Stench of death fills air in Jenin as Palestinians recover their dead

April 20, 2002
[byline not given]


We have no choice but to struggle up the rough slope within range of the Israeli soldiers posted on top of the hill opposite. Israeli tanks pulled back from Jenin yesterday after entering over two weeks ago.

A university student on his way home tells me he hasn't seen his family in 18 days. "They're OK. I was arrested on the first day and taken to an army camp with the other men. They held us for three days and then dumped us here."

There are many like him. Young men with no baggage, walking. The death toll in the camp, estimated by Palestinians to be 500, will not be known until all the men in Israeli custody are counted in confinement or free to walk home.

I hitch a ride in a pick-up on the outskirts of the camp. The devastation begins at the very edge. Boys with a smattering of English step in as unpaid horror tour guides. We begin at a house blasted to its bare bones, picking our way over rubble. Here, at the beginning of the tour, the smell is of half-burnt rotting garbage.

We step out of the narrow confines of the alley into a wide plateau of rubble strewn with bright bits of torn clothing, chunks of plastic, rocks, clumps of cotton wool from quilts and mattresses. A huge bulldozer driven by a man proclaiming he comes from the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees is waiting on the orders of a group of men plumbing the depths of the rubble for bodies.

The boys lead the way to a house where the smell of death is strong. "You see there on the wall, brains," one of them remarks. A thick black splatter of something clings to the dusty outer wall. Inside the house there is more of the same - several people were killed standing against the wall. On the floor lies a brass vase containing a posey of pink silk roses.

The quarter is called Hawasheen for a family of Palestinians who settled here in 1948. The refugees first sheltered in tents, then tiny breeze-block huts which grew upwards into apartments housing extended families. The camp area holds some 14,000 people. At least 3,000 have been made homeless.

Men probing a small mound have found part of a torso and cover it with a cloth tugged from the rubble. Aya Oweiss takes my hand and leads me to her house. The entire front wall of their house has been blown away. "They sent us to stay with our neighbour and moved into our house for 10 days," she says. "When they left, they blew it up." The women sitting in their devastated salon watch men on the large mound search for a body, its presence indicated by the smell. A child's corpse is found, a canopy of pink cloth erected over the grave site while they complete the exhumation. Elsewhere a multiple burial is uncovered, releasing a cloying, sweet stench.

Old people in dust-powdered clothing sit on piles of stone and shattered cement bloc, grim children reach out for a consoling handshake. They collect empty tank shells and scrap metal. People are wounded every day by unexploded ordnance and booby traps.

My companions and I catch a taxi for the return journey but as we alight from the car, we are greeted by a burst of machine-gun fire and several sharp explosions from an Israeli armoured personnel carrier on the hill above. We run uphill and join two dozen Palestinian civilians also running from the gunfire. To welcome us at the barrier are television teams in body armour and helmets.