After the assault

AS ISRAELI tanks rolled out of three Palestinian cities on April 21st, a bluff Ariel Sharon commended the “great accomplishments” achieved by his army’s three-week reconquest of the West Bank. It was, and is, a necessary exercise to root out terrorists, says the Israeli government, and the greatest care was taken to protect civilian life. Others saw it differently.

In the razed heart of Jenin refugee camp, where the fighting was most bitter, Palestinians were shovelling out their decomposed dead. Elsewhere in the West Bank, 600,000 people stepped gingerly out after weeks of curfew to survey the debris of their cities: what they saw, they are convinced, was the calculated destruction of their lives, property and institutions.

“Sharon bombed us back seven years,” said mayor of Ramallah, Ayoub Rabah, amid the wreckage of his town hall, “and then some”. The immediate crisis is humanitarian. A week or so after the army finally allowed medics into Jenin camp, 50 corpses had been retrieved from the rubble, although the Palestinians still say that many more remain buried (though not the “up to 500” that was generally reported at first), mixed with sewage from cracked mains. The danger of epidemic is real. Some 4,000 of the camp’s 13,000 refugees are homeless. Everywhere there are primitive pipe-bombs, still unexploded.

Things are not much better elsewhere in the West Bank. UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for the welfare of Palestinian refugees, is distributing emergency rations to 90,000 Palestinians, but is hindered by the Israeli army’s sieges. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) gives warning of severe water, food and medicine shortages, especially acute in Palestinian villages cut off from their urban centers by dirt walls, army checkpoints and trigger-happy soldiers.

The humanitarian disaster is compounded by an economy that has plunged from depression to paralysis. The UN’s economists estimate that three-quarters of all production in the West Bank has come to a halt, and that three-quarters of the workforce is temporarily or permanently unemployed. Few have cash, and their savings are exhausted.