of Apache helicopters hanging low over the city. Then you hear it: the dull intermittent roar of the Apaches' heavy machine guns firing directly into the houses of Jenin camp. Israeli commanders have said that there has been substantial loss of life on the 'other side'... An hour or so earlier we had been stopped on another route into the city by Israeli soldiers preparing to go and fight at Jenin camp. They told us they had come from fighting in the city of Tulkaram and had been at the Qabatiya junction, close to the city, fighting for the past two days. We ask a young Israeli soldier why is he fighting here, on Palestinian land. He thinks for a moment. 'The problem,' he says, 'is that there is not enough room in this small country for two peoples. It is a trial of strength that we are winning."

Columnist Can't Empathize with Palestinian Victims Because His Great-Grandmother was Killed by the Nazis: "As a self-proclaimed humanist, I ought to recoil in horror from the thought of tanks rumbling through a city, anybody's city. My head should hang in sorrow at televised images of street fighting in Bethlehem and Ramallah. When an army fights in heavily populated quarters, no matter how just its cause, the guilty and the innocent die side by side. Yet for me, when it comes to the confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians, such considerations are outweighed by one simple historical fact. My great-grandmother was murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp." -Ron Grossman, staff writer, Chicago Tribune, April 7, 2002


April 6

"Wanton destruction" inflicted on Palestinian Population

War Crimes in Jenin

" ...opinion polls showed 72% of Israelis supported a 'wide-scale war' in the West Bank."--The Guardian, (U.K.) April 6, 2002

Pathologists examine the body of a six-year-old Palestinian girl, Somaeah Hassan, who was killed by Israeli soldiers in the Rafah refugee camp, in the Gaza ghetto, April 6, 2002. Israeli soldiers pummeled the refugee camp, killing this six-year-old Palestinian child, a 21-year-old civilian and wounding six others, including four Palestinian schoolgirls.

Palestinian mourners carry the body of 13-year old Palestinian Rubin Achtour, April 6, 2002 in the Al-Fawar refugee camp south of the town of Hebron. The boy was killed by the Israeli army during an assault on his refugee camp

Israeli assaults on Palestinian civilians today, in densely populated refugee camps in the West Bank have resulted in "heavy loss of life in the northern town of Jenin." Residents of the Jenin refugee camp said a "massacre" was taking place today, April 6. The bodies of at least 30 Palestinian civilians have been found thus far in Jenin alone.

Al Razi hospital, just outside the Jenin camp, Dr. Ziad Ayaseh said hundreds of phone calls had come in saying there were dead and wounded lying on the street. The hospital also got a call from a woman giving birth and asking for help. But the staff could do nothing and the baby died. A wounded man, shot in the hand and stomach was brought to the hospital, he said, and dropped about four yards from the front door. But Israeli soldiers in a tank parked nearby would not let them bring the man inside, and after several hours he bled to death, Dr. Ayaseh said in a telephone interview.

Officials from the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees stated that the agency's staff are reporting "wanton destruction" of Palestinian infrastructure across the West Bank, including roads, water pipes and the electricity supply. There have also been reports of looting by Israeli soldiers carrying out house to house assaults.

The United Nations children's agency Unicef says it has been unable to deliver crucial aid to the Palestinian communities in the West Bank over the past five days. A representative of Save the Children in the West Bank says one of the major problems is that the humanitarian efforts are hampered by Israeli soldiers. "... there is no respect for the humanitarian missions," Marie-Louise Weighill said from the West Bank. "The Israeli Defense Forces are not allowing any humanitarian agencies to operate in areas under their control."

Adam Shapiro, a US citizen in Ramallah testified: "I've seen tanks roll straight over cars and destroy walls for no apparent reason. Many homes and building are shot through with bullet and shell holes," he said. The Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, says, "We do have confirmed reports of a private hospital being shelled," B'Tselem spokesman Leore Yavne said.

A priest in Bethlehem says his church and others all over Bethlehem are being used as sanctuaries by local families fleeing Israeli tanks and soldiers. Father Magdi Siryani said his own Church of Our Lady Fatima was housing about 25 people. "Dozens and dozens of churches are full of people who just fled this terror," said Father Siryani. "People are terrorized, they are panicking outside. The only place to go, the last resort, is the churches."

In Nablus, as a journalist's car passed by on the empty streets, a woman cried through the bars of her apartment window, "I have a six-month old baby with asthma. I don't know what to do."


April 5

Palestinian doctors in a hospital in Hebron, treat eight-year-old Palestinian Ahmed Srayer, who was severely burned in an attack by an Israeli helicopter gunship, April 5, 2002

An Israeli army stun grenade explodes next to a TV cameraman attempting to report events in Ramallah, April 5, 2002

At least 36 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army today in the cities of Nablus, Tubas and Jenin. Most were killed as Israeli tanks and U.S. made Apache helicopter gunships shelled and rocketed the refugee camps and the casbah. At least three Palestinian women and two Palestinian children are known to be among the dead.

The deadliest Israeli attacks April 5 were in Nablus and Jenin. Apache attack helicopters launched rocket attacks repeatedly on downtown Nablus. The Jewish onslaught increased in the evening and continued for most of the night. Houses in the casbah and in the teeming Balata refugee camp were sprayed with heavy machine-gun fire by the Israeli army.

Israeli troops in armored personnel carriers assaulted the home of the mayor of Nablus, Ghassan Shaka, around 3 a.m. April 5. They strip-searched eight men and three women present before taking the men away blindfolded. The mayor was in Jordan at the time, but his family was home. Jewish soldiers ransacked the house."They were yelling: 'Get out! Get out! Don't wear any clothes,' " the mayor's wife, Halimeh, said in an interview, her hands still shaking hours after the incident. "They were kicking us in our backs. They made us kneel down on the ground with our faces to the wall and our hands behind our heads, and they kicked us."

US envoy Anthony Zinni met Yasser Arafat in Arafat's office, now reduced by the Israelis to barbed wire-ringed mounds of rubble. Israeli roops threw stun grenades, fired rubber bullets and rammed the vehicles of journalists trying to report Zinni's arrival. The journalists were forced to flee. Ranaan Gissin, Sharon's spokesman, said Israelis wanted little attention drawn to the event.

In Bethlehem today, reporters tried to get to Bethlehem's Manger Square, where Palestinians have sought sanctuary in the Church of the Nativity. Several hundred yards from the square, Israeli troops opened fire on the reporters, hitting a television cameraman from France in the leg. "If you don't like it, we don't care," said Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli army spokesman. Jewish attacks on reporters are nothing new. Last month Italian reporter Raffaele Ciriello, 42, killed in Ramallah by machine-gun fire from an Israeli tank.

Israeli reporters generally maintain a cooperative relationship with army censors in order to improve Zionism's image worldwide. In March, Israeli Channel 2 was allowed to accompany the army on a raid in a Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem. The footage was recorded as part of an arrangement with top military officers by which the Israeli army's public relations office would, prior to broadscast, censor images it found offensive. Instead, Channel 2 broadcast the images uncensored. Israeli troops were shown using explosives to blow down the door to a family's house, fatally wounding a young Palestinian mother. She died in front of her husband and small children. At one point in the filming, an Israeli soldier turned to the camera and stated, "I don't know what we're doing here. Purification, maybe -- apparently it's dirty here."

The human rights group B'Tselem today charged the Israeli army with the torture of Palestinians at the Ofer concentration camp near Ramallah. One Palestinian released from Ofer, Kamal abu Khadijeh, who works for Coca-Cola in Ramallah, testified that detainees who are Palestinian policemen are tortured the most by the Israelis. Khadijeh was grabbed from his home by soldiers March 30, handcuffed, blindfolded and interned in the Israeli concentration camp at Ofer.

Torture of Palestinians by Israelis has a shameful and savage history. In September of 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that torture of Palestinians was permissible "in emergencies in which civilian lives are at stake."

On the medical front, in Ramallah city alone, Israeli troops have invaded Palestinian hospitals three times, ransacking operating rooms and medical supplies. The International Committee of the Red Cross announced April 5 that it was reducing operations in Palestine to "a strict minimum" after Red Cross staff and medics were attacked by Jewish soldiers. Red Cross staff were threatened at gunpoint by Israelis in Bethlehem and shot at in Nablus and Ramallah by the Israeli army. Ambulances were crushed by Israeli tanks in Tulkarm. The Red Cross leadership issued the following statement: "This behavior is totally unacceptable, for it jeopardizes not only the lifesaving work of emergency medical services, but also the ICRC's humanitarian mission."


April 4

"More than 1,000 prisoners have now been taken away by the Israelis and except for a dozen or so, no one knows where they have been taken or if they are alive." The Independent (U.K.), April 4, 2002

Israelis Inflict Hell on the Civilian Populations of Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem

In Ramallah, whose population has been under Israeli tanks and guns for a week, the water is running out because the electric system that drives the pumps is destroyed. In a third of the town, the electricity itself is out. Ali Hamouda, director of the local electricity district, said, "There are no less than five or six electricity poles damaged every day by Israeli tanks." Rita Giacammen, a public health worker, said an emergency Palestinian utilities crew went out April 4 to try and repair Ramallah's water pump system, but were harassed by Israeli troops and turned back. They tried a second time and were bound and gagged and taken away by the Israeli army.

Nearly every car that was parked on the street when the Israelis blitzkrieged into Ramallah early on March 29 has been run over by a tank and flattened. Buildings that used to house Palestinian institutions in this city of 160,000 are now wrecked.

All of the stores are closed and shuttered. Food is running out. Salwa Daibis said she won't try to go to the store even if the curfew is lifted again, as it was for a few hours April 2, because, she said, she saw a 14-year-old Palestinian teenager shot by an Israeli soldier April 2. She said, "I don't want to die for a piece of bread."

The censorship the Israelis have imposed on journalists makes it difficult to report the collective punishment of an entire population. The Jews have declared Ramallah a closed military zone, meaning reporters are banned. A new list of media-ban zones issued by the Jewish government includes every city and town the Israeli army has invaded since March 29.

"What we see is destruction all over," Dr. Jiha Mashal said. Dr. Mashal's own family was kept with three other families, totaling 24 people, in a small basement apartment for five days. On April 4, 230,000 Palestinians are without water.

The Israeli army assaulted Nablus, April 4, 2002, with the Palestinian population of the crowded city coming under withering artillery and helicopter attack. Three refugee camps were bombarded using more than 100 tanks in an attack that lasted all day. Palestinian residents reported that buildings around them exploded in a cascade of shrapnel as Israeli helicopter gunships provided by the United States fired at homes.

The Israelis have been targeting the facilities that support the basic needs of the Palestinians since the latest invasion began March 29. April 4 was no different, with the Israeli army destroying the Nablus city water tanks with machine-gun fire. Medical workers are also targets. In Bethlehem, doctors resorted to sneaking wounded Palestinians under piles of the dead because ambulances were being stopped or their movements restricted by the Israelis. In Nablus, Doctors said that one Palestinian medic was forced to hide under his ambulance for hours when he came under fire from Israeli soldiers, who have sealed off Nablus. At the city's's hospital, Dr. Husam Al-Johari, said: "Ambulances are not reaching the injured so the injured are not reaching the hospital."

One of the town's obstetricians, Dr. Salwa Najjab, has had to deliver babies over the telephone because she and her patients are not allowed to travel by the Israeli military. "It is very difficult to travel around," she said. "I haven't been able to reach my clinic since last Friday. I have been told they (Jews) have destroyed the doors but I don't know what has happened to the files."

She said that one expectant mother encountered more problems when sent to the Red Crescent Maternity Hospital in El Bireh, only to discover Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinian doctors and nurses. Hospital staff said that the soldiers kidnapped two doctors, two nurses and a medic, who were handcuffed and blindfolded. "They went into the surgery room, the delivery room and even the intensive care unit for premature births," Dr Nader Ayesh said. "Hospital doors were knocked down with heavy sledgehammers."

In Jenin, Samer al Ahmad, a resident, said: "They (the Israelis) have been shelling since this morning. The Apaches (U.S. helicopter gunships) have been shooting and shelling. Most of the action is against the (refugee) camps. There is fire and smoke coming out of them..." TV camermen are not allowed to film in Palestinian cities under attack and reporters who attempt to photograph the latest Israeli holocaust against the Palestinians have had grenades thrown at them.

In Bethlehem, Greek Orthodox priests have stayed by their own free will in the Church of the Nativity, the church on Manger Square. The priests were providing humanitatian care to nine wounded Palestinians and sharing supplies of coffee and snacks with the Palestinians, a priest said in a telephone interview.

"They are agitated and nervous, but they respect us very much," said a young priest from Canada, who called himself Father Parthenius. "The Christians among the Palestinians are joining us in prayer. There is shooting outside. We heard two tank shells fired today."

Israelis say the Palestinians are abusing the churches by seeking sanctuary. The priests in the Church of the Nativity don't regard themselves as hostages. They say they are complying with the ancient custom of furnishing sanctuary. "We'll never ask them (Palestinians) to leave," the priest said of the Palestinians. "To make war is easy. In order to make peace, we must all pray together."

The priests said they were more concerned about the long-suffering Palestinian people of Bethlehem than about the fate of the church buildings. "The dignity of human beings is more important than the historical center," commented Father Maron Laham, rector of the Catholic seminary in Bethlehem.

A Palestinian Christian, Samir Ibrahim, who had been the bell ringer at the Church of the Nativity for three decades, was shot to death by Israeli soldiers early in the morning of April 4 while walking to the Church.

Two Palestinians bled to death April 3 in the Fawagrah neighborhood, because ambulances couldn't reach them through streets filled with Israeli sniper fire. As a little girl watched, Palestinian Abdel Kader's agony ended on the kitchen floor of a family whose members were strangers to him.

Kader was wounded by Israeli troops in the street during the Israeli onslaught April 2. The family of Fatheyeh Mousa, carried Kader into its ground-floor apartment, a poor hovel in a small courtyard. "He was from a refugee camp in Jordan," said Issam Isis, sitting next to the deceased. "He was here visiting relatitions. Her family tried to tend to Kader with the help of instructions from doctors at the hospital, which is just a few minutes away.

"He has been bleeding here since the morning," Mousa said. "Today he told us, 'I'm dying, I'm going to die soon.' He kept bleeding from a hole in his waist. We tried to find any kind of medicine to help him. We don't know who he is, but we feel as if he was family. We feel as if we have lost a loved one."

Mousa let loose a tirade of curses against Israelis. Her home and the adjoining courtyard reverberated with the wails of enraged Palestinian women, some of whom also shouted anti-American sentiments.


An Israeli cop beats a human rights activist, part of a contingent who tried to to deliver food and medical supplies to besieged Palestinian civilians in Ramallah, April 3


April 3

"...President (Bush) has made clear that he regards the Israeli operation in the West Bank as broadly justified..." N.Y. Times, April 3, 2002

A Palestinian survivor, Sami Abda, sits next to the bodies of his brother Jacoub, 37, and his mother Sumaya, 64, after they were shot to death in their Bethlehem home by Israeli soldiers, April 2, 2002

In Bethlehem in the Church of the Nativity, April 3, Israeli forces blocked attempts to deliver food and medicine to the church, where about 200 people - among them several priests, nuns and Palestinian civilians and policemen - were trapped. Ten of those inside have been wounded, including one in critical condition. Israeli tanks are stationed at the edge of Manger Square, where the church is located, and Israeli troops occupy the municipality building overlooking the square.

Jews gas Arab civilians and medics, Ramallah, April 3, 2002

The United Nations said a convoy bringing food to the besieged city of Ramallah on April 3 was shot at by Israeli marauders. A U.N. staff member accompanying the humanitarian aid trucks was arrested. A U.N. spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said that the agency organizing the food deliveries, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, planned to protest the shootings and the arrest.

April 3, 2002: The body of Hamzeh Abu Ramoz is carried by family members and villagers in the Palestinian town of Hebron. Ramoz was shot and killed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers, April 2.

On April 3 in Jenin, a Palestinian man and woman and a 13-year-old boy were killed by the Israeli army.


April 2

A Palestinian girl reacts to the news that the Jews murdered her father; Ramallah, April 2, 2002

The Israeli Army attacked the area around Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity on April 2. US-made Israeli helicopter gunships, backed by F-16 fighter jets, hovered over Manger Square machine-gunning Palestinians near Jesus' traditional birth site. Some ten Palestinians were killed in the onslaught, including an 80-year-old man. At the nearby Santa Maria Convent in downtown Bethlehem run by the Salesians, an order of nuns, a Palestinian mother and her son were also killed: 64-year-old Samieh Abdeh and her 38-year-old son Khaled, were wounded by Israeli fire, then bled to death after Israelis prevented ambulances from reaching them. A reporter for al-Jazeera satellite television, Majdi Benoura, was shot in the neck by Israelis as he was photographing the Israeli assault on Bethlehem from the roof of a hotel.

Israeli forces have invaded Bethlehem, which has a population of 150,000 Palestinian civilians, several times in the past 18 months. During an Israeli assault in October, 2001 the Church of the Nativity was hit by bullets. Holy Family Church in Bethlehem has also been shelled by the Israelis, as recently as March 15, 2002.

In an April 2 appeal to President Bush, the pastors of all the Christian churches in Jerusalem asked him to "stop immediately the inhuman tragedy" taking place as a result of the latest Israeli rampage in the West Bank town of Bethlehem. About 100 priests and Franciscan brothers also marched from Jerusalem's walled Old City to the official residence of Ariel Sharon, demanding an end to the Israeli attacks on Bethlehem.

In Ramallah,Widad Sufran, a a 56-year-old hard-of-hearing Palestinian grandmother had gone to the hospital in the morning to have a cast removed from her leg. That done, she began to hobble home on her cane. An Israeli sniper from a nearby building shot her down about 50 yards from the hospital's entrance, according to doctors who witnessed the shooting, including Dr. Hosni Atari. The ambulance crew that tried to reach her was also shot at by the Israelis. Israeli soldiers prevented medics from treating her and she died.

Medical workers also found the bodies of two Palestinian males summarily executed by the Israeli army as part of the army's "selection process," Ayoub Musallam, 40, and Mohammed Mahroum, 32. In the Gaza ghetto, gunfire from an Israeli guard tower killed a 13-year-old Palestinian boy near Rafah.

The Israeli government on April 2 banned journalists Leileh Odeh and Bassam Azawi of Abu Dhabi Television news from reporting any longer in Palestine, after the pair broadcast a report on March 31 investigating the summary execution of a group of young Palestinian men in Ramallah by the Israeli army. The Israelis charged that the TV reporters had showed "utter disregard" for Israeli military censorship rules.

The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists on April 2 criticized Palestinian reporters for their graphic coverage of Israeli marauders and Israeli atrocities against civilians. The group demanded that the Palestinian media tone down its reporting to conform to the wounded sensibilities of the Israelis, who are known to be extremely sensitive concerning reporting of Israeli army war crimes, even as Zionists worldwide lobby for ever more intensive and graphic coverage of more than half century old "Nazi war crimes."

April 2, 2002: Relatives mourn for one of the dozens of Palestinian males summarily executed by Israeli forces as part of the Jewish army's "selection" process in Ramallah

In the northern Palestinian ghetto of Tulkarm, Israeli soldiers ordered terrified residents to stay indoors or be shot. As in Ramallah, the Israeli army in Tulkarm and Kalkilya was rounding up young men for "selection"--some to be interned, others summarily shot. Israeli troops shot dead a man aged 42 who had been "selected" near Bala'a, north of Tulkarm. Two Palestinian civilians were also killed near Tulkarm, by Israeli "settlers," also on April 2.

Victims of low-intensity genocide are buried: Relatives and medics inter the bodies of 21 Palestinians in mass graves, in Ramallah, April 2. The twenty-one represent a fraction of those Palestinians massacred by the Israeli army since March 29.

Israeli helicopters bombed and Israeli tanks shelled the headquarters of Palestinian Preventive Security outside Ramallah early April 2, engulfing it in flames and killing many of the Palestinians inside. By daybreak, the flames had ebbed, leaving two of the buildings in the compound smoldering, blackened wrecks, one with a shattered roof. Holes were visible in the walls of several other buildings in the compound. Eyewitnesses said Israeli soldiers used 60 Palestinian civilians as human shields in front of the tanks before the attack. The Israeli army banned reporters from the scene.

In the center of Ramallah, Israeli soldiers used vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft guns to pulverize the facades of buildings packed with residents. Israeli soldiers broke down the doors of homes in Ramallah and Qalqilya, Palestinians said. In the West Bank, the army moved in force late on April 1 night into the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Tulkarm with dozens of tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored bulldozers backed by infantry. Residents are running out of food and water.

An 11-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by gunfire from Israeli soldiers as he played near a market in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian hospital officials said. In Ramallah, nearly all the dead over the course of the incursion -- at least 25, by Palestinian count -- have been men in their 20s and 30s. At Ramallah Hospital, the city's main medical center, doctors pulled open the metal doors of the morgue to display bloodied bodies of young Palestinian males, wrapped in sheets, and said they had not been allowed to transport them out for burial.


April 1

Israeli Troops Shoot at Human Rights Activists and TV Cameramen

Australian woman is prepared for surgery after being shot by Israeli soldier

BEIT JALA, West Bank (Compiled from Wire Services, April 1, 2002) - Seven foreign peace activists and a television cameraman were wounded Monday when an Israeli soldier fired at the ground in front of them, officials and witnesses said. About 100 demonstrators, Palestinian and foreign, were marching through the center of the West Bank town of Beit Jala behind a sign saying ``We want peace not war,'' witnesses said.

As they approached an Israeli armored personnel carrier, a soldier in the carrier fired several shots at them. Medical officials said a Palestinian and seven foreigners were hurt. They included two Americans, two Britons, and one each from Australia, Japan and France. The Palestinian, who was wounded in the leg, was a cameraman covering the march for the Associated Press, colleagues said.

An Israeli soldier also kicked and pushed a Reuters cameraman and fired one shot over his head while the cameraman was covering the demonstration.

The director of Beit Jala hospital, Peter Qumri, said one woman from Austrlia was undergoing surgery to remove a bullet wound from her abdomen and was in a satisfactory condition. The Australian woman was hit in the abdoment, along with six others.

A witness from Beit Jala, who gave his name only as Fouad, said: ``We were just marching in front of the tank and far away from our position they began to shoot live ammunition on the international (demonstrators). "The marchers raised their hands in a peaceful way and they started shooting immediately,'' he said. "Six or seven people were brought to the hospital.''

Groups of foreign peace activists are in the West Bank to show solidarity with Palestinians after Israeli forces sent troops and tanks Friday to besiege Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's headquarters in the city of Ramallah. The army said earlier Monday that troops had stopped 50 foreigners, mostly Italians, from entering Ramallah, where they had planned to join others who reached Arafat's office Sunday.

The group, calling itself Grassroots International Protection for the Palestinian People, wants to shield Arafat from Israeli troops who have taken over most of his compound. Israeli police said the army had handed over 10 French human rights activists to their custody pending their expulsion from Israeli territority.


March 31

Easter Sunday Onslaught

by Michael A. Hoffman II

It is difficult to experience Resurrection Sunday with any kind of joy or sit down to the traditional repast with any kind of relish when, as I write these words, Palestinian males are being summarily executed all over Ramallah by the Israeli army.

Many words will be written about this low intensity genocide but they are all futile if they fail to go to the root of the crisis -- the religion of Judaism's institutionalized, racist contempt for gentiles as documented in this reporter's book, Judaism's Strange Gods.

Also, today a bombshell was dropped in England by Lord Ian Gilmour, Britain's former Secretary of State for Defense. Writing in today's (March 31) edition of The Observer, Lord Gilmour stated, "Ariel Sharon has never wanted peace with the Palestinians and never will - he only wants their surrender and expulsion."

How true! And how seldom is this horrible truth articulated by any official interviewed in the US media, especially on television. Gilmour might have tacked on one final addendum: Sharon does not want peace, he seeks Palestinian surrender, expulsion AND extermination.

This extermination is what Bush, the US Senate and pundits applaud, the de facto extermination of Palestinians by low intensity-- but weekly-- murders. This holocaust of Palestinians can be applauded by those who have sat through hundreds of hours of "Holocaust" movies and "Holocaust" classroom studies because Palestinians are viewed through a Talmudic lens, as sub-humans. They're not Jews, so genocide against them simply doesn't register.

You may read Lord Gilmour's incisive article, "Let there be justice for all, Mr Bush" at: http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,676774,00.html

Here now follows my own summary of news about the absolutely horrible butchery in Palestine. My dispatches include information obtained in phone calls directly to witnesses on the ground in Palestine.

Palestinian official Gibriel Rjoub said that Israeli soldiers in Ramallah executed thirty Palestinian men on Easter Sunday, March 31. Eyewitnesses say that mass killing by Jews is taking place in various parts of the city. Bahij Abdullah, 61, owner of a Ramallah hardware store, said: "They (Israelis) are shooting at everything that moves."

Some will be interned, others summarily executed

Collective punishment of the whole population: Palestinian males, hands tied behind their backs, under Israeli guns, March 31, 2002. Some will be shot, other interned and tortured.

Grim Selection Process

During this operation, Palestinian males have been divided into two groups by the Israeli army: one group is selected to be interned and another group of males is selected to be shot. Nidal Abdullah, 17, was one of those detained by the Israeli army. "They called everybody out of the houses," he said. "Any male from age of 16 to 45. Then they sat us all down in a field." The group was split up, and some 150 were held overnight. During his internment, the youth said, "sometimes they would call a person outside and hit him a little, smack him around...slap him in the face."

Dead Palestinian civilian is carried away from lineup after being summarily shot by Israeli soldiers, March 31, 2002. Other Palestinians awaiting selection huddle against the wall.

Al Nazer hospital in Ramallah, a maternity hospital, is under Israeli fire. Many wounded around the hospital. Medical workers are denied access to the wounded.

Zionists Killers Must Operate in Secret: City of Ramallah Declared "Closed Military Zone"

The Israeli army announced March 31 it will forcibly remove European human rights activists and news reporters from the Palestinian city of Ramallah. The Jewish army has declared the Palestinian city of Ramallah "a closed military zone" in the hope that their soldiers can slaughter the population without undue publicity.

The Israeli army has taken over the Ramallah offices of foreign news organizations, including Reuters, expelling the journalists. The Israeli killers have a lot to hide and the ban on the media is necessary before completely unrestrained Jewish butchery can be implemented against Palestinian civilians.

Israeli soldier prevents TV news crew from entering Ramallah, April 1, 2002

The Foreign Press Association (FPA) protested against the Israeli army's command. "The media must be allowed to cover this major story. We call upon the Israeli government to allow free and independent coverage of the operation in Palestinian Authority areas,'' the FPA said in a statement. At least two journalists, including Anthony Shadid of the Boston Globe and Carlos Handal of Abu Dhabi TV, have been shot by Israeli soldiers in Ramallah since March 29. Shadid was shot in the shoulder March 31. Handal was shot in the face March 29.

Two Palestinian men have been assassinated by Israelis in the village of Saida in the West Bank.

Israeli forces invaded the Palestinian town of Beit Jala. Heavy shelling and firing is reported in this predominantly Christian town. Muslims and Christians have jointly gone to the streets fighting the advancing Israeli tanks.

The town of Bethlehem is also under fire as Israeli troops are attacking it from two directions. On every corner of Ramallah Israeli tanks are positioned. The devastation that these tanks have wrought inside the Palestinians' most attractive city has to be seen to be believed. Roads have been dynamited or torn up by tanks. Buildings are burned and shattered. Everywhere there is rubble, spent ammunition and broken glass.

Hossam Sharkawi and Mohamed Awad, two senior officials in the Palestinian Red Cross reported Israelis had arrested five medics and ambulance drivers. "They have them blindfolded and handcuffed. I cannot understand what the Israelis are thinking. They also used one of our ambulances today as a human shield. They sandwiched it inside a convoy." Israeli troops also forced wounded Palestinians out of four Palestinian ambulances and used them as human shields in Ramallah.

French Mission of Mercy

A delegation from the Palestinian solidarity movement courageously marched to Arafat's office amid Israeli gunfire. They were led by José Bové, the French farmer and anti-globalization leader. Bové and his colleagues marched through the ruins of devastated Ramallah, even as Israeli soldiers opened fire. With hands above their heads, and carrying palm fronds as Easter symbols of peace, they approached Arafat's compound with two columns of heavily armed Israeli infantry threatening from behind. Bové marched through the besieged town with a small group of fellow humanitarians, bearing a tray of medicines for those injured inside Arafat's offices. (Some of the activists were subsequently arrested by the Israelis and are, as of this writing, in jail).

Israeli Soldiers Broadcast Pornography on Seized TV Stations

Pornographic movies were broadcast by Israeli troops who have taken over Palestinian television stations in Ramallah. The offices of local television and radio stations were occupied by Jewish soldiers a few hours after tanks and hundreds of troops stormed the town. The soldiers started broadcasting the porn clips -- considered extremely offensive by most Palestinians -- intermittently in the afternoon from the Al-Watan, Ammwaj, and Al-Sharaq stations.

"The pornographic movies started on Al-Watan television at around 3:30 pm," one 34-year-old Palestinian mother said. "I have six children at home, they have nowhere to go with what is going on here and can't even watch TV," she said angrily. A 52-year-old mother of three children complained about "the deliberate psychological damage caused by these broadcasts". "I am furious, these are the people who are shooting at us that also play this disgusting trick on us," she said. "We are desperate for news and constantly flipping channels and get these terrible pictures instead," adding that videos of the intifada were also shown backwards with "ideal terrorism" written in red across the screen.


"...we must encircle the main Palestinian population centers..."

--Binyamin Netanyahu, Jerusalem Post, March 29


March 30

Eight Palestinians Killed In Israeli Assault on Arafat's Ramallah Office: Mass Round-up of Palestinian Males in Ramallah

by Michael A. Hoffman II

5 Palestinian policemen have been murdered in cold blood by Israeli soldiers since March 29. The policemen were found shot in the back of the head at close-range, execution-style, on the third floor of the Cairo-Amman bank at midnight on Friday, March 29 during the Israeli rampage in the Palestinian city of Ramallah .Five men were put to death by the Israelis, each with a single coup de grace administered to the head or throat.

Maher Shalabi, bureau chief of Abu Dhabi television in Ramallah, was in his office in the same building. "I believe this was an execution." Hassan Asfour, a senior Palestinian negotiator, added: 'They were executed in cold blood. This is a clear example of the collective execution policy adopted by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people."

Three of five Palestinian policemen summarily executed by Israeli soldiers. The five victims were Khaled Awad 33, Ismail Zaid 56, Said Abdelrahman 60, Abdelrahman Abdallah 58 and Omar Musa, 54

Two of Arafat's bodyguards and a Palestinian intelligence officer have also been killed since March 29.

Here's how liars at my former employer, the Associated Press, falsified the murders of the Palestinian policemen to make it appear as though they died in a gun battle:

"Near the center of Ramallah, the bodies of five armed Palestinians, some in police uniform, were found Saturday in a six-story building. The Israeli army said they were killed a day earlier in a firefight that left two soldiers wounded."

--End quote from Associated Press dispatch, "Arafat Remains Confined in Office" March 30, 2002. The preceding AP dispatch gives only the Israeli account, and it withholds information about wounds at the back of the policemen's heads at close range.

Another view of the Israeli massacre of the Palestinian policemen

Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, said in a telephone interview that "Arafat's compound is being guarded so he won't be hit." But Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian communications director, dismissed the Israeli minister's claim. "He is a liar," Mr. Abed Rabbo said. "They are all liars."

Israeli tanks and troops are rampaging throughout Ramallah, demanding over loudspeakers for all Palestinian boys and men ages 15 to 45 to come out for "questioning." 500 have been kidnapped by the Israelis thus far and dragged away, bound and gagged for torture, and in some cases, mass murder.

The round-up is particularly ominous in light of Israeli killings from March 7 to March 16, in which more than 150 Palestinian males between the ages of 15 and 45 were shot to death. On March 8 alone, Israeli troops shot and killed 40 Palestinians. Journalists have been expelled from Ramallah so that this low intensity Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people can proceed without publicity. Such inhuman tactics breed rage and evermore fanatical resistance to the Master Race.


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