April 12, 2002	Friday	Muharram 28, 1423

JENIN, April 11: Israeli troops who subdued Palestinian towns with little trouble early in a West Bank offensive ran into “hell” in the northern refugee camp of Jenin, soldiers fresh from the battle said.

The town looked eerily becalmed from the vantage point of a nearby hilltop army camp where the mood was strikingly relaxed.

Soldiers posed for snaps on top of tanks, others called home on their cell phones, taking in a pep talk from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, one of Israel’s most revered army generals and a veteran of all the Arab-Israeli wars.

The troops told reporters that Jenin had proven the worst shock to the Middle East’s most vaunted army in an 18-month-old Palestinian uprising.

Thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed on Tuesday in a double-barrelled ambush of pinpoint timing in which Palestinians blew up a building being searched by one unit and then poured gunfire on a second unit racing in to rescue the first.

Israelis also took many more wounded in Jenin than elsewhere. There were muffled booms of tank fire and smoke and dust billowing into the air above Jenin on Wednesday, and soldiers said the battle was not quite over yet, although they had established control.

The ambush punctuated days of pitched, close-quarter fighting between Israeli armoured forces struggling to manoeuvre in the narrow, twisting streets of Jenin, especially its refugee camp, and bands of Palestinian fighters.

“It was hell the last two days in Jenin. They were firing from everywhere to everywhere — it was scary and crazy,” said Corporal Yaron Zeltzer, 20, a gunner in a company of armoured combat vehicles with anti-aircraft calibre machineguns.

TOUGHER AND TOUGHER: “It got tougher and tougher for us as we moved from a pretty easy beginning in Ramallah up to Nablus and then Jenin,” said Zeltzer, whose unit was getting 24 hours of leave from action while others arrived, some with flatbed trucks carrying tanks.

The Israeli army launched its now 13-day-old blitz in Ramallah, where it quelled resistance with few casualties and marooned Palestinian President Arafat in his compound.

Qalqilya and Tulkarm, in the central West Bank, were seized after brief, isolated clashes. Moving north was another story.

Nablus, the biggest Palestinian-ruled city in the West Bank, put up a tough fight in its mediaeval casbah district, and then Jenin became a cauldron.

“We usually could not even get out of our tanks and APCs (armoured personnel carriers) because the shooting was so close and so intense,” said Sergeant Dov Rifken, a tank gunner, looking forward to a shower for the first time in a week.

“The Palestinians were very well prepared for us in Jenin, where there is a particularly hard core of terrorists. All of our deaths and injuries I think were from bombs which were hidden well in many different places — in sewers, for example, even in women’s purses,” said Zeltzer.

“The ambush was a very big shock but in war anything can happen,” said 20-year-old tank commander Oded Ben Aroya.

“Jenin was the worst I’ve ever experienced,” said Rifken, as a comrade methodically applied fresh black polish on boots caked with dust, a hot spring sun beating down.

Palestinians have accused the army of indiscriminate, excessive use of force in its sweep into West Bank towns.

Residents of reoccupied cities say Israeli troops have killed and wounded many civilians, bulldozed houses and driven tanks over cars without cause and blocked local medical services from fetching casualties or removing bodies from streets.

The Israeli army says it has done its utmost not to hurt civilians but that guerillas hunkered down in densely populated casbahs and refugee camps have complicated that policy.

It also says it has targeted only buildings where guerillas have spurned calls to give up or those that are booby-trapped or harbour “bomb laboratories”.

As Rifken spoke, a busload of blindfolded Palestinian prisoners passed by en route over the nearby “green line” border to an unknown destination in Israel.

Powell in Amman: US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in Amman Thursday night that the United States will move aggressively on bringing an end to the Israeli-Palestinian violence.

“We look forward to move aggressively with respect to political action,” Powell said at a joint press conference with his Jordanian counterpart Marwan Moasher.

Powell vowed to “move aggressively to get a political track started so that security is restored ... while confidence is being built up as provided for in Tenet and Mitchell.”

That was a reference to the two peace plans drawn up last year with the aim of bringing an end to the Palestinian uprising.

“The political process in Mitchell has to be accelerated and extended upon in order to show the Palestinian people that there is hope out there for them to have their own state side by side with Israel,” Powell said.—Reuters