The sounds of explosions, bulldozers, military drones and heavy gunfire are a constant in Jenin, a Palestinian city in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which has been under full military lockdown for nearly 10 days as Israel carries out a military offensive.
“The siege on the camp first began outside, on the edges of the camp,” Shatha Sabbagh, 21, told New Lines, referring to the refugee camp built in the city in 1953 that is home to thousands of residents. Sabbagh had been besieged in the camp for four days, until the Israeli military entered the home where she was staying with her mother and sister. They were escorted out of the camp at gunpoint, trailed by an Israeli military jeep.
According to Sabbagh, the Israeli army first cut off electricity and communications from Jenin before invading deeper into the refugee camp. In the city, civilians were forced to remain indoors for the entire duration of the siege. “We’ve been in our homes for days, unable to leave,” Ahmad Shreim, 30, told New Lines as he sat with other men from his community near a gas station at the edge of Jenin city. Shreim had been trapped as Israeli snipers stationed themselves on the main streets of Jenin, shooting at cars, including those of journalists.
“The Israeli military fired live ammunition randomly and excessively at anything that moved, whether human or animal, everything would get shot,” said Sabbagh, who is now displaced on the outskirts of the city.
As the Israeli public continues to protest en masse for a cease-fire hostage deal in Tel Aviv, Gaza’s bombardment by the Israeli military also continues, with its civilian infrastructure nearing total ruin. In the meantime, just 45 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, the Israeli military has expanded a separate campaign in the West Bank that it has dubbed “Operation Summer Camps.”
This latest escalation by the Israeli military in the Palestinian territories will likely embolden settler violence — since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, the Israeli military and armed settlers have killed nearly 700 Palestinians in the West Bank, nearly a fifth of whom were women and minors, according to the Shireen Observatory, a rights organization.
Within one week of the launch of Summer Camps, the Israeli military had killed at least 39 Palestinians in Tulkarem and Jenin alone.
As the army took control of the camp, it barred any entry and exit, and medical workers stationed on the outskirts of the city said the military prevented medical evacuations as well.
“We haven’t been able to receive any of the injured, because the Israeli military has dispatched snipers and is denying travel for ambulances,” said Huda Badran, a nurse at the Amal Specialized Clinic just outside Jenin camp. “We had to stay inside, you can’t tell where the bullets will come from.”
Although the Israeli military has reported that the operation is a “pre-emptive strike against Iran-backed terrorism,” the military has also targeted civilians, with at least eight minors and two elderly killed in the assault, including Tawfiq Qandeel, an 83-year-old. For Palestinians in the northern districts of the West Bank, most of which were placed under siege, the reality of Gaza is now close at hand.
“What we have seen in Gaza impacted us as we witness what is happening now [in Jenin and Tulkarem], because it impacted us psychologically in terms of [augmenting] fears of what Israel can and is doing,” Badran said.
For a week, the Israeli military has been carrying out a large-scale offensive on Jenin and Tulkarem, bulldozing camps and cities and destroying civilian infrastructure, besieging Palestinians in their own homes and obstructing access for patients to the only public hospital in Jenin. The military has also denied the entry of essential items like food and water on top of the destruction of water pipes and intermittently cutting telecommunications from the camp and city. According to the Northern Electricity Distribution Co. (NEDCO), the Israeli military destroyed large amounts of infrastructure throughout the siege. “We tried to fix whatever we can throughout the incursion,” Nasser Abu Aziz, the chief field manager for NEDCO, told New Lines. “They destroy the electric wiring and telecommunications infrastructure every invasion, but this time they were very intentional about it.”
Inside Jenin refugee camp, Palestinians were living in an active battlefield as the Israeli military took over, turning houses into military bases and forcing women and children to flee at gunpoint. According to residents inside the camp and witnesses who escaped, the male population of the camp, including the elderly, the chronically ill and minors, were detained en masse, with some being used as human shields and others taken to unknown destinations.
Witnesses have reported similar patterns of behavior in Tulkarem as well as other areas of the West Bank, including Tubas and Nablus.
While the events of Oct. 7 resulted in the eruption of a full-blown war on Gaza, they led also to a de facto war on Palestinians in the West Bank.
“The Israeli army’s operation in the West Bank extends beyond military action to encompass a broader strategy of targeting Palestinian infrastructure, impoverishing Palestinians through financial instruments, restricting access to work in Israel, and perpetuating continuous assaults and attacks by settler militias,” Abdaljawad Omar, a Palestinian writer and analyst, told New Lines.
For Palestinians in the West Bank, Israeli incursions and violations that target the functioning of daily life have pushed them into a state of hypervigilant guardedness and, to an extent, paralysis.
In the West Bank, the Palestinian economy has taken a hit as a result of the war, further destabilizing the territory and pushing it deeper into an economic crisis. Close to half a million jobs have been lost in the Palestinian economy, according to the World Bank. This did not occur in a vacuum.
With the proliferation of Israeli flying checkpoints and indefinite closures of village and town entrances by military decree, Palestinian movement between cities and towns has become even more constrained than usual. Travel time between areas in the West Bank has increased dramatically; if the journey to a village previously took 30 minutes, after Oct. 7 it would take up to two hours.
However, time isn’t the only impediment to movement. With the increased risk of being arrested, attacked or shot at by the Israeli military and armed settlers, travel, even for work and medical care, has become a dangerous activity for Palestinians in the West Bank. This has limited consumption, further stymying an already fragile local economy.
The inability to move freely, however, is not purely due to Israeli military measures. As Israel has conducted large-scale military operations in Gaza, killing nearly 40,000 Palestinians, in the West Bank Israeli settler attacks and depopulation campaigns against Palestinians have increased dramatically. In parallel, Israeli military offensives have become more lethal.
“This is an existential war rooted in zero-sum logic,” Omar told New Lines. “It is aimed at the elimination of the Palestinians.”
At least 3,300 Palestinians have been displaced in the West Bank since Oct. 7, a striking 146% increase from the year before. At the same time, Israeli military offensives have reached a record high. The past 11 months have seen the highest number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank since Operation Defensive Shield, a huge Israeli military incursion that took place in March and April 2002.
According to Omar, however, divorcing settlement practice from Israeli policy is a mistake.
“It is imperative to highlight the internal pressure exerted by Israeli settlers and their leaders, many of whom play a pivotal role in shaping the Israeli government’s agenda,” he said.
At a Sept. 4 press conference about Israel’s purported military goals in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used as an illustration a map of Israel that omitted the border of the West Bank. In response to a question from a reporter, he denied that the map indicated a shift in Israel’s policy regarding the occupied Palestinian territories, but many Palestinians interpreted it as Israel signaling a political agenda of active annexation.
For months, Palestinians have been unable to travel to each other, engage in healthy community conversations or even mobilize properly as civil society in order to aid Gaza, not only as a result of restricted movement but because of restricted communication and a lack of capacity for public political engagement. The number of Palestinians held in Israeli detention, where many have been abused or tortured, has more than doubled in the past several months, with thousands held without charge or trial. According to the Palestinian Prisoners Society, the only nongovernmental organization documenting the case of Palestinian detainees, Palestinians are facing sexual assault, food and water deprivation, beatings and violent interrogations that last weeks at a time. The Israeli organization B’Tselem described the conditions of Palestinian detainees in a report titled “Welcome to Hell.”
In this climate, the West Bank is de facto being further annexed, with Palestinians in the south and center of the West Bank facing direct attacks by Israeli settlers and military, with their lands and homes forcibly taken over at unprecedented rates. According to an investigative series released by BBC News on Aug. 29, of 196 new illegal outposts in the West Bank, more than half have been erected since Oct. 7.
“This operation not only seeks to gather critical intelligence but also aims to push these [armed Palestinian] groups onto the defensive, imposing a significant cost on the Palestinian population in cities and villages like Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus and other areas that constitute the mosaic of resistance,” according to Omar.
Many Palestinians in the West Bank expected military incursions into the area in parallel with the war in Gaza, but sapped of resources, they were unable to mount any resistance. In Jenin, the attacks and measures also appeared wanton and spiteful.
“We have no idea why they did this,” Anas, who used a pseudonym, told New Lines as he stood on the charcoaled ash of the farmers’ market in Jenin city. An Israeli bulldozer had pushed through the city and its operators reportedly threw a flaming piece of wood directly at the market and set it ablaze. “Look, during every invasion the Israeli army attacks us,” Anas said. “Nothing is new here anymore, that’s it, we’re used to attacks, assassinations, burning of our properties, me telling you what is happening is just repetition.”
While Israeli policymakers are strategically weakening Palestinians, economically, socially and politically, they are simultaneously arming Israeli settlers in the West Bank with automatic and semiautomatic machine guns, including M-16 rifles. Not only are settlers and the military increasingly armed, but Israeli regulations on use of firepower and lethal force have been loosened since 2018. Settlers and settlements are also strategically built on hilltops, overlooking Palestinian towns and villages.
This, in tandem with the international inability to curtail settler violence, has left Palestinians in the West Bank without protection. While the Israeli military claims to be targeting combatants who pose a threat to Israeli civilian lives, those claims have offered cover for offensives inside Palestinian towns and areas.
As the Palestinian nonrefugee population in the West Bank tries to hold its ground amid settler expansionism, it is the refugee camps that are birthing armed resistance fighters. While this may be because of the community’s recent and historical displacement, it is largely driven by social, economic and political neglect.
“What do you expect of a child witnessing this? What do you expect of the children that experienced this decades ago? What will they be? Doctors? They can’t. They can’t even live, so they will fight,” said Amjad, 30, who helped extinguish the market fires.
Palestinian refugee camps are specifically designated as “Area A,” meaning that under the Oslo Accords they are under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA). For years, Palestinians in Areas B and A have been witnessing a rise in offensives against them without any intervention from the PA. In fact, the PA collaborated with the Israeli military in targeting fighters in Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem, Tubas and Ramallah, detaining them, torturing family members and even deploying forces to remove IEDs as witnessed in Tubas last week.
Despite these attempts by the PA, the Israeli military continued their military operations and their targeting of civilian infrastructure, which locals see as an attempt to terrorize Palestinians into acquiescing to the Israeli status quo.
“Look, there is no more such thing as fear left for Palestinians,” Shreim said. “What’s left to be afraid of after all the death and killing?”
While Palestinians watched the developments in Gaza, unable to either mobilize or reach the strip to aid it, the escalation in the West Bank now comes after months of fear in anticipation.
“Palestinians outside of Gaza have been engulfed by a pervasive sense of disorientation, struggling to fully comprehend the magnitude and scale of the war that has been unleashed,” Omar said.
“All the streets would be on lockdown and we have families with no access to water or food for days, and inside the camp the army is treating Palestinians with brutality with no respect to any law and regulation for protecting human life,” a resident of Jenin and an educator, Mahmoud Zour, 41, told New Lines. Pointing to the incident in which the Israeli military killed the 83-year-old Qandeel last Thursday, Zour described the operations as “terror campaigns.” The Israeli military, however, also targeted Palestinians outside Jenin. On Sept. 4, nearly a week into the siege on Jenin, 16-year-old Lujain Musleh was killed by Israeli gunfire while looking outside her window in Kufr Dan, west of Jenin. Two days later, on Friday, Israeli forces shot and killed 26-year-old American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi with a bullet to the head.
Yet the parallel campaigns by the Israeli military and settlers are not merely security-oriented — the war is also psychological and meant to rupture social ties. Israel’s military operations have sought to separate Palestinians, the military treating Jenin with a different intensity compared to Nablus, Ramallah or Hebron. Given that policy, coupled with limited defense resources and historical rivalries between political groups, there is skepticism over whether Palestinians can effectively push back against Israeli practices.
According to Omar, “Palestinians are united by pain and also united in their disunity. … The political discourses fighting over the trajectory of Palestine in the various geographies are similar in tone, content and form.”
By making life in Palestine unbearable on the one hand and unviable on the other, Palestinians will have no choice but to resist.
“Look, the north is next to the center, is next to the south, and in the end, we are one people, ” Shreim told New Lines. “You’re going to find pockets of resistance in every place, because in the end, the Israeli goal is the same across space and time: to displace us.”
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