Tim Thompson

Staff Writer

Last week, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak issued a frustrated cry in the wake of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's mission to the Middle East, which failed to produce a cease-fire and adequate withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian communities. Throughout the West Bank, the scale of destruction in Palestinian cities, villages and camps is massive, ranging from deliberate erasure of vaccination records to ongoing lack of basic health services -- to say nothing of whatever Israeli bulldozers are working hard to cover up in the Jenin refugee camp before the work of the U.N.'s fact-finding envoy tallies the damage and loss of life there.

Mubarak, quoted in the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly, mimed the rhetoric of U.S. President George Bush, but with poignantly sarcastic effect.

Mubarak called on all civilized nations to ``stand up and say their word: we are with peace or against peace.'' Mubarak cited ``a huge gap between the words we hear and the actions we see in reality.''

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan dispatched an inspection team this week to investigate the reality of Israeli military actions in the Jenin refugee camp, where 42 Palestinians, many of them civilians, and 28 Israeli soldiers died during the brutal strikes. Palestinians on the scene have questioned ``official'' reports and have born witness to widespread chaos and the deaths of scores of civilians.

Edward Said, expert commentator and long-time observer of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, also questioned the correlation between the extent of Israel's shear military force deployed to Jenin and the actual number of reported casualities.

Writing in Al-Ahram, Said asks, ``By what inhuman calculus did Israel's army, using 50 tanks, 250 missile strikes a day, and dozens of F-16 sorties, besiege Jenin's refugee camp for over a week, a one square kilometer patch of shacks housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and with no defenses whatever, no leaders, no missiles, no tanks, nothing, and call it a response to terrorist violence and the threat to Israel's survival?''

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari will lead the U.N. team, accompanied by Cornelio Sommaruga, former president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Sadako Ogata, former U.N. high commissioner for refugees. After Israeli officials complained that the team lacked a ``military man,'' Annan upgraded the status of U.S. Maj. Gen. William Nash (who was involved in negotiation in Bosnia in 1996 and Kosovo in 2000) from adviser to delegate.

The Israeli government, as reported in the Israeli Ha'aretz Daily, expressed anxiety over allowing the inspectors into the Jenin camp. Diplomatic sources cited by Ha'aretz state that government officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, are worried about what inspections in Jenin will yield.

Meanwhile, reports continue to flood in from all over the West Bank of the abysmal state of Palestinian infrastructure. The Israeli incursion has crippled the administrative ability of the Palestinian Authority -- beyond repair any time soon, many fear. Many government employees returned to their workplaces in Ramallah this week only to find that their computers had been destroyed and crucial files had been erased.

Palestinian Information Minister Yassir Abed Rabbo, quoted in the London Times, stated, ``They knew what they were doing. They were trying to destroy the administrative infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority. The fact that files, archives, records, computers and the servers themselves were destroyed shows they wanted to erase our memory, to create chaos, chaos, chaos.''

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Powell promised the shipment of tents, water-purifying equipment and disease-prevention kits to refugee camps throughout the West Bank, which are desperately in need of basic services. The United States has also promised financial aid to assist Palestinian recovery, up to $90 million. Currently, U.S. aid to Israel continues to run at approximately $10 million a day.