Desperate flight from Jenin in the face of the Israeli offensive: “Each operation is worse than the previous one”

Karmel Obeid is one of the last to leave and she does so crying on what used to be asphalt. It is almost 2:00 p.m., about to end the deadline that the Israeli army has given to the inhabitants of the Jenin refugee camp to leave their homes. There is, in any case, almost no one left: without water or electricity, more than 2,000 families have escaped since December, when pressure from Israel and the United States led the forces of the Palestinian National Authority to launch one of their most unpopular operations, to dismantle the local militia. Hundreds of them, in the last four days, in which Israel has taken the reins, bombing and declaring the camp a closed military zone. Its Defense Minister, Israel Katz, defines it as a “powerful operation” to apply in the West Bank “the first lesson of the method” used in Gaza, in order to eliminate once and for all “terrorists and terrorist infrastructure.” There are already 12 dead, most of them civilians. The fear now is that, with the fire in Gaza extinguished for the moment, the burning of the West Bank will arrive.

Obeid is 11 years old and, just an hour before, he says, a group of soldiers entered his family’s house and gave them 20 minutes to leave it. They were sent to the point known as Shirín Abu Akleh, that is, where the famous Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist was killed by a direct shot by Israeli troops in 2022, while covering one of multiple operations that the city has witnessed.

There, they were subjected to control. His father, his grandmother and his uncle were arrested, and that is why he cries inconsolably. “It is the first time they have entered our house,” from which he has seen how the Israeli military “exploded the doors” of others to enter the buildings and others burned.

A sound covers his story. It is the constant and close hum of the Israeli drones that fly over Jenin, for surveillance tasks or to open fire. It is almost the only thing that separates the city from silence: it is so deserted that only Israeli armored vehicles (some with the national flag), Palestinian ambulances and, very occasionally, a private car circulate through the streets. The shops are a succession of closed shutters.

The other thing that, from time to time, disturbs the silence are the sounds of the invasion. From distant gunfights to much closer explosions. Some are from the explosive devices that the militiamen hide to detonate when the armored vehicles pass by. After others, thick black smoke is seen rising to the sky from the attacked home.

From a distance you can see a crane demolishing a building. In others there is a fire inside, without prior bombing. It is the apparent Gazaization of the West Bank. During the 15 months of invasion of the Strip, Israeli soldiers have gratuitously burned private homes, for revenge or fun, as several have admitted under anonymity, recorded and disseminated by others on social networks, and documented by Palestinian journalists inside Gaza.

For this reason, Arafat Abeid, 64, arrives worried as he flees. “I came without clothes to change, or anything. [Los militares] They gave us 20 minutes to leave. Money and gold… God will say what happens to them. What matters to me is the house and the furniture that I leave behind,” he says before entering a relative’s home, where they will sleep until they can return. When? “The soldiers told us that in a week. I haven’t left the house for three days, because I was afraid and there are children in the house. I hoped they wouldn’t arrive… but they have arrived. Each operation is worse than the previous one. “I didn’t expect them to tell me and my wife, who finds it so difficult to walk, to walk 400 meters where there is no longer a street.” His wife cries from grief and pain, helped by family members in the middle of the mud. Two of his children, he adds, have been detained at the checkpoint.

The West Bank director of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Roland Friedrich, has assured that Israel is “using advanced weaponry and methods of warfare, including airstrikes” in its “massive operation ” in Jenin. The bulldozers They have destroyed all access to the camp and the government hospital, where a military vehicle and an excavator guard the entrance.

In other raids, it was possible to reach the hospital, but this one has an extraordinary purpose. The Israeli army launched it just after the start of the ceasefire in Gaza and after years of pressure from the religious nationalist right, the spearhead of the West Bank colonization movement, to – in Katz’s words – ensure the “freedom of movement” of the colonists.

Bezalel Smotrich, the ultra-nationalist Finance Minister to whom Netanyahu gave broad prerogatives over the West Bank in exchange for the parliamentary support he needed to return to power in 2022, said it clearly on the 6th: “Funduq, Nablus and Jenin have to be alike.” to Jabalia”, the Gaza refugee camp where 200,000 people lived and which Israel has turned into an endless blanket of rubble, as can be seen in the aerial images.

Smotrich advocates “changing Israel’s approach” in the West Bank and has named 2025 the year of its annexation. Israel conquered the territory in the Six-Day War of 1967 and has been building dozens of Jewish settlements, in which half a million settlers live today, but it has never formally annexed it, as it did with East Jerusalem in the 1980s. and the Syrian Golan Heights.

Militia Bastion

The northern West Bank is home to both the bastion cities of Palestinian militias and the most radical and ideological Jewish settlements. In the refugee camp targeted by the invasion, they are now rallying around the Jenin Battalion. It is a local armed group far from traditional factions, in which young people coordinate to repel raids or organize attacks, especially against soldiers and settlers in the area. Most admire Islamic Jihad, one of the most radical factions.

The invasion is on track to become the largest since the Second Intifada (2000-2005). A senior Israeli military commander puts the death toll at 13. The ANP Ministry of Health, at 12, ten of them civilians. The UN Human Rights Office has verified at least 12 dead and 40 injured, “most of them apparently unarmed.” “It is very worrying that what is happening today in the West Bank could have an impact on the ceasefire in Gaza,” its spokesman, Zamin Al-Jitan, said this Friday.

One of the deaths has been recorded in a horrifying video. A family is torn between panicked cries between moving forward or retreating when up to seven shots are heard from an Israeli shooter at the car, which ends up crashing into the side of the road. The driver lost his life.

It is a few meters from that point where Jihad Ali arrives on foot, carrying a medium-sized sports bag full of clothes and other belongings. The asphalt is now a mixture of mud and stones, due to the passage of the bulldozers Israelis, who are destroying infrastructure and lifting the asphalt to deactivate underground explosives.

After surrounding the camp for three days, the troops entered this Friday for the first time and extended the operation to a neighboring area, such as the Ali neighborhood, Zahara. “It is a non-military and quiet area that had always been left out of operations,” he protests. “Today they came in, asked us for our identification documents, asked how many families were left in the building and said: ‘Please take your things because you have 20 minutes to leave. It is a closed military zone.’ I was seeing that the neighbors were leaving, so I had this bag prepared since yesterday, just in case.”

Ali is 38 years old. The last time he was in the same situation he was 15. It was 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada. Israel launched Defensive Shield, a massive operation that enshrined the myth of the Jenin refugee camp as a fortress. The Israeli army lost 23 men and killed fifty Palestinians (more than half militiamen), and both were scheduled for revenge next time.