NP - I might not ever get home

[David Morris]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50986-2002Apr25.html

JERUSALEM, April 25 -- It was the second day of the battle for the Jenin 
refugee camp, and things were going badly for the Israelis. Palestinian 
gunmen, firing from sandbags hidden behind curtained windows, had pinned 
down advancing Israeli troops on the camp's western edge. Two Israelis had 
already died.

To a young Israeli army sergeant watching from a nearby rise known as 
Antennae Hill, perhaps 400 yards above the camp, it was clear that his 
commanders had been wrong when they had confidently predicted a few days 
earlier that the Palestinians would surrender at the first sight of 
approaching tanks.

That's when he heard the orders to open fire.

"The orders were to shoot at each house," recalled the sergeant, a member of 
a heavy weapons company in the Yoav regiment of the army's Fifth Brigade, a 
reserve unit that did the bulk of the fighting in Jenin. "The words on the 
radio were to 'Put a bullet in each window.' "

The sergeant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was troubled by 
the orders, which did not require soldiers to actually see the gunmen they 
were trying to kill. But he said the Israeli soldiers didn't hesitate. They 
pounded a group of cinder-block homes -- the apparent source of Palestinian 
sniper fire -- with .50-caliber machine guns, M-24 sniper rifles, Barrett 
sniper rifles and Mod3 grenade launchers.

"It's not true there was a massacre, because guys did not shoot at civilians 
just like this," the sergeant recalled. "However -- and this is terrible -- 
it is true that we shot at houses, and God knows how many innocent people 
got killed."





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