Once again, Israel says it is preparing to bring down the curtain on another military operation. He has already indicated that he is “satisfied with the objectives” that he started on Monday morning in the Jenin refugee camp, in the north of the occupied West Bank, where from a road checkpoint Benjamin Netanyahu explained to the press that his government he is “accomplishing the mission” against the local militias.
However, as in every depiction of Israeli-Palestinian violence, the work is not over for Palestinian civilians, in this case the more than 14,000 residents of Jenin, whose homes have been leveled by the largest Israeli attack since the second intifada (2000-2005). The Hebrew Prime Minister himself put it forward: “I can say that our large-scale action in Jenin is not a one-time thing. We will continue to operate to eradicate terrorism”.
For a year and a half, raids by the Israeli army on the camp, a historic stronghold of the Palestinian armed “resistance”, are a daily occurrence. But this operation called House and Garden has multiplied that hell, with unprecedented bombings with drones and the deployment of a thousand soldiers, 150 armored vehicles and picket guns, which have caused the death of 12 Palestinians and wounded a hundred, of which 20 are in serious condition, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent and the Ministry of Health.
Israel’s military accounts are more than a thousand confiscated weapons, the dismantling of a well used as a weapons warehouse and the destruction of explosive devices. “In the last two years, Jenín has become a factory of terror. The last two days this has ended”, defined the Israeli Minister of Defense, Yoav Galant, this Tuesday afternoon.
However, the Palestinian view on the ground given to the Turkish agency Anadolu by the mayor of Jenin, Nidal al-Obaidi, is the opposite: “The humanitarian situation in Jenin is catastrophic. What is happening is like an earthquake. It brings us back to the days of the nakba.” This “catastrophe”, as the nakba is translated in Arabic, has evoked for Palestinians the days when more than 700,000 of them were forcibly relocated after the creation of the Israeli State in 1948. Because it is the image that has offered the operation in Jenin: the repetition of entire families leaving the camp, walking past Israeli soldiers with their arms raised, to escape airstrikes and ground clashes.
Suha Ali Hussein, a resident of the camp, described to the AFP agency that “I was in the kitchen when a bomb exploded”. After protecting herself as best she could “in an inner room,” the Red Crescent helped her family move to a shelter.
The organization states that it has evacuated around 500 families, i.e. 3,000 people, although Al-Obaidi later stated that the number of displaced persons was “no less than 4,000”. As assistance, some volunteers from Nablus, a neighboring city of Jenin, have been collecting water and food to mitigate the destruction of the camp’s electricity and water networks. The traumas suffered by the civilians who had to leave go back not only to 1948, but also to 2002, when Jenín was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the second intifada. At the time, the Israeli army declared the area a closed military area and ten days of fighting led to the deaths of at least 52 Palestinians (an estimated half were civilians) and 23 Israeli soldiers, with more than 400 homes destroyed.
Gihad Hassan, a 63-year-old refugee who at the time suffered leg injuries from shrapnel from a rocket, told Reuters that the difference is that today Israeli forces have “stronger and heavier artillery”. “Now they use drones, when before they used Apache (helicopters). But the Palestinian people are strong, Netanyahu will not overcome the Palestinian will and gain nothing from it.”
Another aspect pushed to the limit by the Israeli operation has been health care. Local rescuers have alleged difficulties in accessing the camp and tending to the wounded, allegations echoed by the World Health Organization, but which Israel denies. Hospitals in Jenin have been overwhelmed and, to make matters worse, the firing of tear gas by Israeli troops has sometimes interrupted emergency care, according to Médecins Sans Frontières.
In this scenario, once again, violence begets violence. Although the Palestinian militias in Gaza have not fired rockets so far, they have encouraged retaliation to “escalate”. Cries that appeared to attend this Tuesday to a 20-year-old Palestinian from the southern West Bank who took part in a run-over and stabbing in Tel-Aviv. Identified as a member of Hamas, he wounded at least eight people, including a pregnant woman who lost her baby, before armed civilians killed him. A bloody attack that Hamas has described as “heroic revenge for the military operation in Jenin”.
