The Battle of Jenin

In late March 2002, after a month in which Palestinian suicide bombings killed more than 130 Israelis — thirty of them at a Passover seder in Netanya — Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, reoccupying the major cities of the West Bank. The fiercest resistance came in Jenin refugee camp, where for roughly ten days in early April Palestinian fighters battled Israeli troops in alleys and booby-trapped houses. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers were killed, thirteen of them in a single ambush on 9 April.

Palestinian officials initially spoke of a massacre, and a figure of five hundred dead circulated widely in the international press. Subsequent investigations found the documented toll far lower, though still grave: Human Rights Watch confirmed 52 Palestinian dead, at least 22 of them civilians, and a report by the UN Secretary-General reached a similar figure while cautioning that full verification had been impossible — Israel had refused to cooperate with the UN fact-finding team, which was disbanded before ever deploying. The exact civilian toll remains contested.

What is not contested is the destruction. Army bulldozers razed the Hawashin district at the camp’s center, leaving hundreds of families homeless. Human Rights Watch documented unlawful killings, the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, and the denial of medical access to the wounded, concluding that some of the acts it documented amounted to war crimes.