Questionable Reporting - "Jenin Massacre" Headlines
Sara Bedein
(April 18, 2002)

Following over two weeks of world headlines screaming "Massacre in Jenin!", the true story is slowly emerging, as the IDF allowed representatives of the Israeli and foreign press media to enter Jenin.

Media in a Vacuum

For almost two weeks no reporter - Israeli or foreign - was allowed into the refugee camp to give a first hand account of what was really going on, and this only served to fuel the tales of horror, which spread like wildfire.

* All the foreign media refused to quote Israeli press releases, or air real-time IDF film of their troops in combat, insisting on the privilege of being able to find their own sources and file first-hand reports.

* Israel television also warned from the outset that excluding the media would have a detrimental impact on reporting the facts, even though visuals of Israeli tanks and armored carriers were not helpful to Israel's image.

* On Friday April 12th, CBS reporter Dan Rather, in an interview with Israel radio, said that "the first victim of war is always truth" and that the media ought to be allowed in to seek out and report the truth first-hand.

According to Israeli officials, the reason for the refusal to allow the media into Jenin until the fighting ended was fear for their safety, due to all the booby trapped explosives which were everywhere and fear of the media getting hurt in the fierce battle that was taking place.

Col. Gal Hirsh - Head of Operations in the Central Command explained why Jenin had remained a closed military zone, even after the fighting was over:

"We have been trying to find all the bodies and remove the booby traps from them", he said. "It is very complicated, very dangerous and we are doing our best, in order not to cause much more damage after the fighting. We are trying to remove all the explosives, hand grenades and booby traps from the bodies and houses where the bodies have been found."

Meanwhile, the Palestinians, who took advantage of Israel's refusal to allow the media in to Jenin, claimed the bodies of 500 Palestinians were piled up in the streets and spread the word that Israel was refusing to bury them. Without verifying the facts from any objective source and without testifying personally to this so called "genocide", this number was repeatedly quoted by the foreign media, turning hearsay into fact.

The Bubble Bursts

The media teams were able to enter Jenin on Sunday April 14th, for the first time since the fierce battle between the IDF and terrorist cells in Jenin began, when it was declared a closed military zone.

Among the first reporters who did so were Serge Schmemann and Joel Greenberg from the New York Times, who reported:

"With rumors swirling of massacres and mass burials in the Jenin refugeee camp, the Israeli Army said today that the number of Palestinian dead was not in the hundreds but in the dozens, and it agreed to allow the Red Cross to monitor the collecting of 26 bodies that the army said were still lying about . . .
"What today's visit to the camp showed was more destruction than death, at least, deaths that can be verified right away."

The first eyewitnesses from outside of the Jenin refugee camp were able to see for themselves the destruction and devastation that came from the fierce fighting that took place in the camp and the grim results of the terrorists' booby trapping their own houses, bodies, cars, and streets with vast amounts of explosives which reduced the refugee camp into rubble.

No mass graves have been uncovered so far and, according to IDF sources, there are none. The claims of hundreds of Palestinians being killed in the battle has been reduced to dozens. The Palestinians have acknowledged that bombs were placed throughout the camp.

However, there have been no media retractions of the shocking "accounts" - and it would be unrealistic to expect any.

A Range of Unsubstantiated Reports

Many media outlets devoted huge amounts of ink to unverified Palestinian tales of conspiracies, mass murders, common graves, and war crimes.

The credibility of Palestinian "witnesses" was barely questioned (despite the Palestinian track record of fabricating false claims).

European and Arab states described the fighting in Jenin, inter alia, in terms of:

"genocide";
unprecedented humanitarian disaster;
Sabra and Shatilla #2;
a campaign of revenge and murder;
Nazi ethnical cleansing -

European articles focused mainly on the physical damage to buildings due to Israeli tanks moving through the camp, and failed to mention the fact that many of the buildings and streets were rigged with explosives, which were set off by the numerous terrorist cells operating in the refugeee camp.

The British press, in particular, printed unsubstantiated and unverified reports of what took place in Jenin:

The British newspaper, "The Independent", called what was happening in Jenin, "the Jenin Slaughter House".

The Independent, The Telegraph, and The Times of London all quote the same lone individual, 28-year-old Kamal Anis, who said that he:
"saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank." (The Independent)

By contrast, the American press was generally more balanced in reporting from Jenin, although there were some reports like the one from James Bennet, writing for The New York Times, who wrote:

"Palestinians here describe bodies cut in pieces, bodies scooped up by bulldozers and buried in mass graves, bodies deliberately concealed under collapsed buildings. They describe people drinking out of sewers and people used by Israeli soldiers as human shields."

T. Christian Miller of the LA Times writes that:

Palestinian "accounts, which could not be independently confirmed, painted a picture of a vicious house-to-house battle in which Israeli soldiers faced Palestinian gunmen intermixed with the camp's civilian population."

Washington Post correspondent Molly Moore wrote:
"Interviews with residents inside the camp and international aid workers who were allowed here for the first time today indicated that no evidence has yet surfaced to support allegations by Palestinian groups and aid organizations of large-scale massacres or executions by Israeli troops."

Israeli Briefings Ignored

Israel's comments on what was actually happening at the UNWRA Jenin refugee camp were, for the most part, ignored by world media:

In a press briefing on April 12th, 2002, Mr. Danny Ayalon, foreign policy advisor to the prime minister, dismissed Palestinian reports of putting Palestinian dead bodies into mass graves as part of the Palestinian propaganda and advised the press to check again the Palestinian credibility. "Most of the people who were killed in the Jenin camp", said Ayalon, "were Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian gunmen, including major terrorists on Israel's wanted list who were directly responsible for the murders of many Israelis."

A statement from Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said:

"Alongside the defense activities, we have to undertake an explanatory effort regarding Jenin to stop the flow of rumors. We checked the figures thoroughly, and the number of those killed in Jenin stands at dozens and not hundreds, and the great majority of them were armed men who shot at our forces. We did not bury a single body - and certainly not in a mass grave."

In a briefing held on April 12,th 2002, Col. Gal Hirsh, Head of Operations in IDF Central Command said:

"When you think of the term refugeee camp, you think of poor and helpless people. This is not the case! Jenin Refugeee Camp was a strong combat zone. Do not think of Jenin Refugeee Camp as the model of a refugeee camp but as a real military and terrorist infrastructure. These people decided to fight, and we had to fight back. Most of the Israeli casualties by Palestinian terrorist actions were resulted from the terrorist infrastructure in Jenin Refugeee Camp.

"I've heard the rumors of 500-600 Palestinians dead. These are lies. We had no choice but to destroy the terrorist infrastructure - every day there were terrorists' acts dispatched from Jenin Refugeee Camp. The operation in Jenin cost us the lives of 23 soldiers and many were injured. I regret that some Palestinian civilians were injured and some were killed. We were fighting against armed terrorists. We asked the Palestinian civilians to evacuate their homes so they would not get hurt, some chose not to. Most of the Palestinians that were killed were armed terrorists; many had explosive devices strapped to their bodies. We found a lot of evidence of terrorist activity, for e.g., labs for explosive devices. We are talking about an organized terrorist infrastructure throughout Judea and Samaria."

In another press briefing the same week, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said:

"There wasn't a house that wasn't booby-trapped and there was no way to neutralize the danger without demolishing the structure."
"We also encountered booby-trapped men, Palestinians who raised their hands to surrender while wearing explosive vests, in an attempt to detonate themselves among our soldiers. It was a very bitter combat. We lost 23 soldiers, which indicates that this was a difficult operation, in which the Palestinians did their maximum to inflict as many casualties as they could."
"The Israel Defense forces received clear instructions to avoid harming civilians, and that is exactly what they did…"

Points to Ponder

Now that the media have been allowed to enter the Jenin refugee camp - although there is little expectation that there will actually be any retractions about allegations of a massacre - there is a glimmer of hope that there will be at least some objective reporting. It is hoped this will be based on facts that filter into the media and dampen somewhat the great flames of incitement and hatred towards Israel that have been a result of unfounded reports of a massacre in Jenin.

· Have you noticed any turn around in these reports, or is the media silent?

· Have you noticed any correspondence rebutting the allegations of atrocities?

· Did the Jewish press and media take up the issue, or was it avoided?

· Did the solidarity and rally movement address these grossly inaccurate and hate-inciting reports?

· Can you and will you protest this falsification of Israel's action, at least in the Jewish community?

. For two weeks, media outlets throughout the world devoted huge amounts of ink to such unverified tales of conspiracies, rapes, executions , mass murder and war crimes.

Why was the credibility of Palestinian "eyewitness testimony" barely questioned -despite the PLO track record of fabricating false claims? (Fallacious reports from the Red Crescent in Lebanon back in June 1982 that the IDF had killed 10,000 people and 600,000 made homeless?)
Could it be that the media has overlooked the fact that the Red Crescent, which continues to be the source of most of the allegations of IDF "war crimes", is directed by Dr. Fathi Arafat, the brother of PLO leader, Yassir Arafat?