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The War Zone: Israelis Respond to Jenin Incident; Teenager Gives First-Hand Account of Bethlehem Standoff

Aired April 18, 2002 - 20:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANNOUNCER: LIVE FROM THE WAR ZONE.

Ground zero for a deadly battle.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is horrifying. Lots of other corpses, and the stenches are its own story.

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ANNOUNCER: We'll hear from a U.N. envoy just back from the Jenin refugee camp, and get the Israeli response.

Surviving a standoff. A teenage boy escapes from Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity and gives us a first-hand account.

President Bush praises his secretary of state's mission to the Middle East.

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GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Progress is being made toward our vision.

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ANNOUNCER: In Afghanistan, friendly fire turns deadly. A bomb from an American fighter jet kills four Canadian soldiers.

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DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: Some very fine coalition partners of ours from our neighbor to the north in Canada were killed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: A homecoming three decades in the making. Afghanistan's exiled king comes home.

LIVE FROM THE WAR ZONE. Christiane Amanpour in Jerusalem.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good evening. We planned to bring you those two main stories tonight. We will go live to Kabul for both the heartbreaking story of those Canadians killed, and the joy of the king, whose return trying to be a unifier after 29 years, after more than two decades of war in Afghanistan.

And here, the ongoing crisis in Israel and in the occupied territories. First, from here, it was exactly three weeks ago that Israel began Operation Defensive Shield in response to a string of suicide bombings, and the latest one being that Passover seder bombing that killed more than 20 people.

Israel says that all its forces will be out of most of those areas in the West Bank by Sunday, except for in Ramallah and Bethlehem. And Israel says that by Thursday evening here, Israeli time, all its forces should have been out of Jenin. And it's in Jenin where so many questions persist, as CNN's Sheila MacVicar now reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SHEILA MACVICAR, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The stench has become unbearable. Underneath that mountain of rubble in the heart of Jenin camp are decomposing bodies. No one knows how many, or how they died -- in the fighting, or crushed by Israeli bulldozers. The Israelis say they called on people to surrender. The people say some of their family members did not have time to escape.

People are digging at the cement and twisted steel with their hands. They have no tools, and there is only one bulldozer. This man found the body of his brother. "They've destroyed us," he says. "They have left us with nothing."

All through the camp, people cyst through the ruins of their homes trying to salvage something. "There was a three-story house here," she says, "and now nothing."

Another street, another family. "We need our passports, I.D. cards, birth certificates, money, anything," he says, "just something to prove our existence."

As international concern grows, for the first time the U.N.'s envoy was allowed into the camp to see the destruction for himself.

TERJE ROED-LARSEN, U.N. MIDDLE EAST ENVOY: However, just the objective for such a military operation might have been, the means which had been used here are totally unacceptable and morally repugnant.

COL. MIRI EISIN, ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES: Israel is fighting a legitimate fight.

MACVICAR: On a hillside overlooking the camp, Israeli officers angrily refuted allegations of a massacre. This is their war against terrorism. Jenin, they say, was its capital. They make no apologies for their tactics.

EISIN: Israel is not here standing and saying, whoa, everything hunky dory. Everything is not hunky dory. Bad things happened. The center of that camp was destroyed.

MACVICAR: The scale of that destruction made clear in their aerial surveillance photographs. The Israeli military said they plan to withdraw all its forces from the refugee camp in Jenin city on Thursday night. That will meet one demand of the international committee.

(on camera): Another demand is that aid workers be immediately permitted in with food and medicine. U.N. officials say this has already been a humanitarian disaster, and without that aid and quickly, they say, it will become a catastrophe.

Sheila MacVicar, CNN, Jenin.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: I spoke to that U.N. official that you saw there in Sheila's report just now, Terje Roed-Larsen, the U.N. representative here to Israel and the territories. The U.N. had asked for the last 11 days to gain access to Jenin, even after the fighting had stopped. It only just came through that permission yesterday, and we spoke to Terje Larsen about what he saw and what he said needs to be done.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROED-LARSEN: The scene was horrifying and shocking. Both as concerns what we saw, what we heard, and what we smelled. The smell was horrible, of decaying corpses below the rubble. And we saw, for instance, a 12-year-old boy being -- with some people who were digging with their hands, digging him out, and burned, a completely demolished body.

We saw, for instance, two brothers who were digging out their father and their other brothers below the rubble, their corpses in pieces. It was horrible, an absolutely unbelievable scene.

And what we also know after our visit is that there must be about 2,000 people that don't have roofs above their heads. They need shelter immediately. We also know that there is an acute need of food, water and medicine.

The electricity system is completely destroyed. The water pipes are cut. It is a scenery of catastrophe of major proportions. It looks as if there's been an earthquake there.

AMANPOUR: The Israelis deny all the charges of massacre. They say what happened here was a very fierce battle, and they admit that there were major casualties, both on their side and on the Palestinian side. What do you think happened? Are you ready to make accusations, or are you basically now evaluating? What do you think is the reality of what happened?

ROED-LARSEN: I cannot judge at this point in time. I can only report on what I saw, and what I heard, and what I smelled. I cannot say that there wasn't a massacre, but I cannot say that there was a massacre. But I think that the question of an international investigation is a highly relevant question on the basis of what I saw. And I think it is now necessary to penetrate, to find out exactly what is the situation there and why did it happen.

AMANPOUR: So what needs to happen now? Aid agencies have said they can't begin to search under the rubble because there's not the equipment. What are you asking for now?

ROED-LARSEN: First and foremost, we are asking for two things. One is that international search and rescue teams are allowed to go in immediately. And there are reasons for criticizing severely the government for Israel for not themselves conducting such a search and rescue operation.

And what I could see for the few hours that I was there today, the people with their bare hands digging out bodies, that should have been done by the Israeli military occupiers at the time they were there.

Now the government of Israel have to give us access to get access with proper expertise and the proper instruments for doing such a search in an effective manner. Then secondly, equally important is that you get them food, medicine and water to the needy population, and also to build temporary shelters for the thousands of people, about half of them being under the age of 15, that are now suffering in there.

And also, this of course comes second. There is a situation of an anarchy and chaos, not only in the refugee camp, but in the city and the government. The Palestinian Authority institutions are more or less destroyed. There is no security apparatus, there is no police functions, there is no apparatus to take care of law and order. The situation is very dangerous.

And I would like to add that the situation is not only dangerous for the population there; the situation is also, security-wise, dangerous for Israelis and Palestinians alike. Because it may be that the infrastructure of the terrorists have been destroyed or damaged there. But what is more important is that there is now built a mental infrastructure of hatred and aggression, which is very dangerous.

AMANPOUR: The Palestinians have charged the Israelis with war crimes. They point to not allowing ambulances throughout the battles and even thereafter from evacuating wounded, even the dead. They point to the use of human shields. And, of course the Israelis accuse Yasser Arafat of war crimes for sending suicide bombers into Israel.

What, in terms of international law, happened, do you think? How does one describe not allowing ambulances in, using human shields?

ROED-LARSEN: I would not at this stage go into a legal discussion. What I can say is that it's evident, because international humanitarian organizations have not been given access. That there are very clear violations of basic humanitarian principles. But I would not like to go into the legal issues right now. But it's evident from what I saw today that the question is relevant.

AMANPOUR: You are going to have, or gather together a meeting of some of the major donors to deal presumably with the devastation, the infrastructure devastation that has taken place over the last weeks in the Palestinian territories. What is the level of need there in the territories?

ROED-LARSEN: I cannot assess that here and now. There will, next Wednesday, on the 24th in Oslo be a major donor meeting, where my office, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and others will give an assessment of what is needed here. But it is very evident that major donor effort is required, because what we have been reporting from Jenin today is also by and large the case in many other of the Palestinian cities.

AMANPOUR: In terms of the civilian infrastructure?

ROED-LARSEN: Exactly. And also as concerns rebuilding of infrastructure, and not the least rebuilding Palestinian institutions which can carry the society for the next months. Because the Palestinian Authority institutions are so damaged that they're not very well functioning any longer.

AMANPOUR: On that note, thank you very much for joining us.

ROED-LARSEN: Pleasure being with you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: And joining me here now, in Jerusalem, is Colonel Miri Eisen, an intelligence official with the Israeli Defense Forces. Colonel, thank you for joining us. First of all, I want to ask you directly, what the international community and certainly the U.N. representative has been asking for, and that is Israeli help in shifting the rubble. Heavy bulldozers, heavy equipment to move the rubble after what has happened there, to find out exactly what is under the rubble.

MIRI EISEN, ISRAELI DEFENSE FORCES: The rubble itself is one of the issues that the international world is talking about. We have been taking care of the rubble at the beginning, but mainly to try and find the booby traps. The structures themselves that were knocked down, were knocked down with an incredible amount of booby traps within them. When I say booby traps, I am talking about explosives within the structures, surrounding the structures.

We found them inside refrigerators, along the road. That's the reason the structures were knocked down in the first place. And that's one of the problems of clearing them out.

AMANPOUR: Now that they have been knocked down, and presumably the booby traps have gone off under the force of those explosions and the destruction of all of that infrastructure, journalists are there, aid workers are there, people are there now. Will you bring in? Will you help in this humanitarian effort with the heavy equipment that they don't have on the other side? EISEN: I think that is one of the questions that we'll be asked at the moment, but we will try and send in. We have tried until now, and not stopped. One of the problems we have at the moment is trying to go against a pack of lies at this stage along the way, of what we did or did not do. Because when we were stopping along the way, ambulances and checking them, not not allowing them into the camp during the fighting, but also during the fighting and after it. It was because we found within those ambulances terrorist's explosives, a very cynical use of ambulance ambulances.

At the moment we have not tried to stop or hinder any of the work going on. We sent in our home front units to help out in different structures. We ourselves have already found different people still wounded under the rubble after nine days. As you know, we ourselves are the ones in the world who have a lot of unhappy experience in the fallen structures.

AMANPOUR: What do you say to people who are asking questions? And not only that, the Israeli process is quite full of anecdotes, if you like, reports from Israeli soldiers themselves. I have heard one Israeli soldier say what we did in Jenin was Vietnam. I have heard them talk about the process of using these images, and explaining why they did it. Because they feared the rooms or the houses were booby trapped -- this and that.

How do you answer those things that are coming from your own side? Is that something that the Israeli Defense Force sanctioned? The systematic use of human shields?

EISEN: The Israeli Defense Forces have the highest morals. And when we went into the camp itself, just the fact that we went in as an infantry shows our own moral values. What would have been easier than to go in without any of the officers or infantry soldiers killed there and bomb with an F-16. We didn't do so.

We didn't use any civilians as human shields. I have heard some of the other side, also...

AMANPOUR: Your own soldiers are saying that.

EISEN: Our own soldiers who have not posed themselves with any names with any names whatsoever. I oppose that on both sides. People who have things to say...

AMANPOUR: Names have been posed, though.

EISEN: We go also and have been trying to find these people. You've probably also read about the fact that there have been different people who have been brought to trial for different things that they have done, because we stand behind our own moral standard.

There was a harsh fight within the city of Jenin. That's definite.

AMANPOUR: That's clear and we know that many soldiers were killed, particularly in that booby trap incident. But, I guess, what I want to ask you is this: You say that you went in an infantry. Obviously that is true to an extent. But you also went in with armored bulldozers. You just talked about bulldozing these houses because of booby traps.

There were also helicopter gunships which were firing in that area. That has been recorded and seen. The secretary of state to the United States warned Israel that -- about the excessive use of force in military operations. And the U.N. director, here, has said you had a just cause but the means, he felt, were unacceptable and excessive. And, in fact, I think he used the word morally repugnant?

Do you have any answer at all? Do you feel that maybe it was excessive even under the circumstances that you describe?

EISEN: Not only do I go -- I don't accept that because of the amount of casualties we had, which is because we tried to do it pinpointed and not with our heavy guns. We didn't use a cannon or artillery anywhere. We did not use an airplane anywhere.

The gunships themselves when you talk about the helicopters, the helicopter firing a missile is a very pinpointed exact missile. It does not make a structure fall down. It hits in a window. Yes, it will destroy the one building itself, not the building itself only the room that it hits into. That was only used in assistance. Mainly in that type of fighting was only in Jenin.

And if you look in the other cities we went in this operation into six cities within Judea and Samaria. You do not have the destruction like the center in the camp. There's one point I would like to make. In Jenin, itself, the reason that we went in there, the Passover massacre that you mentioned before. The fact that 29 people were killed and that the suicide bombers themselves were mainly coming out of Jenin.

In the last year and a half, 28 suicide bombers came out of the camp of Jenin. And it was the Palestinians themselves in their own general intelligence report, who called Jenin the capital of suicide bombers.

AMANPOUR: Do you think -- and this is the last question we have. We have no time left. Do you think that this will eradicate suicide bombing?

EISEN: No, I don't. And we've never said that. This operation goes in and where we are, it makes a huge difference. There's been a huge difference in the amount of terrorist attacks within Israel over the last two weeks during this operation. Any city that we're within, it makes a big difference. When we evacuate a city, yes they do come back.

The more that we find them, arrest them, find the explosives and find the people, for us, less suicide bombers in our cities.

AMANPOUR: On that note, thank you very much. When we come back after a short break we'll have much more LIVE FROM JERUSALEM.

ANNOUNCER: Next, no longer besieged in Bethlehem. Christiane speaks with a Palestinian teenager who is caught up in the conflict.

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AMANPOUR: Sixteen-year-old Jihad Abdul Rahman (ph) managed to escape on Monday. He says those still inside are determined never to surrender.

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ANNOUNCER: A first-person view of conditions inside the Church of Nativity when we return. And later, a deadly day in Afghanistan. A mistake in the sky leaves four Canadian paratroopers dead on the ground.

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ANNOUNCER: The Church of the Nativity is built above a cave which is believed to have held the manger where Jesus was born. The original church was built nearly 1,700 years ago.

AMANPOUR: This is one of the holiest sites for Christians around the world, and for the past three weeks it has been the scene of one of the fiercest standoffs between the Israelis and the Palestinians who are holed up inside. Just tonight, as so many nights over the past few weeks, there has been more activity as the Israelis attempt to wait out some 250 Palestinians, including, we're told, armed Palestinians, police and security officials, who belong to the Palestinian Authority, who took refuge there sometime before April 3.

Today we spoke to a young 16-year-old boy who had gone to that church to take some food and cigarettes to a friend of his who was inside, and who got trapped there because the Israelis sealed off the doors.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR (voice-over): In Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers maintain their long vigil outside the Church of the Nativity, patrolling streets and rubble-strewn side alleys of this historic old city.

Residents who have been confined for nearly three weeks by a curfew peer nervously from their battle-scarred homes. And below on this day, a group of American and European peace activists tries unsuccessfully to make a token gesture to the Palestinians holed up inside the church.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: All we're carrying is food, soldier, and you know that.

AMANPOUR (on camera): It's not clear how long this standoff will continue. The Palestinians so far have rejected an Israeli proposal whereby those people who they want will either be tried in Israel or deported and exiled forever.

(voice-over): 16-year-old Jihad Abdul Rahman managed to escape on Monday. He says those still inside are determined never to surrender.

"I heard them say the Israelis shouldn't think about us giving up," he says. "We are going to stay here even if we die." Jihad says they had hoped Secretary of State Colin Powell would resolve their situation.

He says about 250 people remain inside the church. "Half of them are police and security men from the Palestinian Authority," he says. "About 40 to 50 are civilians, and about 10 or 15 people are kids my age. The Palestinian Authority people are armed with Kalashnikovs, nothing else."

He said there are no militants in the church, although the Israeli government insists there are about 30 terrorists on their wanted list inside.

Indeed, when Jihad escaped by scaling the church compound walls, he says Israeli soldiers who interrogated him asked for specific people, such as a suspected member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which has sent suicide bombers into Israel.

"They asked, is Ahmad Al-Mughrabi (ph) inside? I said, no. They said, hey, boy, don't lie. I said, no. The men inside got information on the phone that he had been killed."

In an effort the flush the men out, the Israeli army has been blaring loudspeakers, firing stun grenades and firing bullets into the air. An overhead balloon keeps a constant eye.

The IDF claims these pictures from that balloon shows a struggle, a group of men preventing one among them preventing from trying to escape the church complex. Jihad says his interrogators asked whether their psychological warfare was having an effect.

"The officer asked me about morale inside the church. I said it was good. He asked when they hear our loudspeakers, does that lower morale? I said, no, they can hardly hear them. He asked, when they hear the shooting, are they scared? I said, no."

But Jihad paints an otherwise grim picture of life inside, with meager food rations and the smell of filthy bodies and rotting wounds.

The IDF has now evacuated a couple of the injured, one of them, says Jihad, had a nervous breakdown. The other had been hit by shrapnel near the door of the basilica when the Israelis sealed it early on. For days, he had laid with his intestines exposed, giving off a horrible stench.

Jihad's parents said they would never have allowed their son anywhere near the church if they had known he wanted to go and see a friend who was inside. Jihad said he got trapped when the Israelis blasted the doors shut. He says he finally escaped after two weeks because he was hungry and bored.

(END VIDEOTAPE) AMANPOUR: The Israelis say they will pull out all their forces by Sunday, except in Bethlehem and Ramallah. Now, we've just been told, it's just been confirmed to us by an Israeli colonel of the IDF that the Israeli army has conducted a military operation, indeed one that is still ongoing, into Gaza. This is an area that has escaped largely unscathed in the last three weeks of this military operation. The Israelis say that at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, they were conducting, quote, "routine operations," when they say they were under attack by grenades from the edge of a Palestinian refugee camp. They say they responded. The operation is ongoing. Apparently, one Palestinian was killed.

The IDF spokesman, the IDF colonel told us that this is not a situation where the Israeli forces will remain inside Gaza. They will withdraw.

We'll be back after a short break.

ANNOUNCER: Next, an eerie reminder of September 11.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What I saw is about -- really two floors where all the windows completely destroyed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Deadly impact. A plane, apparently in distress, slams into Italy's tallest office tower.

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(INTERRUPTED FOR CNN NEWS)

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ANNOUNCER: Secretary of State Colin Powell is just back from a 10-day mission to the Middle East. While there, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon three times, and Yasser Arafat twice. He met with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco.

AMANPOUR: Certainly, the White House is now counting the cost of Secretary of State Powell's visit to this region. There are people in some quarters in this region who say the trip was a failure, and there are others who say that perhaps sometime there may be something to build on.

Certainly, at the White House, the President is putting as positive a spin as possible as he can on his chief diplomat's visit. Major Garrett has that story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MAJOR GARRETT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The President took pains to support his top diplomat, implying that Powell wasn't the first top U.S. official to return from a Middle East peace mission virtually empty-handed.

BUSH: This is a part of the world where killing had been going on for a long, long time and one trip by the Secretary of State is not going to prevent that from happening.

GARRETT: And ten days after saying Israel had to withdraw from Palestinian territories without delay, the President now says he believes Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is keeping to a timetable.

BUSH: I gave him a timetable and he's met the timetable.

GARRETT: The President also said he, "understands Israel's continued siege of Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah," implying it might continue until Arafat hands over the alleged killers of the Israeli Tourism Minister hiding in the compound.

Top U.S. aides say that's not an endorsement, but concede many Palestinians might not see it that way. And Powell's trip could change U.S. policy in the Middle East. Senior advisers tell CNN the White House is debating whether to move beyond the Tenet Security Plan and Mitchell Political Plan and present a U.S. backed peace plan designed to break the stalemate. Powell hinted at that possible policy shift.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: We wanted to move forward with negotiations as early as possible, and looking at different ways to do that once security has been established.

GARRETT: And the White House is also considering increasing U.S. aide as part of a global effort to rebuild Palestinian cities and refugee camps.

POWELL: There will be a great need for humanitarian relief or reconstruction efforts and all of that has to be part of an integrated strategy.

GARRETT: Top Middle East analysts say it's time for boldness.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think this is a time for the big leap. The question is, is the U.S. ready for the big leap? Is the President ready for the big leap? That's a decision that is going to have to be made, and I think the next few days and weeks are going to be critical.

GARRETT (on camera): Top aides say if the President shakes up his policy, he won't do it alone, and they say key meetings with Morocco's King Mohammed on Tuesday, and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah on Thursday at the President's Texas ranch could be a part of wide ranging discussions that yield a revamped U.S. policy in the Middle East. Major Garrett, CNN, the White House.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: And now, we go from the war zone to Hollywood. We go to Aaron Brown who's got some breaking news out of Los Angeles -- Aaron. (INTERRUPTED FOR BREAKING NEWS)

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