Search - The Road to Jenin on DVD

Superb account

Alyssa A. Lappen | Earth | 03/11/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This amazing documentary recorded the damage that actually occurred in Jenin in April 2002, during Israel's Operation Defensive Shield.

This counter-terror operation was launched after a series of more than a dozen suicide attacks over the course of a few months, which killed and maimed hundreds of Israeli citizens--at Pizza parlors, Passover seders, coffee shops, discos and on public bus after public bus after public bus.

Israel hit Jenin, a Hamas and Islamic Jihad stronghold, which had been orchestrating the devastating terror attacks.

Though it could have flattened the entire village from the air, rather than risk Arab civilian life, Israel sent in ground forces, and suffered heavy losses as a result.

Here, in addition to interviewing several Palestinian journalists, human rights workers, and Palestinian spokesmen, Rehov also challenges their statements.

Rehov captured on tape Palestinians claiming there had been a massacre, a hospital destroyed and houses bombed.

Within weeks of the operation--too soon for anything to have been rebuilt--Rehov visited Jenin, where he interviewed the hospital director, recorded his claims that it had been "devastated" by cannon fire--and then recorded the few bullet holes in the side of the hospital wall to which the hospital director then escorted him. Subsequently, in a controlled environment, he taped actual cannons firing and the ruins those shots would have created at the hospital, had it really been hit by cannons.

Rehov also obtained interviews from Palestinians who admitted that bodies recovered in Jenin as "proof" of a massacre were actually victims of natural death, whose bodies they transported to mass graves expressly to deceive the Western media.

In addition, viewers get an aerial video showing the "flattened" area of Jenin to be no more than 100 yards square at the center of the town.

The film also captures terrorists bragging about their booby traps and snipers targeting Israeli ground forces, not to mention their use of women and children as human shields and suicide bombers to aid their "fight."

Those duped by media tales of a Jenin massacre ought to examine this objective piece of true journalism.

--Alyssa A. Lappen"