St. Louis Post-Dispatch · St. Louis, Mo. · 3 May 2002
CP-2002-129
Group sees possible war crimes but no massacre
Israel rejects allegations from Human Rights Watch regarding Jenin battle
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Transcribed from the clipping
JERUSALEM — U.S.-based Human Rights Watch says Israeli troops who battled their way through a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank town of Jenin last month may have committed war crimes, but there was no evidence to support Palestinian claims of a massacre.
In a report to be published today, the organization said three of its investigators spent a week gathering testimony in the Jenin camp and documented the deaths of 52 Palestinians, of which it said 22 were civilians. Human Rights Watch is the largest human rights group in the United States.
“Many of the civilians were killed willfully or unlawfully,” a summary of the 48-page report said. “The abuses we documented in Jenin are extremely serious, and in some cases appear to be war crimes.” Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col.
Olivier Rafowicz dismissed the report's findings, charging that Palestinian fighters used their own people as shields in a refugee camp from which 28 suicide bombers were sent into Israel.
How this transcription was made
Date confirmed on the page (folio). Filed under the archive’s spelling; the page prints “St. Louis Post Dispatch”.
Context added by this archive
AP staff copy.
People of Palestine are called 'Palestinians', 'Palestinian fighters', 'Palestinian refugee camp'; the paper also prints, near the end, that 'Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat told CNN that 500 Palestinians had been killed in the fighting, although he later told The Associated Press that he could not document the figure.' Photo caption reads: 'Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (right) presents flowers to a government official (not pictured) at a Cabinet meeting Wednesday.
At left is Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Israel held firm in objecting to a U.N. mission to Jenin.' No ordinary person named.
Cite this clipping
"Group sees possible war crimes but no massacre," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3 May 2002. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2002-129. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2002-129
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
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