19 years ago, from April 1–11 2002, the Battle of Jenin took place.
By March 2002, the second intifada had been raging for 19 months. But Israelis remember that month in particular for the carnage on their streets – a 30-day bombing campaign by Hamas, Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades and Islamic Jihad in 13 separate attacks, including the bombing of Netanya’s Park Hotel during a Seder, which left 30 people dead and 140 wounded, and the murder of 16 people four days later at the Matza restaurant in Haifa.
Israelis were horrified by the attacks and their own loss of any sense of personal security. On March 29, the Israel Defense Forces took the fight to the West Bank in an operation dubbed Defensive Shield, designed to stop the terrorists before they got into Israel.
On April 2, the IDF reached Jenin, from which 23 of the 60 terror attacks in 2002 had emanated. There, the army waged a pitched battle, involving house-to-house fighting with Palestinian gunmen in the city’s refugee camp.
Booby-trapped houses were primed to collapse on the Israeli forces. By the time the fighting ended, 23 IDF soldiers and 52 Palestinians (of whom 14 were civilians) were dead
The palestinian propaganda machine went into overtime. Senior Palestinian Propaganda Minister Saeb Erekat infamously told CNN that it had been a massacre, with some 500 palestinian Arabs killed in the camp. Five days later, PA Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman told UPI that the number was in the thousands “hinting, along with other Palestinian figures, that Israel had snatched bodies, buried Palestinians in mass graves and under the rubble of ruined buildings, and otherwise conducted on a scale compatible with genocide.” Claims of a massacre were echoed by a “forensic expert” working for Amnesty International.
But following investigations, the IDF version of events was corroborated.
Investigations and reports by the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Time magazine, and the BBC all concluded there was no massacre of civilians, with estimated death tolls of 46–55 people among reports by the IDF, the Jenin office of the United Nations, and the Jenin Hospital.A team of four Palestinian-appointed investigators reporting to Fatah numbered total casualties of 56, as disclosed by Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement for the northern West Bank.
As for the civilian-combatant ratio, even the UN admitted that most killed were likely not civilians.
By the time of the IDF withdrawal and the lifting of the curfew on 18 April, at least 52 Palestinians, of whom up to half may have been civilians, and 23 Israeli soldiers were dead.
And Human Rights Watch put the number of civilian dead at 22.
The IDF had the number of dead at 48 terrorists and 5 civilians. But whichever number you rely on, what is clear is that for an intense urban warfare battle, the civilian-combatant ratio was low and this was certainly no massacre.
19 years later, and even the vehemently anti-Israel propaganda site Quds News Network admits to the relatively low 50+ number of palestinian Arabs killed.
Of course they falsely claim it was a massacre, and that all palestinian Arab fatalities were citizens, because vehement anti-Israel propaganda site. But it once again just goes to show you how loose with the facts the palestinian Arab propaganda machine truly is.
