Israel’s military has turned its sights on Jenin refugee camp following deadly Hamas attacks

When you visit the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, the children dance around you like fireflies, full of winks and whistles and happy to show the way to the latest buildings destroyed by Israeli forces after a raid.

They run through narrow, winding streets that have been draped with tarps to hide those who walk them from the view of Israeli drones flying overhead and past pictures of the dead, many of them young men posing with guns.

The Jenin camp has long been a symbol of Palestinian armed resistance to the Israeli occupation. It was a frequent target of Israeli raids well before Hamas launched its deadly attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people.

The raids have increased dramatically since then. Just this week, Israel ended a three-day-long incursion into the camp. Twelve people were reportedly killed, according to news agencies and dozens arrested by Israeli forces.

“The escalation increased after 7th of October,” Dr. Wissam Baker, director of Khalil Suleiman Governmental Hospital in Jenin, told CBC News in an interview at the end of November, just after Israeli forces had entered the grounds of his hospital on the edge of the Jenin camp.

He said they had stopped ambulances from coming and going during an Israeli incursion at the time.

“Before, the rate of incursion was frequently every two or three weeks. But now, after seven of October, the rates [are] more frequent,” Baker said. “Every two or three days. Sometimes short. Sometimes longer.”

Israeli forces often come into the camp with bulldozers, tearing up roads and infrastructure, and have recently been using airstrikes in their operations, rare before now in the West Bank.

Israel says it is conducting counterterrorism operations against Hamas and other militant groups in the West Bank that have carried out or are planning attacks against Israeli citizens.

‘The killing will not bring peace’

Seventy-eight Palestinians have been killed in Jenin alone since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah. That’s out of 288 Palestinians killed in the West Bank as a whole since October’s Hamas attacks.

Not long before Baker spoke to CBC News, his colleagues at the hospital had declared dead two children shot by Israeli soldiers withdrawing from the city, according to witnesses.

Adam Samer al-Ghoul was just eight years old, and Basel Suleiman Abu al-Wafa was 15.

CCTV footage showed the boys falling to the ground and other boys scattering as they did, one remaining behind to drag his friend behind a car.

“During IDF operations in the Jenin refugee camp, a number of suspects hurled explosives towards the forces,” the Israel Defence Forces said in a written response to a CBC News request for comment. “The soldiers responded by firing towards the suspects, identifying hits.”

One of the boys did not appear to have anything in his hand and was running away when he was shot. The other did, but it’s difficult to see what it was.

After his death, Hamas claimed Abu al-Wafa as one of its own. But the firefly brigade could easily have claimed him, too.

Baker said he believes the soldiers were shooting to kill, aiming at their head and chest.

“They are not fighters. Not old men. They are kids,” he said. “The killing will not bring the peace. The killing will make new fighters.”

Israel, U.S. trade views on post-war landscape

Most of the Jenin camp’s residents are those — or their descendants — who fled or were forced from their homes during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

Locals are now calling it “Little Gaza.”

The 78 people reportedly killed in Jenin since Oct. 7 is nowhere near the number of Palestinians who’ve been killed in Gaza since Israel began its war against Hamas — now estimated at nearly 19,000, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry there, with two-thirds of them women and children.

But it’s a reflection of how dark the mood is across the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, from a people already well versed in hardship and despair.

“It’s not just what’s happening in the West Bank. It’s everything,” Ramallah-based political analyst Nour Odeh said in an interview with CBC News.

“It’s what’s happening in Gaza. It’s the fact that the whole part of our heart, of our soul as a nation, is being decimated. And we are helpless. Not just surviving daily occupation, but we’re utterly helpless.”

And Palestinians are rarely given agency, she said, when Israel and the United States are trading public views on what “the day after” the Israel-Hamas war will look like.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will maintain security control over a demilitarized Gaza, and he rejected U.S. President Joe Biden’s reach for a two-state solution to the conflict — despite its profound neglect by the international community over the years.

Biden has argued for a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority (PA) that could take on the job with the support of willing Arab governments and the international community.

Israeli occupation intensifies in West Bank

As the war in Gaza rages, Palestinians in the West Bank say they feel increasingly boxed in by Israel’s occupation. Military raids and settler violence have all intensified since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7.

Abbas, Palestinian Authority seen as corrupt

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has indicated in talks with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the PA would only contemplate a role as part of a comprehensive solution, including Palestinian statehood.

But Odeh said the PA has no credibility.

“You cannot breathe life into a mummy. And that’s basically the leadership structure of the Palestinian Authority right now,” she said.

“As a Palestinian, I would want to see them gone, and I would want to see an organic Palestinian process that produces an inclusive interim body of Palestinians that can take us through this healing process, through this reconstruction process into elections.”

The PA is a governing body controlled by Fatah that was created out of the 1990s Oslo Accords — agreed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization — and exercises only partial control of the civil administration in some parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The 88-year-old Abbas and his entourage are widely viewed as corrupt by most Palestinians and largely impotent in the face of the Israeli occupation, now in its 56th year.

Fatah was thrown out of Gaza by Hamas after the militant group won an upset election in 2006, followed by a near civil war a year later.

Hamas can’t be excluded: analyst

Israel’s Netanyahu has since been accused of encouraging that division by propping up Hamas, at the expense of Fatah and the PA, by allowing Qatar to send large amounts of cash to Hamas.

“They build the monster, they feed the monster and then the monster kill them,” is how Alaa Yaghi, a former Fatah MP who fled Gaza in 2007, described it in an interview shortly after the attacks of Oct. 7.

Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza and its new Hamas rulers in the wake of the militant Islamist group’s takeover with Egypt’s help in 2007. Palestinians haven’t had an election in Gaza or the West Bank since.

Political analyst Odeh said she believes that whatever happens the day after the war, Hamas will have to be included in any long-term political solution.

“You don’t have to like them, but they’re there,” she said.

Hamas has been designated a terrorist group by several governments, including Canada’s. Given that it refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and is sworn to its destruction, it’s hard to imagine Israel agreeing to that.

But Odeh said it’s not as simple as removing the Hamas military wing and its al-Qassam Brigades.

“Hamas is a social movement. It has a youth movement and a women’s movement. And it’s involved in unions and so on,” she said. “It’s not a detail you can just ignore or pretend doesn’t exist. And it certainly doesn’t only operate in Gaza.”

Popularity of Hamas on the rise, poll finds

An opinion poll released by Khalil Shikaki’s Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research on Wednesday found a dramatic rise in support for Hamas in the West Bank.

Conducted between Nov. 22 and Dec. 2, 44 per cent of respondents in the West Bank said they supported Hamas, compared with 12 per cent in a September poll. In the same survey, 92 per cent called for Abbas’s resignation.

In the neighbourhood of Silwan, where the streets flow down into the valley from the walls of the old city in East Jerusalem, Suleiman Onizan agreed that Abbas’s time is up.

But the grandfather, who was born in Silwan and still lives there today, comes from a generation that remembers the promise of a two-state solution, including the hope that East Jerusalem might one day be its capital.

He said there is no other option.

“This is a conflict that will keep going until people decide to view it rationally and provide peace. Build bridges between the two nations that must live together.”

Onizan said there were genuine seeds of hope in the 1990s before the collapse of the peace talks.

The new generation of Palestinians is being raised on the opposite of hope — especially in places like Jenin, where mothers worry they won’t be able to protect their children. That’s the “day after” they’re already worrying about.