Naught for your comfort

摘要

By now it is a footnote, but Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, has at last published his report on last April's battle at Jenin, the West Bank refugee camp where the Palestinians accused Israel of massacring up to 500 civilians. He concludes that although the Israelis and Palestinians alike were guilty of breaking some of the rules of war, there was no massacre. All the claims at the time about some 500 dead being buried beneath the rubble, or carted off for secret burial in refrigerated lorries, turn out to have been so much nonsense. It now seems that the Palestinian death toll in Jenin was 52, of whom non-combatants numbered 14 (says Israel) or about 20 (say various human-rights organisations). It is true, as groups such as Human Rights Watch have pointed out, that Israel's refusal to co-operate forced Mr Annan to rely on secondhand sources. He was not able to investigate allegations that a few of the Palestinians were killed in cold blood, or that Israeli soldiers used civilians as human shields. But not even Human Rights Watch quibbles with the numbers. And though the killing of up to 20 civilians is no light matter, Mr Annan's report accepts that this was in the course of a fierce battle between Israel's soldiers (of whom 23 were killed) and up to 200 gunmen who had made the cramped camp their base.