Mariam Barghouti
+972 Magazine / September 4, 2024
The Israeli army is destroying civilian infrastructure, blocking medical access, and conducting mass arrests in its largest West Bank operation in years.
On Aug. 28, Israel launched “Operation Summer Camps,” the largest military invasion witnessed in the northern West Bank in over two decades. In Jenin, Israeli forces first moved into the city before imposing a full-blown siege on the refugee camp within hours; the army simultaneously carried out operations in Tubas, Nablus, Ramallah, and Tulkarem.
Since 2021, the Israeli military has repeatedly targeted Jenin refugee camp under the pretext of fighting armed resistance groups. Most of the victims of these assaults have been non-combatant Palestinian civilians and minors, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Local Palestinian residents and journalists say that this current assault is the most intense and violent in years, with at least 19 Palestinians killed in Jenin, including minors. This comes amid a dramatic increase in Israeli military operations and settler violence across the West Bank after October 7, which have killed nearly 700 Palestinians in the territory — 185 in Jenin alone — in brutal ways.
The army was also recently reported to have shot 83-year-old Tawfiq Qandeel in the Jenin camp on Sept. 30, leaving him on the street to die without access to medical attention. A video circulated on social media two days later showing Israeli military vehicles driving over Qandeel’s body.
Bombs, bulldozers, bullets
While the Israeli army claims to be fighting the Jenin Brigades and other Palestinian resistance movements, the current operation has devastated large swathes of civilian infrastructure in the refugee camp as a clear form of collective punishment.
“They blew up our home, they blew it up!” 72-year-old Khayriyeh Khrayneh told +972, just moments after she was forced to flee her home near the eastern quarter of Jenin refugee camp.
Four days into the operation, the city had largely become a ghost town while the camp became a battlefield. Palestinians were forced to remain inside their homes as Israeli soldiers turned buildings into military bases and dispatched snipers across various rooftops. Civilians, including children, elderly, and chronically ill, have been denied access to water, food, and medicine as part of the total siege on the camp.
“We were not even allowed a glass of water,” Khrayneh cried, as they remained trapped between bombs, bulldozers, and live bullets. Khrayneh and her young daughter barely escaped their home at gunpoint, carrying nothing but a small black purse with her ID cards and passports.
Her three sons (the youngest of whom is 16 years old) and her husband were all taken by the Israeli army — part of what eyewitnesses inside the camp describe as a campaign of mass arrests targeting Jenin’s men and boys. Khrayneh’s husband has diabetes and needs constant medical care; her eldest son, 41, is battling cancer.
“He had just finished a chemotherapy session,” Khrayneh recalled, holding her tears back as the smoke rose above the rubble of her home just a few meters away.
Although members of the press were denied access to the camp, the sounds of explosions and machine gunfire echoed throughout Jenin. Large numbers of Israeli D-9 bulldozers, armored personnel carriers, and armored jeeps moved through the city’s streets. The skies of Jenin were buzzing with drones; it was unclear whether these were surveillance drones or the lethal quadcopters, which Israel has commonly deployed both in Gaza and the West Bank.
Some Palestinians have managed to escape the camp — mostly women and children, often driven out at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers who had invaded their homes and detained the men and young boys in the families.
Those who fled described the ferocity of Israel’s military tactics over the past week: anti-tank rifle grenades that destroy civilian infrastructure; attack dogs unleashed against families; Palestinian detainees used as human shields; and live ammunition fired sporadically and recklessly.
Blocking hospitals and ambulances
While the military operation has raged inside the refugee camp, residents of the city and its environs have not been spared from the effects of the siege. With the army roaming the streets and shooting at cars, Palestinians in Jenin have been under strict curfew, and access to the city from the outside has been highly restricted.
“We’ve been locked in our homes for days,” Saed Souki, from the Al-Batal neighborhood in the southeastern suburbs of Jenin, told +972. “We haven’t had access to the most basic things, like flour and baby food, for days.” Any efforts to bypass the siege have been met with brutal force: on Sept. 1, the Israeli military bombed and killed three Palestinian children from Seela Harthiya, west of Jenin, as they drove on their vespa after delivering bread to Jenin residents.
Not even ambulances have been able to cross the city to reach the refugee camp. According to the head of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin, Mahmoud al-Saadi, “the ambulances were shot and paramedics were denied any entry into Jenin, even to retrieve the bodies of the killed Palestinians, despite acquiring permits in coordination with the Israeli army.”
At the start of the operation, the military also imposed a full lockdown on Jenin Governmental Hospital, the only public general hospital in the city. The Israeli Border Police, or Magav, was tasked with maintaining control of entry and exit to the hospital and declared the immediate surrounding area a “closed zone by military order.”
The Governmental Hospital has continued to receive patients through the ambulances, but only after they are stopped and checked by Magav officers, who have on occasion forced patients out to check their IDs.
From outside the city, the route to Jenin is riddled with checkpoints and road closure imposed by the army, stymying movement not only for Palestinians but also journalists and medical personnel. And with Israeli operations expanding across the West Bank, leaving Jenin is becoming as dangerous as staying in it.
“I have been here for four days, and I haven’t been able to go home because of the ongoing events,” Huda Badran, a nurse at Al-Amal Hospital, adjacent to Jenin refugee camp, told +972. Badran, who is from Tulkarem — 60 km southwest of Jenin — said that this is the first time in her 18 years of working at the clinic that she couldn’t be home for nearly a week.
“You can’t tell what will happen,” she explained, and given the simultaneous military operation in Tulkarem, “I face risks not just leaving here, but also getting home.”
The Israeli army says that Palestinian resistance groups have been the primary target of the assault on Tulkarem; those killed in recent days include a co-founder of the Tulkarem Brigade, Mohammad “Abu Shuja” Jaber, along with fighters Majd Daoud and Dousom Srouji.
But like in Jenin, residents of Nour Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps were placed under siege, with no access for media or medical workers. Withdrawing from the camps in Tulkarem on August 30, the Israeli military left behind a trail of destruction, with at least three killed and dozens injured.
The army renewed its assault on the two camps on Sept. 2, killing at least one minor, 15-year-old Mohammad Kanaan and injuring his father with a bullet to the waist. This time the Israeli army not only obstructed journalist access, but directly targeted media personnel.
‘It is another Gaza’
It is still unclear how long the Israeli military intends to continue Operation Summer Camps. The governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu Al-Rub, reportedly tried to coordinate a ceasefire with the army to allow urgent aid into the refugee camp, but his efforts were denied.
After the Jenin Brigades killed an Israeli soldier in a joint ambush on the fourth day of the siege, the Israeli operations intensified. “We have no intention of letting terrorism … raise its head,” IDF Chief Herzi Halevi said in a statement. “That is why the initiative is to go from city to city, refugee camp to refugee camp.”
Yet such Israeli military assaults have only served to deepen resentment among the Palestinian civilian population — who bear the brunt of the attacks — and drive recruitment for the resistance groups.
“What do you think they’re doing? They’re pushing for escalation so that they can fully depopulate us,” said A., a 30-year-old resident of Jenin, who asked to speak anonymously for fear of Israel’s mass arrest campaign.
“They’re making life for us unbearable,” A. explained. “What this does is naturally push us toward confrontation, and when we do, the Israeli military further intensifies its abusive practices.”
By the time A. spoke to +972, Israeli forces had set Jenin’s farmers market aflame, bulldozed at least 70 percent of the streets within the camp and surrounding areas, and cut off water access to the camp completely and 80 percent of Jenin. And with Israel reportedly planning to designate the entire West Bank as a “combat zone,” Israeli security officials are warning that “the Jenin operation is just the beginning.”
“You know what Jenin is? It is another Gaza, and Gaza is Palestine,” A. affirmed. “We cannot keep separating them, because the perpetrator is targeting us as Palestinians, and will use the same reasoning both here and there to keep pushing Palestinians off their lands.”
The IDF did not respond to +972’s requests for comment by the time of publication; their statements will be added if received.
Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian writer based in Ramallah
