In April of 2002, Israeli soldiers driving American-made military bulldozers plowed through the center of Jenin refugee camp, home to 13,000 impoverished Palestinians, a handful of whom had been putting up armed resistance to Israeli military takeover. Homes-containing civilians-were indiscriminately bulldozed. The operation was ostensibly in response to a tragic suicide attack in Israel, but officials admit that the offensive was planned far in advance, in part by studying and internalizing German policies in taking over the Warsaw ghetto. Israel used bulldozers to minimize Israeli soldier casualties, meanwhile the body count on the other side has never been confirmed. With help from the United States, Israel disbanded a fact-finding team appointed by the UN to clarify what had happened, and simultaneously denied Palestinians access to the bodies of the dead, preferring to bury them in mass graves themselves. Shortly after, Israel announced that there were 55 casualties, only a quarter of original estimates. Israeli soldiers' and Palestinian civilians' testimonies of unarmed men being executed and bodies being squashed suggest that this number is highly inaccurate. Still, Israel maintains that a massacre never happened at all because nobody can prove all those people died and didn't just flee.
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