Palestinian militants had prepared for a fight, booby trapping locations throughout the camp, and after an Israeli column walked into an ambush, the army began to rely more heavily on the use of armored bulldozers.

[1][12] Most of the camp's residents originally hail from the Carmel mountains and region of Haifa, and many maintain close ties with their relatives inside the Green Line.

Unlike other camps, the organizations in Jenin had a joint commander: Hazem Ahmad Rayhan Qabha, known as "Abu Jandal," an officer in the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces who had fought in Lebanon, served in the Iraqi Army, and who had been involved in several encounters with the IDF.

[25] Like other cities targeted in Defensive Shield, Jenin was declared a "closed military zone" and placed under curfew before the entrance of Israeli troops, remaining sealed off throughout the invasion.

[1][29] "Omar the Engineer", a Palestinian bombmaker, said that some 50 homes were booby trapped: "We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them.

Omar said that everyone in the camp, including children, knew where the explosives were located, and noted that this constituted a major weakness to their defenses, since during the Israeli incursion, the wires to more than a third of the bombs were cut by soldiers guided by Palestinian collaborators.

Instructed by Israeli soldiers to strip before they were taken away, journalists who entered Jenin following the invasion remarked that heaps of discarded clothing in the ruined streets showed where they were taken into custody.

[1] Israeli sources say that the IDF incursion into the camp relied primarily on infantry to minimize civilian casualties, but interviews with eyewitnesses suggest that tanks and helicopters were also used in the first two days.

AH-1 Cobra helicopters were used to strike Palestinian positions on rooftops using wire-guided missiles, and about a dozen armored D-9 bulldozers were deployed, widening alleys, clearing paths for tanks, and detonating booby traps.

The force walked into a Palestinian ambush, finding themselves in an inner courtyard surrounded by tall houses (later nicknamed "the bathtub") and under fire from all directions, and were also attacked by a suicide bomber.

By evening, when Chief of Central Command, Brigadier General Yitzhak Eitan, had a press conference, there were rumors of a helicopter carrying dozens of troops shot down, the death of the Ramatkal's deputy, and a heart attack suffered by the Minister of Defense.

Medical teams from Canada, France, and Italy, as well as UN and ICRC officials, with trucks carrying supplies and water waited outside the camp for clearance to enter for days, but were denied entry, with Israel citing ongoing military operations.

"[51]The same day, in response to a petition presented by the Adalah organization, the Israeli High Court ordered the IDF to stop removing the bodies of Palestinians killed in battle until after a hearing on the matter.

MK Ahmed Tibi, one of many signatories to the petition before the court, said that removing the bodies from the city violated international law and was "intended to hide the truth from the public about the killing that occurred there".

[53] On April 19, a day after Israeli troops withdrew from the camp, journalists reported counting about 23 bodies that were lined up on the outdoor grounds of the clinic, before being quickly buried by Palestinians.

[47] Tanya Reinhart notes that later Israeli media reports attempted to conceal and reinterpret their intention to transfer the bodies to the special cemetery in the Jordan Valley.

As an example, she cites a July 17, 2002 article by Ze'ev Schiff in Haaretz which provided a wholly different explanation for the presence of the refrigerator trucks posted outside the city on April 11.

[37] PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, who left the compound in Ramallah for the first time in five months on May 14, 2002 to visit Jenin and other West Bank cities affected in Operation Defensive Shield, praised the refugees' endurance and compared the fighting to the Battle of Stalingrad.

[60] Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) reported that an estimated 4,000 people, more than a quarter of the population of the camp, were rendered homeless because of this destruction.

Nissim said he had driven his D-9 for seventy-five hours straight, drinking whiskey to avoid fatigue, and that apart from a two-hour training course before the battle, he had no prior experience in driving a bulldozer.

[64] That same day, Saeb Erekat, on a phone interview to CNN from Jericho, estimated that there were a total of 500 Palestinians killed during Operation Defensive Shield, this figure also including fatalities outside of the Jenin camp, in other areas of the West Bank.

A British forensic expert who was part of an Amnesty International team granted access to Jenin on April 18 said, "the evidence before us at the moment doesn't lead us to believe that the allegations are anything other than truthful and that therefore there are large numbers of civilian dead underneath these bulldozed and bombed ruins that we see.

[85] In November, Amnesty International reported that there was "clear evidence" that the IDF committed war crimes against Palestinian civilians, including unlawful killings and torture, in Jenin and Nablus.

[91] In May 2009, the IDF released a videotape showing what it called "a phony funeral that the Palestinians organized in order to multiply the number of casualties in Jenin," wherein a live person is wrapped in a green sheet and marched in a procession.

[95] Lorenzo Cremonesi, the correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in Jerusalem, writes in a 2009 article, that he slipped past the army barricades and entered the Jenin camp on April 13, 2002.

He says the hospital was almost deserted as doctors played cards in the emergency room and that he spoke to 25 lightly wounded patients who told heartrending stories but when asked for names of the dead and urged to show where the bodies were, became evasive.

He told reporters that the devastation was, "horrific beyond belief," and relayed his view that it was "morally repugnant" that Israel had not allowed emergency workers into the camp after the battle with Palestinian gunmen had ended.

[100] Official Israeli sources expressed surprise that they were not consulted as to the composition of the team, adding that, "We expected that the operational aspects of the fact-finding mission would be carried out by military experts."

[101] In private discussions, Giora Eiland, Major General and Head of the IDF Operation Branch, convinced Shaul Mofaz that the team would ask to investigate officers and soldiers, and that it might accuse Israel of war crimes, paving the way for the sending of an international force.

[105] Following a lengthy cabinet meeting on April 28, Reuven Rivlin, the Israeli Communications Minister, told reporters that the UN had reneged on its agreements with Israel over the team, and so it would not be allowed to arrive.