Israel Hiding Not One War Crime, But Two

JENIN REFUGEE CAMP: Gaunt and exhausted, Jamal Fayed was yesterday wandering round the vast heap of stinking detritus in which Israel has buried the war crimes of Jenin refugee camp, tormented with worry about the fate of his family.

The last time Fayed, a Palestinian science teacher, saw his wife and children, eight-year-old Majed and Ahmed, six, was just after Israeli forces had invaded a fortnight ago. He told the family to leave their house because he feared that a nearby Israeli tank was about to begin shelling. But he stayed behind, because he thought that if he left with them the soldiers would open fire on them, assuming him to be a fighter.

"Maybe they have gone to another village. I just don’t know where they are," he said, as he trudged through the dust of what used to be a large residential area which has now been reduced by Israeli bulldozers to a wasteland, fetid with the reek of decomposing human bodies beneath it.

Nearby old women picked through the debris, trying to salvage a few belongings.

International aid workers are beginning to address the arduous task of establishing how many people were killed in the camp during Israel’s so-called counter-terrorism operation — a long bout of fighting which culminated with the bulldozing by the army of hundreds of dwellings.