MideastWeb News Service November 10, 2002
Foreign Ministry's Jenin reality test
The Israel Foreign Ministry insists that the April 3-11 fighting in Jenin took place in an area no larger than 200 square meters.
On its face, such a claim invites skepticism. Two hundred square meters means 2,152 square feet. A high-school basketball court takes up more than twice as much floor space.
GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington website that specializes in analyzing aerial photographs, contends that the combat zone was actually 200 times bigger than the Foreign Ministry says. The U.S. site guesses that confusion in arithmetic was what caused a number of mistakes in a Foreign Ministry presentation intended to rebut Palestinian claims of terrible damage.
The Washington analysis suggests that the Foreign Ministry really meant to say that the combat zone was 200 meters squared, not 200 square meters. Multiplying 200 meters by 200 meters works out to 40,000 square meters. This is almost 10 acres and it jibes with the Washington group's own estimate that the battleground was roughly 160 meters by 250 meters. The Jenin fighting, in which 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 or more Palestinians died, involved tanks and armored bulldozers.
"Palestinian claims regarding the extent of damage in Jenin do not pass the reality test," the Foreign Ministry states in an online presentation titled "The Jenin Combat Zone." This presentation uses Flash animation software to blend one image into the next, zooming in on an aerial photograph of the Jenin refugee camp and overlaying it with the message that the combat zone was 200 square meters.
Elsewhere on the Foreign Ministry website, an aerial photograph of the Jenin refugee camp shows an area inside an oval-shaped outline with the legend, "Combat zone (approx. 100m X 100m)" This equals 10,000 square meters, or 50 times the figure in the Foreign Ministry's Flash presentation. The Foreign Ministry does not explain the discrepancy. This photograph and its legend are from the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson's Unit.
The Foreign Ministry's presentation also says that the Jenin refugee camp comprised 1,100 houses in an area of 3,500 square meters and "only 95 houses were destroyed."
If the camp really were only 3,500 square meters in area, this would mean that 1,110 houses existed on a plot of less than one acre. On such a tract, each house would be smaller than six feet by six feet on an average, and the destroyed houses would have been smaller than five feet by five feet, and there would have been no room for streets or alleys. Aerial photographs on the Foreign Ministry site make it clear that this does not pass the reality test, either.
According to the United Nations, the area of the refugee camp is 373,000 square meters.
The Foreign Ministry's Flash presentation and aerial photographs came to MideastWeb's attention after HonestReporting.com, a website with an announced goal of combating anti-Israel bias in the media, repeated the Foreign Ministry claim of a combat area limited to 200 square meters within a 3,500-square-meter refugee camp. HonestReporting said Nov. 5: "These numbers coincide with those reported by Israeli government spokesmen. Go to http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ll60 and scroll down to the Flash presentation."
Israel's Foreign Ministry is not the only organization that has difficulty applying elementary arithmetic to Jenin. A United Nations report on the Jenin fighting incorrectly stated that the refugee camp's area of 373 dunams equals one square kilometer. Actually, a square kilometer is 1,000 dunams, not 373 dunams.
According to news reports, Nasser Al-Kidwa, Palestinian UN representative, told the General Assembly that one square kilometer of the camp was "obliterated by bulldozers." One square kilometer equals one million square meters, an area almost three times as large as the refugee camp.
The Jenin presentation and photos were already on the Foreign Ministry's website when Benjamin Netanyahu replaced Shimon Peres as foreign minister last week.
Sources:
http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ll60
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/palestine/jenin-imagery.htm
http://www.idf.il/english/news/mapjenin.stm
http://www.HonestReporting.com/Critiques/2002/90_coalition.asp
http://www.un.org/peace/jenin/index.html
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=07052002-100713-2099r
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