This week, Israeli forces besieged the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. It was perhaps the biggest escalation there in two decades. It’s also of a piece with the policies of the current Israeli government.
On Monday, Israeli forces conducted an operation with airstrikes and military personnel. About 1,000 Israeli troops entered Jenin over those two days, according to the Israeli press, in what the government said was a counterterrorism operation.
At least 12 Palestinians were killed, several of them militants; over 100 Palestinians were wounded; and one Israeli soldier was killed. The Palestinian health ministry said that water and electricity systems in Jenin were damaged, and ambulances were blocked from reaching those in need of care.
Amid the aerial attacks and bulldozers, thousands of Palestinians fled from their homes in Jenin. While many may return after homes are reconstructed, those shocking images were reminiscent of the catastrophe of 1948, which Palestinians call the Nakba, when some 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes. An “ongoing Nakba, a never-ending trauma,” is how Inès Abdel Razek, the advocacy director for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, described the situation. “You’re being displaced and re-displaced and denied your dignity and the right to be free within your homeland.”
The Israeli attack represents a major escalation and the most intensive campaign in the West Bank since perhaps 2002, when Israeli forces destroyed parts of Jenin. But it also builds on an exceedingly violent year in Jenin and across the occupied West Bank, including ongoing Israeli raids on Palestinian homes there to crack down on grassroots resistance groups that use violence against the Israeli military. In May 2022, prominent Palestinian American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead covering the Israeli raids of Palestinian homes in Jenin.
Though Israeli forces appear to have ended the campaign…
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