Israel:War Crimes in Jenin

Palestinian sources claim that the bodies of Palestinians are being taken away by Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers to be buried in mass graves on the Jordanian frontier. Eye witnesses are being shot.

After days of being forbidden to enter the refugee camp at Jenin, where IDF forces carried out a massacre of some 500 Palestinians, the International Red Cross has been allowed in to accompany the IDF soldiers to collect the bodies of the Palestinians which are lying decomposing in houses, in the streets, or simply buried under piles of rubble, after huge bulldozers demolished dwellings without any regard for the lives of the civilian inhabitants.

Stories start to leak out of summary executions, without trial, totally unacceptable in any country which terms itself as a state of law. Others, wounded, were not allowed to leave their houses to seek hospital treatment and ambulances were not allowed to circulate. Some were even fired on and in one case, reported in the international press, a doctor and nurse who had been wounded when IDF soldiers sprayed their ambulance with automatic fire, bled to death outside a hospital as IDF snipers took aim at the doctors and nurses who tried to come outside to save them.

Such actions go totally against any norm for military intervention against terrorism. Palestinian human rights watchdog LAW filed three petitions at the Israeli Supreme Court over the weekend to stop IDF forces burying the dead in mass graves.

Independent information coming out of Jenin will rely heavily on the accounts of the Red Cross workers, since NGOs and journalists are not allowed in to what is classified as a military exclusion zone, even though thousands of women and children are said to be wandering around, homeless, after their homes were bulldozed by the IDF and are in urgent need of help.

An eye-witness, quoted by the international press, whose identity Pravda.Ru will not reveal for security reasons, claims that “The Israeli soldiers are taking the bodies away, I don’t know where to. People say they are being taken to Galilee or Alanby Bridge (on the Jordanian frontier”.

Other witnesses say that bulldozers and excavators are digging enormous trenches in these two reasons, without understanding why.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru LISBON PORTUGAL