When Asaad al Damagh dropped dead in an alley in Jenin refugee camp on November 25, two explosions were heard. A first projectile killed Al Damagh; The second struck down Maisa, a 30-year-old Palestinian woman who tried to help the man by dragging him to her home covered in shrapnel. With her body pierced by the same pieces of metal that turned the facade of the house into a sieve, the woman managed to enter the hallway. His eldest son Riad, 10, said he had previously seen “something gray in the sky.” It was an Israeli army drone. Maisa now lies in a bed at Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin, a city of about 50,000 people in the northern West Bank. She has already had three operations to remove shrapnel from her body, but can no longer see well in one eye. Other patients with shrapnel in their skulls, like her, “went blind,” says her husband.
For many Palestinians, the Jenin refugee camp is a fiefdom of resistance against the Israeli occupation. For Israel, this place of less than half a square kilometer, where 14,000 displaced people, children and grandchildren of the Nakba, are crowded, is a nest of “terrorists” from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other organizations. In the second case, Al Damagh was active and was murdered without questions and without the opportunity to defend himself in court. This category – “terrorist” – is the one that Israel systematically applies to those who died in Israeli military attacks in the city and especially in the countryside. These operations, which have been recurring for decades, have taken place “unabated” and up to three times a week since October 7, the day Hamas attacked Israel, explains Luz Saavedra, local coordinator of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the only international one Relief organization that operates permanently on site. In the last of these operations, which Israel calls “search and capture,” the Israeli army announced the deaths of four of these “terrorists” on November 28 and 29. One was eight years old. His name was Adam Saber al Ghouk. Another, Basil Suleiman Abu al Wafa, 15. Two unarmed children shot dead by an Israeli soldier.
From October 7 to November 23, Israeli soldiers killed 211 people in the West Bank, almost half of the 452 Palestinians who died for the same reason in 2023. Of these, 54 were children. Eight more Palestinians – including another child – were killed by Israeli settlers, according to a United Nations Humanitarian Coordination (OCHA) document. 66% died in search and arrest operations, “mainly in Jenin and Tulkarem governorates,” which were 60 kilometers apart.
The streets of the Jenin refugee camp bear witness to this series of deaths. Every two steps, improvised altars with framed or photocopied photos pay tribute to the many men, some women and several children who were killed by the Israeli military because of their actual or suspected membership in armed groups. Other faces in these photos include those of victims of a sniper, of crossfire between militiamen and soldiers, or of explosions and bombings that take place in the “search and capture” operations that are turning the refugee camp into a war zone. In July, the Israeli army even fired rockets at the refugee camp from two Apache gunships.
A road in the refugee camp whose asphalt was lifted by an excavator during an Israeli military attack.Diana Khwaelid
Weapons of war
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The military incursions, which have “increased in frequency and intensity” in the nearly eight weeks that the Gaza war has also lasted, Saavedra emphasizes, begin with drones, an ominous presence whose buzz is often the omen that the Field it will be It has been declared a “military exclusion zone” and the Israeli army will break in there. Then the soldiers arrive at sunset, accompanied by the D-9s, huge military excavators that destroy the asphalt and sewers in their path, including entire house walls that the neighbors no longer bother to repair. Snipers are now stationed on rooftops and even in houses in the countryside. Salah Eddine Mansour, a 28-year-old lawyer, points to the scarred walls. The large holes in the facades are “so that the sniper can remove the barrel of the weapon.” There are also other, slightly smaller holes everywhere: gunshot marks. Some of these bullet holes fit in one hand. The soldiers, explain several refugees on the street, use ammunition that explodes when it enters the body.
Emm Haitham, 66, points to her son’s car. The vehicle’s body is half crushed, like a soda can squeezed in your hands. An Israeli bulldozer ran over him. Long black tarpaulins hang from the power cables next to the houses. They are trying to hide the streets from Israeli drone cameras, explains the MSF coordinator.
Not far away, a woman opens the door of her house to reveal a wall whose upper part has evaporated. An Israeli rocket uprooted it, he explains. He then points to the ground and says that during a raid, a man the soldiers were looking for hid in his garden. “They shot him and took him away,” he remembers.
Since the day of the Hamas attack, the Israeli military has not only increased its usual violence in this refugee camp, which was one of the main scenes of the second Palestinian intifada two decades ago. They also prevent the wounded from receiving quick medical care by blocking the entrances to the city’s hospitals, especially one, the largest public hospital in Jenin, Khalil Suleiman, which is located right on the land, explains the Doctors Without employee Boundaries. Saavedra describes how the soldiers stop the ambulances, search them and ask everyone inside for documents. This humanitarian worker recalls the case of a 45-year-old man with a mental disability who was shot in the stomach during an Israeli raid and was presumed dead because the ambulance did not arrive in time.
Doctors Without Borders supports emergencies in Jalil Suleiman. Local volunteers were also trained, some with previous health care experience and others not, to provide basic emergency care to the injured in so-called “stabilization points” while ambulances arrived. houses or plots of land intended for this purpose. All that remains of one of them, bombed by the Israeli army in July, are charred walls and twisted bars. Médecins Sans Frontières also donated to the volunteers a stroller like those used on golf courses, equipped with a stretcher to transport the injured through the narrow streets of the golf course.
Bullet holes in Jenin refugee camp. DIANA KHWAELID
shoot to kill
In the Jalil Suleimán Hospital, the windows of the stairs were broken by bullets. Its director, Wisam Bakr, explains that the Israeli military not only prevented ambulances from entering, but even detained the wounded who were inside. The use of weapons such as shrapnel bombs or rockets in civilian urban areas, as well as attacking hospitals and preventing aid to the wounded, may constitute war crimes.
“Since the Hamas attack,” laments Dr. Bakr, Israeli soldiers “shoot to kill,” even at people who are in the hospital. A man selling coffee at the entrance to the facility was recently killed by a sniper, explains the doctor, showing a video from the hospital cameras that recorded the murder. At his side, Khaled Musarwe, a 43-year-old ambulance driver, recounts how Israeli soldiers arrested, handcuffed and mistreated him as he tried to evacuate the wounded during several search and arrest operations. In one of them, a sniper shot the vehicle, he claims. He came out unharmed.
Sabreen Zaid, 32, was luckier. This medic, admitted to Jenin’s other major hospital, Ibn Sina, survived being shot by an Israeli sniper on November 9th. The woman was also in a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance, whose personnel were trying to help two other Palestinians injured by gunfire. The projectiles penetrated the bodywork and two of them lodged in his groin area. One grazed his spinal cord and since then he has been unable to move his leg. Sabreen also has video of the shooting. Inside you can hear the whistling sound of a hail of bullets and terrifying screams of pain.
Medic Sabreen Zeid recovers after being shot by a sniper at Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin. Diana Khwaelid
In Jalil Suleiman’s emergency room, head nurse Qassem Jomah Bani Garrah lost track of the gunshot wounds he was treating. He recalls that during a search operation, 108 patients were admitted to the emergency room within 47 hours, almost all with gunshot and shrapnel wounds. “Since October 7th, patients have been coming to us dismembered by explosions or with shrapnel in their hearts. We had to amputate both of one boy’s legs, and another had his forearm torn off by an explosive bullet,” the nurse remembers.
Hassan, 13, sits in a wheelchair in another room at Ibn Sina Hospital. He was also shot twice in the stomach by Israeli soldiers on November 9, during the same raid in which the medic was injured. The boy laughs when he is told about his team Barça, but his expression turns serious when he explains how a sniper shot him. He then counts how many of his friends the soldiers killed: five, he says, adding: “Three others were also shot.”
In a house in the refugee camp, a woman cleans some carpets with a brush. His 15-year-old daughter Sadil also died from a shot in the head. When asked about her, the brushing becomes hectic and the woman calls Malak, a friend of the dead teenager, to speak to this newspaper. The young woman explains that her brother was the first to see Sadil on the ground. At that moment a young man approaches.
– Is this man your brother who found Sadil?
– No Answer. And he starts to cry.
– Why are you crying?
– My brother was killed by the Israelis two weeks ago.
If you cross the Green Line, the imaginary border between Israel and the West Bank, “as a Palestinian you immediately lose 20 years of life expectancy,” says the MSF coordinator. The cause is “the violence of the Israeli occupation”. The majority of refugees from the Jenin camp never crossed the de facto border between Israel and these occupied territories, established in 1949. To leave the West Bank they need a permit, which Israel systematically denies them. The beach is about 50 kilometers away. Many teenagers in Jenin refugee camp have died without ever seeing the sea.
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