October 23, 2023 at 4:43 pm EDT
Residents search the ruins of Al-Ansar Mosque in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank after an Israeli airstrike killed two people. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post) Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
JENIN, West Bank – A group of young Hamas fighters in black tracksuits walked through the rubble of a mosque damaged by an Israeli airstrike on Sunday that killed a fellow militant. The men are wanted by Israel and have taken refuge in the Jenin refugee camp, where they are hiding from a security crackdown that has displaced thousands of Palestinians across the West Bank.
“They are trying to save face after what happened in Gaza,” one fighter said of Israeli attacks, raids and arrests against militants in the occupied territory. The 20-year-old man had freshly bandaged wounds on his arms and face, which he said were from a separate attack.
“It won’t work,” he said on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “You will always lose.”
Israel’s sweeping security measures in the West Bank are an expansion of its war against Hamas in Gaza, an attempt to eliminate the militant group and permanently shift the balance of power in a conflict that has raged for decades. More than 1,400 people have been arrested and more than 90 killed in the West Bank in the past two weeks, according to Palestinian officials.
Israel has said its “counter-terrorism” operations will prevent Hamas from launching another attack like its brutal attack on October 7, when gunmen killed over 1,400 people and took more than 200 hostage in southern Israel.
But many Palestinians and some analysts warn that the measures could have the opposite effect. Hamas’s presence in the West Bank, where the rival Fatah movement is in power, is limited, but many of its goals are shared by a new generation of militant groups that have taken up arms here in the last year. The fighters are young, loosely organized and opportunistic.
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Violence did not immediately erupt in the West Bank after Israel declared war on Hamas, said Tahani Mustafa, senior analyst for Palestinian affairs at the International Crisis Group. However, she said militant activity had increased in response to Israel’s recent crackdown.
“Israel has always tried to use full force to prevent any kind of resistance,” she said. But “if the stated goal is to prevent armed resistance, then that is very counterproductive because, if anything, it often has the negative effect of radicalizing young boys.”
The Jenin camp, home to more than 20,000 people, appears to be prepared for a fight. Most access routes to the camp are barricaded; Tarps and sheets are stretched from the roofs of tightly packed houses and stretched across narrow streets to block the view of drones.
The ruling Palestinian Authority is virtually invisible here; The militants are the ones in charge. Residents and local fighters said wanted men from neighboring towns and beyond had moved to the camp, where it was more difficult for Israeli troops to operate.
“From now on, the violence will only increase,” said Abu Ali, 50, a resident who spoke on the condition that he be identified by his nickname for security reasons. He has witnessed past escalations in the camp and fears this will be the worst yet.
He and others have received text messages in Arabic from Israeli forces warning of increased operations in the camp. A message urged people to “distance themselves, their children and families” from militants.
“This has no impact on the spirit of the camp residents,” said Alaa Au Abed, whose cousin was also killed in the Jenin airstrike. “We don’t think about it. We are steadfast.”
But other families feel caught in the middle. Salam Subhi Abu Jabal, 50, said her husband was dragged from their bedroom in the middle of the night.
“They just take anyone who has any connection to Hamas,” she said. Her husband, Juma Saad, nearly 60, had been active in Hamas’ political wing but left the group years ago after an injury from an earlier round of clashes cost him a leg.
He had been arrested many times before, his wife said, but never like this. “This time it was different, they came violently,” she said, her husband being dragged away so quickly that she couldn’t give him his prosthetic leg. She fears she may never see him again.
Others described similar nighttime operations in which members of Israeli forces were dragged from their homes without explanation.
Surveillance camera footage from a neighbor’s house showed the moment soldiers kicked in the door to Mahmood Fayed’s ground floor apartment.
“As they left, they broke the screen and the center table and turned the sofa set upside down,” said his sister Amani Fayed. The noise woke her up and she could hear her brother screaming “I don’t know” as he was taken away. He was an elementary school administrator, she said, and had no connection to any militant organization.
“They take anyone who is a religious man,” she said. “They want revenge because of Gaza.”
According to a statement from Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ rights organization, the arrests were carried out under Israel’s expanded “counterterrorism law.”
According to the group, “activists, lawyers, nurses, doctors and artists” are among those arrested in the past two weeks. Several lawmakers were also arrested, including Aziz Dweik, the former speaker of the Palestinian parliament and a member of the Hamas political party.
Even before the recent violence, 2023 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank in two decades. And over the past week, funerals have increasingly turned into rallies of armed resistance.
Masked gunmen marched alongside mourners outside the Nur Shams camp near the Palestinian town of Tulkarm, chanting “revenge” after a raid on Thursday killed more than a dozen people, including children, residents said. In Bethlehem, neighbors and relatives of a murdered teenager called for a new fight against the occupying forces.
At the cemetery outside Jenin where one of the men killed in the airstrike was buried, militants along with relatives gathered to show their support.
“We are not sad about the way our sons were martyred,” Au Abed said. “It makes us proud to die like this [people] die in the Gaza Strip.”