quote:
Op zaterdag 24 januari 2009 02:08 schreef moussie het volgende:[..]
ik zal het even uitspellen ..
in
deze post damian dit als bewijs dat er gesjoemeld is met de body count
[..]
en tja, in die bron staat dus hetgeen ik gequote heb .. er mag dan gesjoemeld zijn met de bodycount, Israël heeft dat niet bepaald makkelijk gemaakt met het ontoegankelijk maken van het gebied, en volgens het UN-rapport dat ik gevonden heb zijn het toch echt 497 doden en geen 52 , maar dat terzijde, doet dat iets af aan de rest van wat daar gemeld wordt ?
We began this article with a citation of Palestinian top negotiator Saeb Erakat, who is also the person that announced to the world the Jenin atrocities that never happened.
It was in the same Jenin that corpses of animals were used to fabricate the stench of the massacred bodies, that funerals were fabricated and filmed only to have the victims becoming alive, etc.
All these are typical to Israel's Hasbara problem:
Both the fundamentals of the conflict such as what is Palestine, and the current events such as who deliberately target civilians and who sacrifices its own life to save civilians, are falsified.
Often reality is precisely the opposite of what is being presented by the Palestinians: 23 Israeli reservists lost their life because they fought on the ground in Jenin in an unparalleled (as compared to other democracies that would have used the air force and artillery) attempt to save civilian life.
Yet the lie of the massacre of Jenin is still prevalent.
So we have to permanently explain that the M.E. conflict is not only a universe where the Palestinian side never keeps signed agreements but it is also an Orwellian universe where lies are permanently propagated.
Also words are used to mean what the Palestinians decide they should mean like Humpty Dumpty does.
An indiscriminate killer becomes a freedom fighter, a fifth of Palestine becomes Palestine, and Zionism becomes, instead of the self-determination movement of the Jewish people, something sinister.
BronPalestinian and International Charges of MassacreYet Palestinian spokesmen characterized Israel's counter-terrorist operations in Jenin, right from the start, as a "massacre."
Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erakat charged during a CNN interview on April 10, 2002, that Israeli troops had killed "more than 500 people."
On April 12, he repeated the charge on CNN: "a real massacre was committed in the Jenin refugee camp."
He added that 300 Palestinians were being buried in mass graves.
On April 15, Erakat continued his charges: "And I stand by the term 'massacres' were committed in the refugee camps." He also began to refer to Israeli actions as "war crimes."
Erakat was not alone in hurling the charge of an Israeli "massacre" of Palestinians in Jenin. Peter Hansen, the commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) told a Danish newspaper, the Internatavisen Jyllands-Posten, on April 19, that 300-400 Palestinians had been killed in Jenin.
He told CNN: "I had, first of all, hoped the horror stories coming out were exaggerations as you often hear in this part of the world, but they were all too true" (CNN, April 19, 2002).
CNN correspondent Rula Amin gave her own impressions of "a lot of destruction, a lot of devastation" (CNN, April 17, 2002).
Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN Secretary-General's representative in the Middle East, was initially more careful: "I cannot say that there wasn't a massacre, but I cannot say there was a massacre."
Yet he still insisted:
"But I think that the question of an international investigation is a highly relevant question on the basis of what I saw" (CNN, April 18, 2002).
He spoke of "clear violations of basic humanitarian principles." Hansen's impressions and Larsen's reports undoubtedly affected the assessment of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
What Really Transpired
Now that the city of Jenin has been open for several weeks, a clearer picture of the reality on the ground has emerged:
*
No Massacre of Palestinians Occurred
Contrary to the repeated televised charges of Saeb Erakat and other Palestinian spokesmen, "hundreds" of Palestinians were not killed.
As of May 1, there were 54 bodies found in Jenin -- not 500 -- according to Israeli military sources. Palestinian officials, on the ground, now verify the Israeli numbers:
Mousa Kadoura, director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization for the northern West Bank, claims 56 Palestinians died in Jenin (Washington Times, May 1, 2002).Foreign Minister Shimon Peres has stated that only seven civilian casualties have been identified (Israel Foreign Ministry Press Release, April 20, 2002).
These limited Palestinian casualties were due to the fact that Israel did not employ massive air strikes or artillery barrages in Jenin, but rather sent its vulnerable ground forces to engage in house-to-house combat.
As a result, Israel lost 23 soldiers in the battle.
Essentially, Israeli soldiers lost their lives in order to keep the collateral deaths of Palestinian civilians to a minimum. *
The Role of Palestinian Explosives and the Limited Scale of DestructionPalestinians admit that they employed large amounts of explosive devices in Jenin.
There were booby-trapped buildings and explosive devices configured as anti-personnel mines.
Captured Islamic Jihad operative Tabeat Mardawi told CNN that 1,000-2,000 explosive devices had been prepared.
An Islamic Jihad bomb-maker from Jenin told Al-Ahram Weekly:
"We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp" (MEMRI, April 24, 2002).
Still, the level of destruction was limited.
Out of 1,896 buildings in the Jenin refugee camp, 130 buildings were destroyed -- or less than 10 percent (Israel Defense Forces -- Central Command).
According to Fatah activist Mousa Kadoura, the area affected was the size of a large football field (Washington Times, May 1, 2002).
Moreover, because of the large amounts of Palestinian explosives in the camp, it is difficult to discern what component of this destruction was caused by Israeli forces and what part was a result of Palestinian detonation. *edit* Tiesemans ( Hamas deed precies hetzelfde onlangs door de Gaza vol te hangen met explosieven om de opmars van grondtroepen te vertragen.)
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