What happened
Defensive Shield was launched days after the Passover Park Hotel suicide bombing killed 30 Israeli civilians at a Seder meal (documented in PalestineTimelineSeeder), one of the deadliest attacks of the Second Intifada, and Jenin's refugee camp was targeted as a base from which several bombers were believed to have originated. Rather than an airstrike campaign, Israel chose close-quarters urban combat, using armoured bulldozers to clear booby-trapped buildings — a decision that produced high Israeli military casualties precisely because commanders prioritised ground clearance over air power specifically to reduce Palestinian civilian deaths, according to Israel's own account, though HRW's investigation found this did not prevent serious violations.
HRW's report is unusually balanced in its condemnation: it found the IDF had used Palestinian civilians as human shields to enter buildings ahead of soldiers, demolished homes with residents still inside or without adequate warning, and delayed medical access to the wounded in ways that likely cost lives — conduct HRW characterised as war crimes. At the same time, HRW's investigators, working in Jenin immediately after the operation, explicitly and publicly rejected Palestinian and some international media claims of a 'massacre' involving several hundred deaths, finding the actual toll of 52 (about half civilian) did not support that characterisation — a finding that drew criticism from Palestinian officials at the time but has held up in the two decades since as the more accurate account.