Perfume bottles for the diggers to sweeten the acrid air

April 19, 2002


Broken concrete hung precariously above dusty Palestinians as they sifted through the rubble of a home in Jenin refugee camp yesterday in a grisly search for corpses. "Careful, look for the body parts," said one of the excavators, handing up a sheet filled with dirt to helpers standing on the heaped remains of the house.--Christine Hauser reports from Jenin

Using household brooms, Palestinians with green surgical face masks to ward off the stench gently brushed away the dust, gradually uncovering chunks of flesh and bones. Above them, the upper storey of the shattered building threatened to cave in.

Flies swarmed as what appeared to be a broken rib-cage and other body pieces were lifted from the ruins, loaded on to a stretcher and carted off across the hillocks of rubble that now make up much of the centre of the camp.

Those nearby handed out perfume bottles for workers to try to sweeten the acrid air. Israel, which lost 23 soldiers in Jenin, has described the place as the "camp of terror", saying it was the source of many suicide bombings. It has said the Palestinian death toll was about 70 people, the vast majority of them militants.

Jenin's hospital director, Mr Muhammed Abu Ghali, said 36 bodies had been recovered so far, but the final toll could soar to between 200 and 400 as workers slowly sift through the ruins of the devastated camp in the weeks and months ahead.

Palestinians have struggled to find enough places to keep the decomposing corpses. In the garden of Abu Ghali's hospital, small mounds of earth mark the temporary graves of some 15 bodies recovered from the camp.

Wafa al-Amer clawed over the freshly dug dirt in the hospital grounds on Thursday that covers her dead husband, Ziad, wiping the mud over her face.

Facades of houses in the camp were scraped clean away by Israeli bulldozers or explosives, exposing their interiors like children's doll's houses. Chinaware was still balanced on shelves; family pictures hung on the walls for all to see.

Islam Abed pulled a shredded Koran from a window sill of one broken building and leafed through its pages, kissing it gently and touching the Muslim holy book to his forehead in respect.

Some refugees scrabbled for belongings in what remained of their homes, wary that as they dug for family possessions they could uncover more gruesome finds.

Zaki Saleh Hindi (36) fled his home with his family when four Palestinian gunmen raced into the house as the fighting raged elsewhere in the camp. Now his home, like so many others, is largely a mound of crumpled masonry.

"Everything I had was destroyed. Maybe the four are under the rubble now," Hindi said as he and his brother clawed at the ruins in search of their wives' jewellery that could be sold to help support their families.

The Israeli army has blamed Palestinian militants for much of the destruction, saying they planted bombs and booby-traps aimed at killing soldiers.