Saturday, April 20, 2002

In Rubble of a Refugee Camp, Bitter Lessons for 2 Enemies
Rather than emphasizing their role as victims, Palestinians could have presented this fight as a brave but losing struggle. The Israelis worried about both outcomes, that the Palestinians could display their corpses to the world to claim a massacre, and that they could energize their fighters by claiming a victory. Those fears helped shape the combat and its aftermath.

"It doesn't matter how much time is needed, we have to complete the victory in the camp so as not to allow the Palestinians to turn this place into a myth of bravery," Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the defense minister, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot late in the campaign.

But many residents were not looking to die a hero's death. Jammal Issa Sabagh's family believes that it was on the third day of fighting, Friday, that he died. Mr. Sabagh, 35, a diabetic, left the house to surrender with a group of men, according to his sister-in-law, Abeer Ghazawi. He took a bag of clothes with him, she said, and the soldiers evidently mistook the bag for explosives. Soldiers who fought here said that on at least two instances fighters hid themselves in groups of civilians and then attacked.

Mr. Sabagh was shot dead, and his body was left in the road. Tanks ran over it, Palestinians said. Jellied remains amid tattered clothes still lay in the dirt days later.

Late Friday night, Yusra Abu Khurj, 60, was alone on the fourth floor of her house, said her brother, Muhammad Abu Khurj, 75. A TOW missile fired by a helicopter tore through one wall and exploded in the room, spraying shrapnel and killing Ms. Abu Khurj, whom her family described as mentally ill.

Days later, a dried puddle of blood still lay beneath the hole gaping in the wall. Her body had been wrapped in a carpet and shoved into a corner of the room, where maggots invaded it. Her brother said Israeli soldiers had forced him to leave the house and abandon her body, and that they had placed it in the corner. Ms. Abu Kurj's body was eventually identified and interred in the temporary grave behind Jenin hospital.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/international/middleeast/21JENI.html?pagewanted=all

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