In a Single Hour, Israeli Snipers Killed Seven Bystanders at the Jenin Refugee Camp

Mounds of rubble in the Jenin refugee camp; once again mounds of rubble in the Jenin camp. A putrid stench rising from sewage flowing in the streets, dirt paths, streets reduced to pits and heaps of stones. The refugee camp was rehabilitated amazingly with a donation from the United Arab Emirates in 2002 following the Israel Defense Forces' incursion that spring. But now there isn't a street that hasn't been razed by IDF bulldozers, not a public square that hasn't been reduced to rubble, along with many stores that have been destroyed.

The IDF has raided the camp and the city in which the camp is situated multiple times recently; every incursion leaves behind dozens more killed or wounded. It looks as though the soldiers would rather be in the Gaza Strip and are compensating themselves by behaving in Jenin as though that's where they were. In "Little Gaza," as the Jenin refugee camp is known these days, the images speak for themselves. Two armed militants on a moped pass us in the wrecked alleyway, despair hangs palpably in the air.

Jenin has endured plenty of rough days lately, but May 21 outdid them all. In the course of one hour in the morning, snipers killed seven of the city's residents, all of them innocent passersby, even though the streets were quiet and the soldiers had no cause to open fire. They shot from high up in two buildings, called Rabia and A-Rein, just outside the camp, and the dead included two teenagers and the director of the surgical ward at the Jenin Governmental Hospital, who was just getting out of his car in the hospital's parking lot.