Palestinians have dubbed the city “Jenin Al-Kassam,” the suicide city, in memory of Islamic militant Az Adin Al-Kassam, near the city in November 1935. Al-Kassam preached jihad against Jews and the British. After his death at the hands of British paratroopers, who had threatened to level Jenin in pursuit of him and his militants, he became an object of admiration and imitation by Palestinians. The military wing of HAMAS is also named after him: “the Az Adin Al-Kassam Brigades.”

  The BBC reported that, "Hidden in the concrete warren of the Jenin refugee camp is a bomb-making factory where the suicide belts and the explosives are made." According to Jamal Hwaid, confidante of PIJ leader Ali Safuri, "The Israelis call Jenin the cockroaches nest, but we call it the nest of angels,"

  Jenin, not far from the Israeli town of Afula,is an ideal place from which to mount terror attacks in Israel. Distances in Israel and the disputed territories are quite small; the main population centers are no more than an hour’s drive from one another

  The Palestinian Authority (PA) exercises little real control in Jenin, HAMAS and PIJ have become the de facto rulers of the city. These organizations have established an educational and economic network, based on donations received from Moslem communities worldwide. This network is instrumental in gaining support for the movement’s activities, and in recruiting followers. HAMAS and PIJ cells have also multiplied in villages to the east and north of the city

  In March 2002, more than 135 Israeli civilians were killed in terror attacks committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations, HAMAS, PIJ and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (the "military branch" of Arafat's Fatah movement). The deadliest attack was on March 27, 2002, the "Passover Massacre", in which a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 28 people and injured 120 at the Park Hotel in Netanya (2 others later died from their injuries).

  On April 3, Israeli troops, tanks and helicopters surrounded Jenin. The Israeli army was determine to "smoke out the terrorist nest." In nine days of ferocious fighting 52 Palestinians, mostly gumnen, were killed in pitched battles that left 23 Israeli soldiers dead.

  Anti-Israel media sources in the Middle East, Europe, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the world, had a field day. Headlines screamed "Massacre", "War Crimes", "Atrocities", "Genocide" and worse; the battle was termed a Palestinian "Alamo." Every unsubstantiated rumor of Israeli misdeeds was given the status of truth as reporters looked for the big story they were convinced was happening. Palestinian sources were quoted without any fact checking while Israeli versions went unreported.

  For example, Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian representative to the United Nations, was given time on CNN to say:

There's almost a massacre now taking place in Jenin. Helicopter gun ships are throwing missiles at one square kilometer packed with almost 15,000 people in a refugee camp.... Just look at the TV and watch, watch what the - what the Israel forces are doing.... This is a war crime, clear war crime, witnessed by the whole world, preventing ambulances, preventing people from being buried. I mean this is an all-out assault against the whole population.

  Adding fuel to the fire, the Arab mayor of Jenin stated:

What I saw with my own eyes can't be described with words, I just can't understand how human beings are capable of committing nefarious crimes as such. ... decomposed bodies of children and old people were scattered everywhere and two thirds of the camp has been reduced to rubble.

  Israelis are alleged to have buried bodies in mass graves or shipped them out in refrigerated trucks. One reporter did have the temerity to peer into the back of a truck, reported by Palestinians to hold several bodies, only to find nothing but vegetables. Other "journalists" simply repeated the massacre charges without the tedium of trying to verify them.

  As usual, when the smoke cleared, quite a different picture emerged. Witnesses observed that the town of Jenin was untouched and most of the so-called "refugee camp" was at most lightly damaged. Only the area where terrorists had located, where intense house-to-house fighting took place, was extensively damaged.

  Early on the Israeli government initially estimated that as many as 100 armed combatants died. PA officials initially claimed that the Israelis had deliberately massacred 3,000 people, and were burying them in mass graves. Some advocates of Palestinian nationalism claimed that "the Jews" were starting a "Holocaust" against Arabs. However, on April 30, Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the northern West Bank, dropped the death toll to 56 people, including armed combatants. The final toll of the battle was 52 to 56 Palestinian Arabs dead, mostly armed fighters, while Israel lost 23 soldiers.

  As the Boston Globe (April 29, 2002) reported, "PA allegations that a large-scale massacre of civilians was committed by Israeli troops during their invasion of the refugee camp here appear to be crumbling under the weight of eyewitness accounts from Palestinian fighters who participated in the battle and camp residents who remained in their homes until the final hours of the fighting. In interviews yesterday with teenage fighters, a leader of Islamic Jihad, an elderly man whose home was at the center of the fighting, and other Palestinian residents, all of whom were in the camp during the battle, none reported seeing large numbers of civilians killed."

  Testimonies in Arab media from Palestinian commanders support Israel's contention that its soldiers fought fierce battles at the Jenin refugee camp with gunmen who used booby traps and civilians, including children, to engage in "guerrilla warfare." Time also quoted a Palestinian gunman admitting that the terrorists' own booby traps caused some of the civilian deaths.

  "Believe me, there are children stationed in the houses with explosive belts at their sides," said Abu Jandal, commander of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad at the Jenin camp, in an interview during the battle with Al-Jazeera. "Today, one of the children came to me with his school bag. I asked him what he wanted, and he replied, "Instead of books, I want an explosive device, in order to attack...."

  DFLP commander, Raed Abbas, said that the Israelis "destroyed many houses. They are trying to wreak vengeance upon the civilians. The army is evacuating the (residents of the) camp forcibly, in order to close in more and more on the fighters."

  In contrast, PIJ said its commander in Jenin, Muhammad Tawalbeh, had prevented civilians from leaving the camp. Tawalbeh died in his booby-trapped home when he blew it up with Israeli soldiers inside on April 6, according to the Islamic Jihad website.

  Tawalbeh "had thwarted all attempts by the occupation to evacuate the camp residents to make it easier for the Israelis to destroy (the camp) on the heads of the fighters," the announcement said.

  "The Zionist enemy thinks he is creating a Palestinian Masada for us – that is, that we have chosen to commit suicide – but we say to him that he is mistaken," the PIJ leader said, referring to the 1st century Roman assault on the fortress Masada where a group of Jewish Zealots seeking refuge chose to die rather than be captured.

  "We are not creating a Palestinian Masada, but a Palestinian Karbalaa, which will hasten the second Jewish Masada … until the Zionist entity ceases to exist … ," he said, speaking of the battle of Karbala'a in AD 680, which established "martyrdom" in Shi'ite tradition.

  United Press International (UPI) published a three part series of articles (see Sources below) examining the media's treatment of the phony Jenin massacre story, describing how the US news outlets did relatively well in containing the false rumors while their uncritical acceptance constituted a "humiliation for Western European governments and left-leaning media leaders."

  After-battle reports made clear that the IDF took great care to avoid civilian casualties, the opposite of Palestinian claims, and took higher Israeli casualties as a result. When faced with strong resistance in a congested urban area filled with explosives, snipers, and booby-traps the easy course for Israel would have been a massive air attack to flatten the area. Instead, the IDF engaged the terrorists in house-to-house fighting that spared civilians as much as possible. Non-combatant casualties would have been even lower if the Palestinian terrorists had not used civilians as shields and decoys.

  Israel chose not to bomb the spots of resistance using aircraft as it entered in order to minimize civilian losses, but rather to take hold of the city using infantry. 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in the street fighting, 14 of them in a single day from a charge carried by a suicide bomber that triggered the collapse of a building and from shooting done by his accomplices. Overall, Israel said that its forces had killed 47 militants and 7 civilians. The walls of many buildings were covered with posters hailing the suicide bombers "martyrs".

  The United Nations called for an investigation of Israel's actions in Jenin. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon objected to the makeup of the proposed UN commission. Israel initially agreed to co-operate with the inquiry, but put up a set of conditions to do so. Among these were that the mission should include anti-terrorism experts.

  American congressmen and others called for an investigation of the United Nations whose UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was in charge of the Jenin refugee camp. How did Jenin become a world center for recruiting and training suicide bombers under UN supervision?

  Israelis don't trust the UN, and with good reason. For instance, the UN special envoy to the Middle East referred to Jenin as "completely flattened." In fact the city is largely intact, with one area in ruins. Another UN official speculated to the Times of London that the Israelis were hiding a "war crime." Meanwhile, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, which not long ago evicted the U.S. but continues to seat Libya, Cuba and Syria, passed a resolution asserting as fact the "mass killing" of "hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including women and children" in 12 refugee camps including Jenin.

  British military expert and a military adviser to Amnesty International, Major David Holley visited Jenin and told the BBC why he thinks there was not a massacre in and why he believes Israel is right to challenge the UN fact-finding mission.

What did you see in Jenin?

"There is an extensive area - about 200 metres (600ft) by about 100 metres (300ft) - that has been completely flattened. It is just like a building site or the aftermath of an earthquake. No houses, just rubble."

So what leads you to the conclusion that there was no massacre?

  "I think massacre is a word that is too often used in these sorts of situations and it doesn't really help.

  "What we have got here is possibly 54 bodies found so far, with possibly 20 or 30 unaccounted for but we can't really verify these figures until the whole site is cleared.

  "Talking to people and talking to witnesses, even very credible witnesses, it just appears there was no wholesale killing.

Why did the Israeli Government object to the make-up of the fact-finding team?

  "I think Israel has a very valid point. The UN team was going to be made up of UN civil servants, and I think you would then get a very one-sided view of what happened in Jenin."

  "I think it is important that you do have military men and anti-terrorist experts on that UN commission.

  "I think it is unfair for a lawyer to go to Jenin to then build up a military picture of what happened. You do need a soldier's perspective to say, well, this was a close quarter battle in an urban environment, unfortunately soldiers will make mistakes and will throw a hand grenade through the wrong window, will shoot at a twitching curtain, because that is the way war is."

  Most Israeli journalists understand that facts matter (the Israeli press is often virulent in criticizing its own government): It is a good bet that if a mass killing occurred, they would report it sooner or later. Democratic Israel has a lively tradition of dissent. (Its Supreme Court recently granted an injunction to the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, plus two Arab Israeli Knesset members, forbidding the army from burying Jenin gunmen separately from civilians. A country that permits such legal manoeuvring in the middle of a war is unlikely to "cover up" a massacre for long.)

  In late April and May 2002, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch respectively released their reports. The HRW report stated that it found "no evidence to sustain claims of massacres or large-scale extra-judicial executions by the IDF", Amnesty International's report came to the same conclusion. They agreed with the total casualty figures provided by the IDF but claimed a higher proportion of civilian casualties.

While focusing mainly on the actions of the IDF, it adds that:

  Palestinian gunmen did endanger Palestinian civilians in the camp by using it as a base for planning and launching attacks, using indiscriminate tactics such as planting improvised explosive devices within the camp, and intermingling with the civilian population during armed conflict, and, in some cases, to avoid apprehension by Israeli forces.

  People died in Jenin, Arabs and Israeli both. Some were innocent bystanders, even women and children. Arab propagandists would have you believe that Israelis are racist and took the opportunity to engage in a massacre with a view to ethnic cleansing. That is clearly not the case.

  Most of those who are doing the dying these days were not yet born when the conflict began - they didn't want it, they didn't ask for it. Despite the fact that some elements in Palestinian society, and embarrassing as it is, a small percentage of Jews, are trying to make it into a religious war the dispute is over territory - pure and simple. The killing is not over scriptural disagreements.

  As a former soldier, this webmaster can tell you that urban house-to-house fighting is just about the most dangerous thing a soldier can do. A racist Israeli state bent on ethnic cleansing would have reduced Jenin, in its entirety, to rubble through the use of attack fighter-bombers, helicopters, artillery and tanks, putting few soldiers in danger. Jenin would now be a Jewish settlement named Tel something or other.

  That this did not happen, that the IDF used tactics guaranteed to result in a higher number of Israeli casualties, exposes the Palestinian lie of a massacre for what it is.

  Personal note to the Palestinians: My God! Jews do not relish killing Arabs and destroying their homes, but neither can they sit back and allow terrorist to slaughter their countrymen. Look at the harm terrorism is causing to the Palestinian economy. How many of your people and Israelis have to die - painfully, horribly? Jews and Arabs both are de-humanized by the violence. When you are ready for long, complicated and extremely painful (for both sides) negotiations there will be peace.