Ill-Prepared For a Battle Unexpected

JERUSALEM, April 25 -- It was the second day of the battle for the Jenin refugee camp, and things were going badly for the Israelis. Palestinian gunmen, firing from sandbags hidden behind curtained windows, had pinned down advancing Israeli troops on the camp's western edge. Two Israelis had already died.

To a young Israeli army sergeant watching from a nearby rise known as Antennae Hill, perhaps 400 yards above the camp, it was clear that his commanders had been wrong when they had confidently predicted a few days earlier that the Palestinians would surrender at the first sight of approaching tanks.

That's when he heard the orders to open fire.

"The orders were to shoot at each house," recalled the sergeant, a member of a heavy weapons company in the Yoav regiment of the army's Fifth Brigade, a reserve unit that did the bulk of the fighting in Jenin. "The words on the radio were to 'Put a bullet in each window.' "

The sergeant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was troubled by the orders, which did not require soldiers to actually see the gunmen they were trying to kill. But he said the Israeli soldiers didn't hesitate. They pounded a group of cinder-block homes -- the apparent source of Palestinian sniper fire -- with .50-caliber machine guns, M-24 sniper rifles, Barrett sniper rifles and Mod3 grenade launchers.