In April the Israeli army and Palestinian militias fought the battle of Jenin camp. Three months on, the dead are exacting vengeance. Graham Usher revisits a battleground haunted by ghosts. Click to view caption The centre of Jenin refugee camp still resembles an earthquake zone. There are still mountains of bulldozed earth, capped with avalanches of broken masonry, twisted metal girders and torn, faded clothes: the residue of what were once 168 buildings and homes to 450 Palestinian families. For eight days in April Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militiamen fought house-to-house, and sometimes hand-to-hand, through the camp's warren of breeze block shelters and sloping lanes: 54 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in the cruelest, most ferocious battle of the Intifada. I'd been there -- or near there -- when the battle was in full cry. I watched the smoke rise above the camp from a hillside lush with flowers. But I could not approach the fire. For 12 days the Israeli army barred entry to the camp to journalists, medics and officials. I was there when the camp's 14,000 inhabitants -- freed from curfew -- were finally allowed to pick over the rubble of their lives. I took notes as they sifted through destroyed rooms, counted their dead, searched and enquired frantically for the missing. I returned with dozens of journalists, diplomats and human rights workers. We were all trying to determine whether a massacre had occurred in the camp, as the Palestinians claimed, or whether the Israeli army had acted in accordance with the rules of war. The general consensus was that no massacre took place. But that the army had been negligent in its duty to spare innocent civilian lives: a negligence that could be construed as a war crime. The matter was never settled. The Israeli government refused to cooperate with a United Nations fact-finding mission that was supposed to investigate what had happened in Jenin. This week the UN will release its report on Jenin camp. It will focus less on the army's actions than on its denial of "humanitarian access", says a UN official. Finally, I witnessed the razed heart of the camp turn from an event into a shrine. On the ruins of homes mourning tents had been pitched, crowned with billowing Palestinian flags and murals celebrating the death or "martyrdom" of this or that Palestinian militia leader. The tents, flags and murals are gone now. The lanes are deserted and many of the homes abandoned. There are only their ghosts and my memories. I walk on a verandah. In April, I had sat there with a woman who told me her husband was a fighter from Hamas, and had died a martyr in defense of his home. "Where were you when the Jews were killing us?" she had charged. I remembered the vacancy of her daughter's eyes. Neither is at home. I pass by a house, now boarded up with a sign to beware of loose debris. Three months ago, I had choked back the stench of mortality to see three corpses inside, each one burnt to a blackened pulp. There is nothing now: not a trace of their lives and deaths, not even a plaque -- only the flies that still lodge in the corners of your mouth. There is only wall after wall plastered with the bleached portraits of the camp's 23 suicide bombers. Sprayed on one is an edict scrawled in English. "We shall not forgive or forget," it says. Three months on, the world has largely forgiven Israel's actions inside Jenin camp. After US President George Bush's speech on the Israel- Palestinian conflict on 24 June, they have become local acts of self-defense in the global war against terrorism and evidence of the need for Palestinian "reform". It has certainly forgotten the Palestinian homeless. Three thousand from the camp have yet to be re-housed, even in tents. But the ghosts have not forgotten or forgiven. They are active still. Last week Palestinian guerrillas and suicide bombers struck again in the West Bank and Tel Aviv, leaving 12 dead. They hailed from the West Bank city of Nablus. But they drew their inspiration from the dead -- in Jenin and every other Palestinian town, village and refugee camp. "We've been happy these last days," says Mohamed from Jenin, who refuses to give another name. "The military operations [in Israel and the West Bank] show Ariel Sharon's policies won't work, they will not bring Israel's security. They only create more suicide bombers." In the wake of the latest Palestinian attacks Israel said it was considering new batteries of "deterrence" against the bombers: arrest of relatives, demolition of homes, deportation to Gaza. Mohamed shrugs his shoulders. "What do their punishments mean to us? We are like rats against certain kinds of poison. We've become immune to death," he says.
