[schmooky007]

Originally posted by Wenchie
At the risk of sounding impolite.......

thats absolute rubbish.

check the daily independent's website for that date. there's a headline that says "dozens killed in rafah" and when you click on the article the heading reads "8 killed in rafah". this is just one example of how online publications revise their articles as more facts come out.

Again.....the reports of '500 deaths' were largely reported as 'alleged by Palestinians' as opposed to being reported as hard cold fact.......and again this could possibly have been avoided had journalists had access to the site.

what a load of crap! journalists from around the world reported rumours as factual information. while the palestinians alleged that 500 people were killed, the media jumped to their own conclusions with reports of genocide and mass graves, equating what's taking place in jenin to genocide in cambodia and bosnia even though this was clearly not the case.

a few examples of what the press printed:

- "We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide..." (london evening standard)

- "Rarely, in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life." (london times)

- "Israel's actions in Jenin were every bit as repellent as Osama Bin Laden's attack on New York on September 11." (the guardian)

- "I personally saw 30 Palestinian corpses at the hospital on April the 20th, and with dozens of other foreign reporters, watched them being buried at a mass grave just up the road from the hospital... Just as in Tiananmen Square, the power of the gun and the tank ensured there was no proper body count or accounting. Just as happened in Tiananmen Square, the uninformed and those with their own agenda, are now claiming there was no massacre. There was a massacre, a considerable number of human beings were indiscriminately and unnecessarily slaughtered..." (peter cave, australia's ABC)

the story was never proved as no mass graves were found, and if reporters like peter cave really wanted to provide their viewers with impartial coverage they could have went to abu kabir to check on the corpses of the 30 israeli civilians who were blown to pieces on the eve of passover just two weeks earlier. THAT he'll actually find. but of course he and literally everybody else had no intentions of doing so. all this rhetoric from the media proves beyond doubt that not only the reports about what happened in jenin were flawed and biased, but most of them were not based on information coming out of the PA so you can't say the press was saying what the palestinians were alleging. these were all fabricated lies that were brought upon by the media's perception of the palestinians as victims du jour and the israelis as the aggressors.

the media was barred from Jenin for approximately 2 weeks ( 3rd - 17th April) and initially after that 'selected' journalists were given 'restricted' access in that they were allowed to 'tour' the camp under IDF supervision

this is another myth. the media was never banned from jenin. civilians were banned from certain small areas of the camp for their own protection and not because israel was trying to hide anything. once the operation completed and the dust settled, reporters were surprised to find that their exaggerated claims were unfounded. the new york times interviewed dozens of palestinians in the camp and found "no solid evidence of large-scale deliberate killing of civilians", and according to the washington post, "no evidence has surfaced to support allegations ... of large-scale massacres or executions by Israeli troops."

The report was written without a visit to Jenin or the other Palestinian cities in question and it therefore relies completely on available resources and information, including submissions from five United Nations Member States and Observer Missions, documents in the public domain and papers submitted by non-governmental organizations. The Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs wrote to the Permanent Representative of Israel and the Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations requesting them to submit information but only the latter did so. In the absence of a response from Israel, the United Nations has relied on public statements of Israeli officials and publicly available documents of the Government of Israel relevant to the request in resolution ES-10/10.

all the relevant palestinian, UN, and human rights organizations contributed to the report. israel didn't participate in the inquiry because it already provided most of the information it had to the public. despite this, convinced that a massacre in jenin indeed took place, the international community shunned the israeli figures. initially the report gave the palestinians the full exposure they wanted, and it started with their claims of over 500 palestinians killed. eventually the palestinian claims proved to be an outright lie and the UN report ultimately agreed with the israeli figures. on the day the UN released its report on jenin and kofi annan accepted the findings, a few journalists and editors issued pathetic excuses for their flawed coverage.