Every time Israeli troops entered his refugee camp, Alaa would take his assault rifle and coordinate with other Shabab – young people, as everyone in the West Bank euphemistically calls militiamen – from Nur Shams to try to organize a typical urban guerrilla ambush that would soon take place left again after enduring a mix of gunfire, Molotov cocktails and butane bottle explosives. “Usually they would come in to arrest someone, there would be some confrontation and they would leave. At most they used a drone, but for surveillance,” explains Alaa, with an M-16 on his shoulder, decorated with a sticker of his companions who no longer accompany him. While the funerals of the 1,400 dead in Hamas’ massive surprise attack were taking place last week, they “brutally” invaded this camp of 12,000 people near the West Bank town of Tulkarem.
The troops left the area in the dark and cut off communications. The young people began coordinating with walkie-talkies as the bulldozers made their way through the camp’s narrow streets amid drone shots and bombardments from Apache helicopters, as if the clock had gone back two decades. “The number of houses they invaded, the number of those they demolished and also the aggressiveness are not normal. They put shooters on almost every corner,” he says. The result: 13 Palestinians (five of them children) and an Israeli border police officer were killed in 27 hours of operations.
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Alaa can’t remember anything like it because he’s never seen anything like it: it’s the bloodiest incursion into the West Bank since the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when he was just a baby who ended up growing up with no horizon for recovery until he joined the Al-Quds Brigades – the armed wing of Islamic Jihad that monopolizes posters, graffiti and headbands here – and now, at the age of 21, rejoices in the fragility of Israel on October 7th showed what is already the bloodiest day in its history. “Gaza has given us additional strength to defend our people and we are sending a message: you are not alone,” he says.
Posters call for revenge
Obscured by the thousands of bodies in Israel and Gaza, the vicious cycle of violence in the West Bank is in full swing. At least 82 Palestinians have died in the West Bank since last day, the 7th, an unprecedented rate in two decades. Particularly in confrontations with Israeli soldiers, although the number of civilian deaths has also skyrocketed at the hands of ultranationalist settlers who have put up posters in Hebrew with slogans such as “Revenge” or “Destroy.” [Gaza] + attachment = victory.”
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In Nur Shams there is no need to look for signs of the raid. Bullet holes wider than usual (apparently from a type of Israeli ammunition that expands on impact), burned or bulldozed cars, destroyed buildings, torn up asphalt on the only road where armored vehicles can fit, sandbags, steel anti-tank barriers , traces of shrapnel on the outside of houses, a small crater from the rocket in which seven Palestinians died…
A car damaged by bullets in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the West Bank town of Tulkarem, this TuesdayAntonio Pita
The Israeli army said in a statement it discovered dozens of improvised explosive devices at the camp and “neutralized at least twelve terrorists,” some through airstrikes, a common resource in Gaza but virtually unprecedented in the West Bank over the past two decades. Video taken on a cellphone shows at least six bodies on the ground, none with a gun nearby. Another, four young people together at the moment of impact.
Culture of martyrdom
One of them is Mujahid Qazli. He was 15 years old and his image now dominates the typical Arab living room, where sofas take up three walls and where neighbors sit to express their condolences to the family. Um Muyahed (the typical matronym by which she prefers to be called) is shown holistically, also because pain and pride mix when a son loses his life, either actively (by sacrificing himself in a suicide), in the context of the conflict with Israel ). attack) or as an innocent victim, like a civilian in the bombing of a house. It is the so-called “culture of martyrdom”.
The mother says that Mujahid did not normally pray, but in recent days he began to ask God that when his time to die came, he would be like a martyr: “just like the children of Gaza.” “Of course I see I know how the Israelis act and I’m afraid of losing more children, but there isn’t a family in the neighborhood that hasn’t lost one. And for us, who have several children, it is easier than for other families. We have five boys and four girls. Well, now four and four,” he says.
He wears a pendant with the photo of Mujahid around his neck and holds a Muslim rosary in his hand. To pose, he puts on the keffiyeh, the traditional scarf that has become a symbol of Palestinian identity. He explains that when the bombings began in Gaza – which grew in intensity and claimed more than 5,000 lives – “the young people in the countryside started throwing stones at the soldiers.” “Others then couldn’t take it anymore and shot at the military checkpoints out of anger at what they saw on TV and on the phones,” he says. A teenager walks in with his face covered and an Islamic Jihad militia headband. “That’s what young people in the countryside are like,” he says, justifying the maze of streets inhabited by refugees from the Nakba, the flight or expulsion of about 700,000 of the millions of Palestinians who lived in what is now Israel between 1947 and 1949.
To Muyahed, this Tuesday in her home in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the West Bank town of Tulkarem.Antonio Pita
Another teenager, Anas Turabi, 17, claims the military used him as a human shield. But he downplays it because what really bothered him was that they beat him “like a sack of wheat.” “Every time we entered a house, the soldier would open the refrigerator and if he didn’t see any food, he would beat me,” he says, showing bruises on his side.
Turabi says they handcuffed him, his hands behind his back, and a uniformed officer led him onto the street and had him walk directly in front of them, the rifle on his shoulder. It was 10 hours during which he occasionally attached an explosive to a door. They left and when it exploded, he ordered him to enter the building first in case there were militiamen there waiting to fire.
The Israeli army said it interrogated “dozens of suspects” in the raid and arrested 20, out of nearly 600 in the West Bank since the Hamas attack. Reports from rural residents of the raid follow the pattern of previous raids in other West Bank cities: a dozen soldiers enter, sometimes violently, separate the men from the women and children and interrogate the former. Farhan, 17, was in his uncle’s house when the soldiers entered: “First they asked for everyone’s IDs and cell phones. And me the password. I refused, but they threatened me and I was afraid. In the end I gave it to him. He researched and immediately found a photo with martyrs from Gaza. He showed it to me and asked: What? Are you also a Hamas terrorist?”
Despite the raid, there are no very sad faces. Alaa admits that the images of deaths in Gaza make him sad, but he trusts in the role of the “resistance.” [los soldados israelíes] enter by land.” “I’m not from Hamas, but we’re all fighting together here. And what he did gives me strength to keep fighting when I see how wrong and weak this army is. “It’s not an army, it’s a candy.”
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