Monstrous War Crimes By Israel In Jenin

PHIL REEVES,
JENIN,
The INDEPENDENT -

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 centre 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 shovelled 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.

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