Under the rubble of the refugee camp

摘要

Many facts are known, others are still contested. On April 2nd the Israeli army invaded Jenin as part of its military operations to root out the Palestinian "terrorist infrastructure" which, in Israel's mind, now includes the Palestinian Authority. The conquest took three days. Then the army laid siege to the refugee camp just outside the town. The camp had been among the prime targets of Israel's assault on the West Bank, along with the casbah in Nablus and the Palestinian gunmen sheltering in churches in Bethlehem's old city. Huddled on a northern mountain-side lush with cypress trees, it has long been a bastion of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and, recently, of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Of the 100 Palestinian suicide bombers in the 18 months of the intifada, 23 were bred in its warren of poverty, breezeblock shelters, sloping lanes and a militant brew of Palestinian nationalism and radical Islam. "The Palestinian Authority doesn't really exist here. It's the fighters who run things," said a camp resident, before the invasion.