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Why Jenin? What does Israel have against the refugee camp?

Israeli military action against the town and impoverished refugee camp are decades old.

Israeli military vehicles manoeuvre during an operation in the West Bank city of Jenin, July 5, 2024 [Majdi Mohammed/AP Photo]

By Al Jazeera Staff

Published On 29 Aug 202429 Aug 2024

Amid the largest Israeli assault on the occupied West Bank since the second Intifada, the city of Jenin and its nearby refugee camps once again find themselves in the focus of Israeli military attacks.

At the time of writing, Jenin city, housing nearly 50,000 people, was surrounded by Israeli forces as part of a wider attack that has seen assaults launched at Jenin, Nablus, Tubas, Tulkarem and has so far killed 10 Palestinians and wounded many more.

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Access to hospitals has been blocked with dirt barriers, with other medical facilities surrounded by troops.

In a statement, the governing Palestinian Authority (PA), which has nominal responsibility for the territory, said hospitals were under siege and warned of “repercussions” over what it said were threats to storm them.

Jenin has been the focal point for Israeli military incursions many times before, which, in a long history of military assaults have, in the words of Zaid Shuabi, a Palestinian human rights organiser in the West Bank, are “like Gaza on a smaller scale”.

“You don’t see roads because they’re destroyed. The infrastructure … the sewage and electricity system and the water pipes and telecommunication networks are damaged,” he told Al Jazeera in June.

Video Duration 3 minutes 46 seconds3:46

Repeated incursions

Israeli attacks on Jenin are hardly new.

From the present assault to the violence of the second Intifada between 2000 and 2005, Jenin has rarely been far from the worst of the storm that continues to rage across the West Bank.

The refugee camp at Jenin is thought to be home to about 14,000 people, nearly all descendants of the Palestinians dispossessed of their land and homes when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Conditions in the camp are desperate. Of the 10 camps across the occupied West Bank, Jenin has the highest rates of unemployment and poverty, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

In January last year, an Israeli assault on the refugee camp made headlines globally. During the incursion, 10 Palestinians were slain, one of them a grandmother, Majida Obaid.

During repeated assaults, Israeli forces destroy entire neighbourhoods, claiming they harbour fighters. Civilians are punished in the process – killed, arrested or made homeless, activists told Al Jazeera.

Jenin was particularly hit badly during the second Intifada.

In 2002, Israel launched a major assault on the Jenin refugee camp, the scene of some of the worst violence during the unrest.

During days of violence in April of that year, Israeli infantry, commando forces, and assault helicopters battled lightly armed fighters and homemade booby traps across the civilian encampment, in a response subsequently condemned as “disproportionate” by rights groups

A UN report issued later that year, said 52 Palestinians were killed, with as many as half being civilians.

Israel lost 23 soldiers.

A Palestinian woman gestures atop her house in the destroyed Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, April 28, 2002. A UN mission to find out what happened during Israel’s three-week-long military operation in the camp is awaiting a green light in Geneva to depart to the region [Reuters]

Resistance

Several armed groups have a presence in Jenin, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, and the armed wing of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction also have a presence, with fighters in the camp operating under the umbrella of the Jenin Brigades.

“These groups [in Jenin] started as a community defence mechanism, so the more violent Israel’s raids got and the more systemic, the bigger these groups grew,” Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera earlier this year.

She said the young men who join these groups are reacting to Israel’s deepening occupation and are disillusioned with the PA, which administers the occupied West Bank and is viewed as an Israeli auxiliary by many Palestinians.

The prospect of the regular wage that often accompanies membership of an armed group, as well as the opportunity to “die with pride”, led to more young men joining the ranks of the resistance, Shuabi, the Palestinian human rights activist, told Al Jazeera.

“Families of martyrs – even if they are feeling pain – understand why their brothers [or sons] or other family members are getting involved in the resistance,” she told Al Jazeera.

“Even if they’re not a member of the resistance, they’re being targeted. They figure that they might as well die with pride by being a member of the resistance.”

Video Duration 5 minutes 22 seconds5:22

Resisted

Jenin’s position within the Israeli popular imagination as a centre of resistance is often reflected within the country’s parliament, the Knesset.

In December last year, following a predawn military operation in Jenin, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir defended Israeli soldiers who had used a mosque’s loudspeaker to broadcast Jewish religious songs to the nearby population.

In June of the same year, after further incursions into the area, Israel’s far-right Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich called for full military deployment to the town, including tanks and airpower, after seven Israeli soldiers were injured during fighting there.

Israeli forces had killed four Palestinians in that operation.

According to Ori Goldberg, a Tel Aviv-based political analyst, Jenin’s status as a refugee camp fails to register with an Israeli public which has grown accustomed to seeing itself as the victim.

“No, humanitarian issues and the Palestinian plight don’t really matter to the Israelis,” he said. “You hear expressions such as ‘nest of terrorism’ and other dehumanising expressions about Jenin more than you do anywhere else.”

Partly as a result, Israel’s military presence has been growing at a higher rate around the refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarem since the beginning of the war on Gaza than anywhere else, Goldberg said.

“It’s part of the same cycle,” he continued, outlining how armed resistance in Jenin had led to the default response among Israel’s lawmakers and the public of “Oh, Jenin. That’s bad. We should do something”, before calls for military action are voiced and details of any accusation are provided.