CM: I live in El-Dila and I’m a teacher at Bir Zeit University. I have been in Jenin camp for the last three days, and no one has been allowed to come in. I walked and then came past the soldiers with a medic’s jacket and a white flag, and I was told I was not allowed in but I got in. And I’ve been coming in and out bringing food to people.

What I’ve seen is a disaster. I’ve seen pictures of Berlin after World War II, I’ve seen pictures of the camps in Lebanon, and what I’m seeing here is like those pictures. There are people living in houses that are completely rubble on the ground, in the ruins of the wrecked houses, some of them still stand a little bit. They have no water, they have no food, they have no electricity, they have nothing for two weeks most of them.

There are dead bodies and the smell of dead bodies throughout the camp. I have seen people who were burned to death after their houses had missiles were dropped on them or some kind of explosive thrown through them, thrown through the walls. These people are burned sometimes down to the skeleton. What has become increasingly apparent over the last two days to me is that there are many many people here under the rubble, but that the rubble is not simply the rubble of a house that was crashed down, that was destroyed. Its rubble created by bulldozers that came after the destruction and that have turned over the earth so that now we found one foot in one place and one foot in another place six yards away from one another in a way that would probably not have occurred had it just been a death caused by the falling of a house. People who live in the camp tell us that they have actually seen with their own eyes the bulldozers come and do this shifting and re-shifting of the  earth to bury the bodies after the destruction first happened.

There was resistance in the camp, there were some men who had guns, and when they began to resist then the bulldozers came, knocked down even more houses and began to bury the bodies. I talked to a woman today who said that she saw the bulldozers dig a hole, with the bodies of men who were killed and then the bulldozers filled in the hole. Meanwhile a water main was broken, and all the water came into the top of the hole, so now it looks like a lake. It would be very very difficult to find all the bodies or to find out who they belong to or how many there are.

It seems as though there is a slaughter here. Whole families are missing, buried under the houses. I got a call, I was told by neighbors that they were called by a man, they know his name, They were called three days ago. He  had his mobile with him. He was in the wreckage of his house trapped. His family was there also. He was still alive of course, talking on his mobile, calling for help. No one was able to go for help, because no one is able to move in the camp without being shot. There are snipers and there are soldiers and there are bulldozers and there are tanks, and people are not allowed to move. They were not able to go to him.

The Red Cross has not been allowed into the camp until today or yesterday for the first time.

The UN has not been allowed into the camp except yesterday was the first day, so there was no possible way that they could save this person’s life or the life of anyone after they saw the houses bulldozed upon them.

I’ve talked to people who saw a man who was mentally ill. They knew that he was in the house. The soldiers called through the loudspeakers of the bulldozer, "Come out of your house, we’re going to bulldoze your house." Everybody ran out of the house except the man who was, cause he was in a wheelchair. People instantly realized that he was in the house and started running back. His mother ran to the Israeli soldiers with a picture of him and said, "He’s mentally ill. He’s mentally ill. I have to get him out of the house." And they bulldozed the house, and that was the end of that person, he hasn’t been seen since.

Most of the bodies now are being eaten by maggots. The smell of death is everywhere, it’s becoming a health hazard, so many diseases can be carried by the bacteria that eat the bodies after death. The Red Cross and the UN now are just beginning to get in and they seem absolutely astounded by what they’ve seeing. I took them around today because I had already seen many bodies and knew where people were living, and they were just muttering to themselves "I can’t believe this" and "Sabra and Shatila". The difference of course with Sabra and Shatila is that in this case the bodies have mostly been disposed of, shall we say, either put under the earth or buried, or in some cases I’ve heard the bodies have been burned by people who saw that.

DB: Let me just interrupt for a second. We’re speaking with Chivvis Moore. She has been living inside the Jenin Refugee Camp which is in ruins now for the last three days. Were you saying, Chivvis Moore, that in some cases the Israelis have trucked the bodies out of the camp?

CM: I cannot say that I have seen that. I came too late to be here during the fighting and the killing. By the time I came, just dead bodies, and not that many, not like lining the streets. What we’ve heard from people, I’ve been walking around for three days talking to people in the camp, bringing them food, and they say that they have seen people trucked out and taken who knows where. Some say to the Jordan desert, some say western Lebanon. Now how they ever would know where they have been or where they were taken, that is speculation. I myself have seen no one trucked out or buried, but people who have been here and watched with their eyes say that they have seen this.

DB: And I understand that one of the striking experiences that you have had is to see, essentially, I don’t know how to say this, is feet?

CM: Feet. Yes. Well, feet. Today I took quite a number of photographers and reporters to see feet. There were two feet sticking out of the rubble, the sand and the rubble and all the innards of a house. One foot was about six feet away from the other, both feet were upside down, very bloated since they had obviously been there a while, severed at the ankles, and what can I say? They looked like two feet of the same person, but quite a distance apart. I mean, is that any worse than seeing a whole person burned to death, or with his innards completely gone, or being eaten by maggots, or having his leg chopped off? I don’t know how people got hung up on the feet, but anyway I guess it is kind of, it’s all pretty awful.

DB: Ariel Sharon is saying that maybe a couple dozen people were killed, 75 people at the most. What can you say about that?

CM: From my own experience I would say that’s an outrageous fabrication, just outrageous. Entire families are missing and people know where they were seen when the missile fell or when the bulldozer came. It’s not 24 people. I’ve seen for myself about 13 dead bodies, and other people have today a man found a friend of his…. It’s not 24 people….

DB: You’re fading out, could you change direction.

That’s good.

CM: A young man was just telling us here tonight, I’m in the camp now, how even though he’d seen many bodies this week, and burned so badly, he felt just paralyzed with not fear but just shock I guess, and the terrible pain when he saw his friend, he got a call that somebody was uncovering someone and it was his friend. He and his other friends went there. They uncovered him. They found a bullet through his chest, and they re-buried him. This is happening, so bodies are actually being re-buried at the same time that they’re being uncovered. It’s impossible to keep track of. In addition, I have heard people first-hand tell me they saw men, maybe five together, line up against the wall, with their hands tied, with their heads toward the wall, shot by soldiers from behind, and then bulldozed. I’ve heard a number of times of groups of men who were already handcuffed, kneeling down or standing, being shot to death and then being bulldozed over. I’ve heard this from so many different people in so many different parts of the camp that it’s very difficult to think that it’s some kind of unified propaganda, as one journalist today suggested.

DB: There used to be about 15,000 or 20,000 people living inside the camp. About haw many people might be left living inside, and what are they doing to survive?

CM: There were, they say, 15,000 people in the camp, that’s what I’ve been told by people here. The UN, UNRWA has a complete list of all the names, I’ve been told, so that should be easy to check. As far as how many people are here, I would say thousands are still here. It’s hard to know, because people are hiding, and when I went walking around they came out. As soon as the Red Cross comes, because its accompanied by soldiers, they all vanish again. It’s impossible to tell how many there are. The people that I’ve found as I walk, I found 50 in one house, I found 25 in another. They had tiny little bits of water, they were sharing it in small very amounts each day. They have absolutely, of course, no fresh food. They don't have cooking gas anymore, there’s nothing to cook on. They’re cooking on open fires unless they’re too afraid. If they’re young men they can’t even cook or make fire, the soldiers will see them. so I really… been in an Arab house and not offered food, which gives me an idea that there isn’t any, because there’s no Arab ever that would not offer you food. People are beginning to start to go hungry.

DB: where are you living? Are you living in the camp now? Are you staying

with a bunch of people?

CM: I work with the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees since all this happened. I’m staying at the house of one of the people in the camp who is working with that organization. It’s an organization headed by Mustafa Barghouti in Ramallah, but the organization provides mostly medical but also food and water, that kind of aid, to anybody who is in need throughout Palestine, including Gaza and all parts of the West Bank. I’m staying in Muhammed’s house tonight with members of his family and two journalists, one from Australia, and one from Italy and Germany, she’s from both places. And with various members of his family. I heard them whispering before dinner time, the wife and her husband, and I could something about "We have eggs." I don’t know how they fed us. And we were unable to bring anything. I was carrying things in by hand, but the soldiers won’t even let me carry by hand now. We’ve got a team of people that were trying to carry in stuff, just like anything, canned, anything, and they wouldn’t even let us walk in.

DB: All right, Chivvis Moore, we’re going to say goodbye now. Now you are inside the camp there, where the devastation is overwhelming, and we appreciate you being with us. If you have a message to the world, to Colin Powell who is in the region, what would that message be? What would your advice be? What would you want to say?

CM: I’m afraid I wouldn’t bother saying anything to Colin Powell, but a message to the people who listen to you is please go into the streets and tell our government that we are responsible for this. And that there’s a very very simple solution: stop giving Israel money, arms and support against the entire world community, which knows that this is a criminal thing that’s happening. The United States is paying for it, it’s our Apache helicopters that are dropping these missiles, it’s our F-16s that are bombing Palestinian cities, it’s the U.S. voice in the United Nations that’s keeping every single other nation away from being able to act on what they know is true, which is Palestinians need to be allowed to have the tiny bit of land that they are trying to hold on to now. And that includes Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the entire West Bank. The United States citizens need to go into the streets and say, "We do not want to support the Israeli occupation. End the settlements. Let the Israelis get out of the settlements, let them live in their own safe state within 1967 borders, and stop hiding the fact that we are doing this.

DB: All right, Chivvis Moore, talking to us from inside the devastated Jenin refugee camp in the city of Jenin that has been the site of horrific massacres and destruction. We urge you to be careful, and we’d love to stay in touch with you.

Thank you.

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Chivvis Moore is a Palestinian American who has been living and teaching in Ramallah in the West Bank for the last 10 years. She teaches English and Politics at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. For the last four days she has been living in the devastated Jenin refugee camp as soldiers continue to bulldoze buildings while people were still living in them as well as buildings that have been blown up and destroyed by Apache helicopter and tank attacks. While few people have been able to gain access to the camps, she managed four days ago to infiltrate by putting on a medic’s coat and acting as if she was a doctor. She was interviewed for KPFA’s Flashpoints investigative news magazine by host producer Dennis Bernstein. Her story is consistent with the stories recorded by Flashpoints in the last week. Flashpoints has done over a hundred interviews with human rights workers and international solidarity workers who have gain limited access to the camp as well interviewing hundreds of refugees who have fled to nearby villages.
www.palestinemonitor.org

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