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."
In separate interviews Wednesday, the sergeant and another Israeli reservist who fought in Jenin, Sgt. Shlomi Lanyado, offered a detailed account of the battle from the perspective of the Israeli forces. The Jenin combat was the heaviest of the recent military operation that Israel launched in the West Bank after a string of suicide bombings. Both sergeants participated in the house-to-house combat in the center of the densely built refugee camp.
The 10-day battle claimed the lives of 23 Israeli soldiers and at least 50 Palestinians – more may be buried beneath the rubble – and left the center of the camp in ruins. Israeli officials say most of the dead Palestinians were armed fighters who had turned the camp into a "nest of terror" used to launch suicide bombings against Israelis.
Palestinians say most of the dead were civilians and have accused the Israeli military of committing a massacre in Jenin, which Israel has denied. Israel and the U.N. Security Council are now arguing over the composition of a U.N. team charged with investigating the battle.
The sergeants' accounts add up to only a small piece of a much larger picture. Their recollections are parallel in some respects, but do not provide a comprehensive account of the battle.
Both sergeants have returned to civilian life, and spoke without the presence of Israeli army press officers.
The soldiers described a lack of preparation by Israeli reservists. They were hastily mustered from civilian life less than two weeks before, and were told to expect a Palestinian surrender within three days, the sergeants said. They spent barely a day rehearsing the operation. They also described the trauma of losing close friends in battle.
They expressed grudging admiration for a mostly unseen enemy that had meticulously planned for the assault, stockpiling ammunition, food and medical supplies as well as crude but effective bombs made frommetal canisters filled with phosphate and acetone.
"I can't be contemptuous of them," said Lanyado, 32, a cheerful, animated stage actor and producer who lives in a high-rise near Tel Aviv with his wife and two small children. "Somebody there had thought very much what to do and how to fight and succeeded for 10 or 11 days against a very big army."
Both Lanyado and the other sergeant said they do not believe that Israeli soldiers intentionally killed Palestinian civilians. Lanyado said he and the other members of his platoon went out of their way to treat Palestinians with respect, providing them with water and once summoning a medic to treat an elderly man who collapsed in his bedroom.
The other sergeant, however, said he was troubled not only by the order to fire through open windows without specific, identifiable targets, but also by what he said were insufficient efforts by the army to allow civilians to leave their homes in safety. He also questioned the decision to use bulldozers to knock down houses at a time when he said the fighting had mostly subsided.
Neither soldier said he was aware of Israeli troops using noncombatants as human shields, to open doors, closets or packages that could be booby-trapped, as Palestinians have charged. Both sergeants acknowledged, however, that soldiers often drafted Palestinians to knock on neighbors' doors as the soldiers moved from house to house in search of gunmen and terrorist suspects.
"The thought was that if there was a gunman behind the door, he'll think twice before spraying the whole door," said the sergeant with the heavy weapons company.
Both sergeants said the practice was aimed at saving Palestinian as well as Israeli lives. Israeli military spokesmen denied that Palestinian civilians were deliberately put at risk. The spokesmen said that from the first day of the assault, Israeli forces broadcast regular warnings over loudspeakers in Arabic offering residents a chance to leave the camp in safety and fighters a chance to surrender. They said bulldozers were brought in only as a last resort following the death of 13 soldiers in an ambush.
"Most of the civilians in the camp left very early on, which the [army] facilitated," a military spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal, said today. Those who remained behind, he added, were "mostly terrorists." Dallal said houses were fired upon only if they were identified as "sources of fire."
The sergeants were called to active duty on March 17, about two weeks before the start of Israel's offensive in the West Bank. Israeli intelligence had identified the camp as a center of operations for two militant groups, the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, as well as fighters affiliated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
On Monday, April 1, Lanyado said, he and other members of the company rehearsed their mission – to round up terrorists and gunmen – using empty buildings at an army base near Jenin. "We practiced knocking on the door and then waiting" to one side, he recalled.
In general, they said, the mood was relaxed. "We were told specifically that once the Palestinians see the tanks, they'll give up," the other sergeant said. "Those were the words my company commander told us."
The mood changed abruptly, however, on April 3, when the first soldiers set off down Antennae Hill, so named for two large radio towers atop the hill, which slopes toward the two- and three-story houses at the edge of the camp. The Palestinian gunfire was much heavier than the Israelis anticipated and it quickly claimed its first victim, Maj. Moshe Gerstner, felled by a bullet to the throat.
"We began to understand that the Palestinians are taking this very seriously," said Lanyado, who later that day led a squad of six men into the first row of houses. They spent the night inside one that had been abandoned. The next morning, "I got a call to bring a medic" to a house about 75 yards down the hill, Lanyado recalled. He raced toward the house, with bullets singing past his head. "This was the fastest running I've ever done," he said. "I don't know how the bullets didn't hit me. I was saying to myself, 'I'm going to fall.' "
He entered the house to find that a friend and company medic, Aynon Sharaabi, had been fatally wounded in the side by a ricochet, moments after washing in the kitchen, then binding his arm with a ritual leather strap, in preparation for morning prayers.
At that moment, "we started the war," Lanyado said.
A similar realization was dawning among the members of the Israeli heavy weapons company, which had remained up the hill in a supporting role. On the third day, said the sergeant with the company, he and his men were ordered to fire on a group of five or six houses to "soften the target" and "wake up the snipers" so they would shoot back and expose their locations.
After a few days, Lanyado and his men left the western side of the camp and moved to another area farther down the hill. It was too dangerous to travel in the open, he said, so the soldiers used sledgehammers to create a tunnel through the houses as they worked their way toward the center of the camp.
On one occasion, Lanyado recalled, he and his men burst through a wall to find 16 Palestinians – four women, two men and 10 children – sitting stiffly in a living room, "almost like they were waiting for us." Lanyado, the son of an Egyptian Jew, said he spoke to the family in Arabic to try to put them at ease, then passed out candy to the children after first popping a piece into his mouth to show them it wasn't poisoned.
As the Israelis penetrated deeper into the camp, the other sergeant's heavy weapons company could no longer fire from the hill without jeopardizing soldiers below. At that point, the sergeant said, he and his comrades moved into the camp as well, picking their way through streets and houses strewn with booby traps.
One such trap, he said, consisted of a loose tile that concealed two metal plates separated by a scrap of sponge. Anyone who stepped on the tile, he said, would have completed an electrical circuit and triggered a homemade bomb. Lanyado and his squad had many similar encounters.
"There were a lot of bombs in every place," Lanyado recalled. "You would see a door partly open, and there would be a wire that was connected to one of these soda canisters."
The other sergeant disputed official assertions that the army had made every effort to empty the camp of civilians. "The civilians, they never got a real chance to get out," he said.
He recalled that on the fifth day, he was inside an armored personnel carrier broadcasting appeals in Arabic for fighters to surrender. The commander of the vehicle, he said, asked a senior officer who was riding with them why they did not broadcast the appeal on more than one street. According to the sergeant, the officer replied, " 'These are my orders. Do you really think the brigade wants to give them a chance to give up?' "
The sergeant said there were still plenty of civilians inside the camp during the period of the fiercest fighting. On guard duty inside a house one night, he recalled, he heard a baby crying unattended for hours in an adjacent building. Fearing that the mother was dead, he asked an officer to investigate. But the officer said it might be a trap. "He said, 'I'm sorry. I wish I could, but I can't,' " the sergeant recalled.
Toward the end of the battle, he said, he was peering out the hatch of an armored personnel carrier when he noticed a young man in bluejeans crawling on his hands and knees through the rubble. His platoon commander, a lieutenant, who was in another vehicle ahead of him, ordered the man in Arabic to stop, then fired a warning shot. But the man kept crawling toward the vehicles.
Fearing a suicide bomber, the lieutenant shot him dead, he recalled.
Lanyado said his men often asked him why they didn't use more aggressive tactics and were greatly relieved when commanders decided to send in the bulldozers.
"All the time the soldiers asked me, 'Why aren't we using more strength?' " Lanyado recalled. " 'Why do I have to go from house to house and maybe not come back?' " Lanyado said he has been shocked, since hanging up his uniform, by the international storm of criticism over Israeli tactics in Jenin. "I'm ready to speak with anyone, to look them in the eye and tell them that I and my soldiers, we were as clean as we could be," he said.
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