Daily Telegraph, London.

Camp was fortress of terror, say the Israelis

(Filed: 19/04/2002)

TROOPS are bitter at being branded killers, reports David Blair

A FEW streets away from the scene of Jerusalem’s last suicide bombing, Pte Noam Ron cradled an M16 rifle across his knee as he bitterly attacked foreign criticism of the Israeli army.

“I just can’t believe what is said about us,” he protested. “It makes me very angry. We don’t have suicide bombers. We don’t try to kill the innocent. We only hit people if they are armed.”

Pte Ron, 19, has just completed the first of three years of compulsory military service. Most Israeli soldiers, who serve an army forged from a blend of civilian reservists, conscripts and professionals, share his sense of injustice.

They believe that a necessary campaign against ruthless terrorists has been seized upon and used to smear the Israeli forces. Those involved in the assault on the town of Jenin, the costliest operation of the onslaught against Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank, feel this resentment the most.

Twenty-three Israeli soldiers were lost in Jenin, including 13 killed in a single ambush. Sixty-five more were wounded. Most of those who were thrown into the bitter street fighting that engulfed Jenin’s refugee camp were civilian reservists – drawn from the 26,000 called up for Operation Defensive Shield.

Major David Zangen, the senior medical officer in the battle for Jenin, left his post as a doctor at Jerusalem University Hospital.

He said: “I felt terrible leaving my family but I had to do it to fight this brutal terrorism. I want to look in the eyes of my children and say `we did something so you can live in peace’. I’m not a military man; I’m a reservist. We are all fathers, we are all husbands. We were all fighting to protect our children, not because we are killers.”

Major Zangen, 43, a father of four who has treated victims of suicide bombings in Jerusalem, argued passionately that the assault on Jenin was crucial to prevent more atrocities.

He said that more than half of all the suicide attacks seen during the current Palestinian uprising, which erupted in September 2000, were carried out by people from Jenin refugee camp. “That was not a civilian camp, that was a fortress of terror,” said Major Zangen. By his own estimate, the Israeli army destroyed one square mile of the camp.

“The houses were all booby-trapped and filled with people shooting at us. The only way was to destroy them,” he said.

Posters of “shahids”, or “martyrs” who carried out suicide attacks, adorned many of the houses in Jenin camp. Major Zangen said the sight of these pictures, common in every Palestinian town, incensed the Israeli soldiers. “The old woman making coffee in Jenin camp doesn’t have a picture of pretty scenery on her wall but a picture of a suicide bomber,” he said. “They saw the shahids as heroes, but all these terrorists are doing is saying, `I want to die and I want to take with me as many as possible – children, pregnant women, old men.’ “

Major Zangen said that four of the Israeli dead in Jenin were medical officers, killed while treating the wounded. He described how a six-year-old boy ran towards soldiers carrying a bag that turned out to contain a booby trap, and said that Palestinian fighters used an elderly man and a woman as human shields during the street fighting.

“And people think we are the ones who are killing the innocent,” he said. “We sacrificed our own soldiers to prevent, as much as possible, damage to civilians.”

Israeli forces bombarded Jenin camp with tanks and attack helicopters, before razing whole streets with bulldozers. Palestinians say that hundreds of civilians were killed, and the scale of the destruction indicates that this tally may prove more accurate than the Israeli estimate of “dozens” of dead.

The events have entered the mythology of both sides. Israeli soldiers echo Major Zangen’s view that Jenin refugee camp was a “fortress of terror” that had to be wiped out. To the Palestinians, it was a home for innocent civilians who were “massacred”.

All that both sides have in common is a burning sense of grievance.