Summary
The Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. In Pappe’s account in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the Israeli invasion of the camp between 3 and 15 April 2002, and the massacre he says Israeli troops committed there, stand as the Second Intifada-era continuation of 1948; the UN fact-finding mission voted after it was abandoned when Israel refused cooperation.
Details
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Baroud’s Searching Jenin contains eyewitness accounts of the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp between 3 and 15 April 2002 and the massacre Israeli troops committed there, and testimony of the cowardice of the international community, the callousness of Israel and the courage of the Palestinian refugees (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.280).
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Pappe quotes Rafidia al-Jamal, a 35-year-old mother of five, on the killing of her sister Fadwa, twenty-seven, a nurse assigned to a field hospital: after a shell fell around 4 in the morning, Fadwa left in her white uniform to help the wounded, and was showered with bullets from soldiers positioned on top of the mosque as she tried to help the wounded Rafidia (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.280-281).
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On 20 April the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1405 to send a fact-finding mission into the Jenin camp; when the Israeli government refused to cooperate, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan decided to abandon the mission (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.281).
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In the Epilogue’s list of continuing killings, Pappe places “the Jenin Refugee Camp in 2002” after Kfar Qassim, Qibya, Samoa (as printed), the Galilee villages in 1976, Sabra and Shatila in 1982, Kfar Qana in 1999 and Wadi Ara in 2000 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.296).
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Earlier in the book, the population expelled from Ijzim in July 1948 was expelled to Jenin (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.197-198), and Operation ‘Yitzhak’ of 1 June 1948 attacked Jenin and failed against its Iraqi defenders (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.181-182).
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In Sitta’s register Jenin appears only as an extra, partially depopulated village named in the Lajjun row; the Jinin district’s main list has six localities (Ayn al-Mansi, Jawfa al K, Lajjun al, Mazar al, Nuris, Zir’in) with a subtotal Arab Population 48 of 4,005 (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.14).
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In Makdisi: entire communities in Jenin and Nablus, and Rafah in Gaza, were flattened by the Israeli army’s Caterpillar D9 armoured bulldozers during the Second Intifada, leaving tens of thousands of Palestinians homeless (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.138).
Related pages
The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Right of Return, Kafr Kassim