West Bank: “Jenin is now a small Gaza”

With a cup of Arabic coffee in his hand, Ahmad Khanfar is standing on a hill on the outskirts of Jenin and looking down on the city when he hears an explosion. A cloud of smoke rises above the refugee camp in the west of the city - the Israeli army has probably blown up another building. Khanfar's house is somewhere down there. He and several relatives fled to the outskirts of the city to escape the fighting that has been simmering in Jenin for weeks.

There they live on land that belongs to the family. Two small rooms, one with blankets on thin carpets, the other with a small bathroom and a hotplate. It is cold and rainy.

The 55-year-old Palestinian with the grey-black beard made the decision to create an emergency shelter in September, when the Israeli army carried out a military operation. A rocket hit the area next to one of his five children. His 28-year-old son was in hospital for four months, he says, but the doctors were unable to remove all the fragments from his head. On his phone, he shows an X-ray of his skull, on which several whitish spots can be seen.

The Israeli army has been active in the camp again since mid-January - and Khanfar's family lives on the hill again. "I don't want my children to die," he says. Down there, everyone could become a target for snipers.

The camp is largely sealed off and approaching the area is dangerous. Nevertheless, Palestinians keep doing it. Ahmad Khanfar's sister Aisha comes up the hill. She was just in the family house with her mother to get a few things. The streets are full of earth and rubble and the apartment is largely destroyed, she reports. "My mother cried when she saw that." Why did she even subject her 80-year-old mother to the dangerous march, Aisha asks out loud and gives the answer herself: "Because I thought that would soften the soldiers' hearts and they would be more likely to let us through."

The troops have been in the camp for five weeks now. This is the most extensive and longest military operation in two decades. And it is not just affecting the refugee camp - and not just Jenin either: the entire northern West Bank is affected. After Jenin, the army took on Tulkarem further west, then Tubas and Tammun in the Jordan Valley.

Critics say the number of dead and injured is disproportionately high. Since the military action began in mid-January, at least 70 Palestinians have been killed, including several children. The army says it is taking action against terrorists - in fact, the refugee camps in Jenin and other places are considered strongholds of armed groups.

But it is not just the length of time and the number of deaths that make the current military action different from previous ones. Diplomatic circles say that the army's current actions have a "new military quality". There have been repeated air strikes. On Sunday, the Israeli government announced that it was sending several tanks to Jenin for the first time since 2002. Before that, there had been an attempted bomb attack on several buses in the greater Tel Aviv area - Israel suspects the perpetrators are in the West Bank.

Foreign observers believe that the security situation in the region has not improved as a result of the military action - but it was not the reason for it either. Many people here also believe that the timing and course of the invasion were no coincidence. "This operation is 100 percent political," says Mohammad Jarrar, the mayor of Jenin. The 52-year-old politician refers to the start of the invasion on January 21 - immediately after the Gaza agreement between Israel and Hamas came into force.

"Netanyahu wanted to save his coalition," says Jarrar. His coalition partner Bezalel Smotrich from the settler party "Religious Zionism" demanded that the army take action in the West Bank as the price for agreeing to the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip . Smotrich himself has repeatedly claimed to have initiated the military action, which was given the name "Iron Wall."

Many Palestinians are particularly angry that the invasion was apparently coordinated with the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA is actually responsible for security matters in places like Jenin. In December, it began its own military operation against militias in the refugee camp. Its security forces acted with great ruthlessness. In mid-January, a ceasefire was brokered between the PA and the so-called Jenin Battalion. However, it collapsed after a short time and new confrontations broke out. Then the PA security forces suddenly withdrew - and the Israeli invasion began.

Most of the armed men fled quickly. Nevertheless, the military action continued. This led to thousands of residents leaving the camp, which was home to around 16,000 people; it is now practically empty. Israel claims that the residents left voluntarily. Many reports from those affected suggest the opposite. Some left because the electricity and water supplies had been cut off, others were under immediate threat. On the hill above the town, Ahmad Khanfar reports that a drone flew over the camp and made announcements ordering people to leave. "That's why we came here."

From up there they could observe what happened in the days and weeks that followed. The invasion resulted in unprecedented destruction of infrastructure. In the refugee camp in particular, entire streets were razed to the ground. At the beginning of February, the troops blew up 21 houses at once. Khanfar's sister Aisha says they cried and screamed in pain when they saw this from afar. Her father exclaimed: "They are destroying our dreams, they are destroying our memories."

Ahmad Khanfar, meanwhile, asserts that the inhabitants of Jenin are indomitable. If Israel's aim is to achieve their complete subjugation, the opposite will actually happen: "We will rise up." The younger generation is even more militant than the previous one, says the Palestinian, who has five children. At the same time, he stresses that people are forced into this attitude because there is no political horizon. "What do you think young people here want?" he asks rhetorically. "They want their own house, a car, to get married. But they have lost hope."

With regard to the military action, Khanfar makes a comparison that many Palestinians are making these days. "Jenin is now a small Gaza," he says. Mayor Jarrar also believes that the army is using tactics from the Gaza war. For example, the troops are destroying houses in the refugee camp to create wide paths. "This is intended to make future military operations there easier." But there is also apparently arbitrary destruction: houses are burned down or blown up. Sometimes only the shells remain standing, while everything inside is destroyed.

All of this makes life in the camp impossible, says the mayor. He would not be surprised if the army stayed in the camp but allowed the residents to return at some point. "When people see that not a stone is left standing there, they will leave. Israel wants people to leave 'voluntarily'. It is the same scenario that they are working on in Gaza." However, Israel's Defense Minister Israel Katz announced on Sunday that he had instructed the army "not to allow the return of the residents and a renewed rise of terrorism." The army should prepare for a "longer stay" in the evacuated camps, Katz said during a visit to Tulkarem.

More than 40,000 people have now fled from Israeli military operations in Jenin and other places. There has not been such a large displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since the Six-Day War in 1967. Most have found shelter with relatives or friends or rented accommodation. Several hundred families have been housed in makeshift accommodation. Around 85 refugees are now living in a school for the blind in southern Jenin. One of them reports that almost all of the children are now sick because it is so cold.

They receive the bare necessities from the city, but the city itself has found itself in difficult waters due to the weeks-long military action. Public life around the camp has partially come to a standstill. The unemployment rate is more than 40 percent, says the mayor. He speaks of a "humanitarian catastrophe."

The military action does not only affect the area around the refugee camp. At the other end of Jenin, in a district called Sharqiya, a young man walks through a courtyard and points to some dark spots above a house entrance. "That is Ahmad's blood," says Fadi Saadi. "And that is Ahmad's brain." His 14-year-old cousin Ahmad Saadi was killed by a rocket here on February 1. He was sitting in a courtyard with friends when the rocket, fired from a drone, hit. It was aimed at a Palestinian militant who was not in the area at the time of the attack. Such incidents are reported again and again. Several underage boys and girls as well as a pregnant woman have been the victims of attacks.

Immediately after his death, Ahmad Saadi's family received mourners who wanted to express their condolences. About fifty men were on the street when another rocket hit a few meters away, reports Fadi Saadi. This time it hit its target - but together with another civilian, Tamam Saadi. The 25-year-old Palestinian was a nurse and member of an Israeli-Palestinian group of peace activists.

He would not wish anyone to have to retrieve their dead son from the street, says Tamam's father Muhyidin Saadi. The 72-year-old Palestinian is sitting with other relatives in a room in the basement of the apartment. "I pulled myself together and controlled my emotions, but it was extremely painful." The old man with the white beard adds that there is only one thing that calms him down: "Tamam has gone to heaven, to God - to a place where there are no checkpoints or roadblocks." That has given him some peace.