An Israeli military operation in Jenin has turned the West Bank refugee camp into what residents and some officials describe as a ghost town, causing destruction on a scale not seen there for over 20 years.
Israel’s military says the large-scale raid is aimed at suppressing fighters in Jenin, a Palestinian city in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Two weeks after the military operation began, Jenin is largely deserted. Thousands of Palestinians have left their homes, taking only what they could carry, after Israel told them to leave through drones with loudspeakers. After destroying roadways and other infrastructure, Israeli forces demolished multiple buildings at the weekend, causing loud explosions.
“We stayed at home until the drone came to us and started calling for us to evacuate the house and evacuate the neighbourhood because they wanted to carry out an explosion,” said 39-year-old Khalil Huwail, a father of four who left with his family.
“We left in the clothes we were wearing. We couldn’t carry anything, that was forbidden,” he said. “The camp is completely empty.”
After bulldozers and armoured vehicles were deployed near his home, he said, residents trudged away along rubble-strewn roadways to an assembly point where Red Crescent vehicles awaited. Israel’s military said it had destroyed 23 structures and would ‘continue to operate to thwart terror wherever necessary’.
From a hillside overlooking the camp, little could be seen apart from clouds of smoke and soldiers moving among the blackened walls of burnt-out houses. The operation, that latest stage of a raid launched last month, started after a ceasefire began in Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip with Hamas.
UNRWA, the UN Palestinian relief agency, said the demolitions in Jenin ‘undermine the fragile ceasefire reached in Gaza, and risk a new escalation’.
It said Jenin, a township for descendants of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 war around the creation of the state of Israel, ‘has been rendered a ghost town’.
The refugee camp, long a stronghold of groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, has been raided repeatedly over the years – not only by Israel’s military but also by the Palestinian Administration.
In 2002, during the Second Intifada uprising, Israeli troops demolished hundreds of houses, displacing about a quarter of its population.
Jenin governor Kamal Abu Al Rub said the latest operation had left in the camp only about 100 people from the 3,490 families that had been there before it.
“The situation is worse than what happened in 2002 because the number of the displaced was lower then,” he told Reuters.
Meanwhile, two Israeli soldiers were killed and eight wounded in the occupied West Bank yesterday, setting off a gunfight in which the shooter was killed by Israeli soldiers, the military said.
l Talks on the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal have started, a Hamas spokesperson said yesterday.
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