THE WASHINGTON POST

Friday, April 26, 2002

That's when he heard the orders to open fire.

"The orders were to shoot at each house," recalled the sergeant, a member of a heavy weapons company in the Yoav regiment of the army's 5th Brigade, a reserve unit that did the bulk of the fighting in Jenin. "The words on the radio were to `Put a bullet in each window.' "

The sergeant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was troubled by the orders, which didn't require soldiers to actually see the gunmen they were trying to kill. But he said the Israeli soldiers didn't hesitate. They pounded a group of cinderblock homes -- the apparent source of Palestinian sniper fire -- with .50-caliber machine guns, M-24 sniper rifles, Barrett sniper rifles and grenade launchers.

"It's not true there was a massacre, because guys did not shoot at civilians just like this," the sergeant recalled. "However -- and this is terrible -- it is true that we shot at houses, and God knows how many innocent people got killed."

In separate interviews, the sergeant and another Israeli reservist who fought in Jenin, Sgt. Shlomi Lanyado, offered a detailed account of the battle from the perspective of the Israeli forces. The Jenin combat was the heaviest of the recent military operation that Israel launched in the West Bank after a string of suicide bombings. Both sergeants participated in the house-to-house combat in the center of the densely built refugee camp.

The 10-day battle claimed the lives of 23 Israeli soldiers and at least 50 Palestinians -- more might be buried beneath the rubble -- and left the center of the camp in ruins. Israeli officials say most of the dead Palestinians were armed fighters who had turned the camp into a "nest of terror" used to launch suicide bombings against Israelis.

Palestinians say most of the dead were civilians and have accused the Israeli military of committing a massacre in Jenin, which Israel has denied. Israel and the U.N. Security Council are now arguing over the composition of a U.N. team charged with investigating the battle.

Both Lanyado and the other sergeant said they don't think that Israeli soldiers intentionally killed Palestinian civilians. Lanyado said he and the other members of his platoon went out of their way to treat Palestinians with respect, providing them with water and once summoning a medic to treat an elderly man who collapsed in his bedroom.

The other sergeant, however, said he was troubled not only by the order to fire through open windows without specific, identifiable targets, but also by what he said were insufficient efforts by the army to let civilians leave their homes in safety. He also questioned the decision to use bulldozers to knock down houses at a time when he said the fighting had mostly subsided.

Israeli military spokesmen denied that Palestinian civilians were deliberately put at risk. The Israelis said that from the first day of the assault, Israeli forces broadcast regular warnings over loudspeakers in Arabic offering residents a chance to leave the camp in safety and fighters a chance to surrender. They said bulldozers were brought in only as a last resort after the death of 13 soldiers in an ambush.

"Most of the civilians in the camp left very early on, which the (army) facilitated," a military spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal, said Thursday. Those who remained behind, he said, were "mostly terrorists."