Israel’s attacks on the Jenin camp and adjacent town have intensified in the past two decades: “Sharp Israeli militancy to wipe out the remnants of an open-ended occupation”
Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militancy. The Palestinians see the intensifying Israeli military presence in the area as an entrenchment of Israel’s 56-year open-ended occupation of the territory.
The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint as Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated since the spring of 2022. Two weeks ago there was a violent confrontation in Jenin.
Israeli media said the military also conducted airstrikes, reviving a tactic it had largely halted during the past two decades, after a Palestinian uprising against Israel’s open-ended occupation slowly fizzled.
The number of Palestinians who have died in violence this year in the West Bank has reached 131, a level not seen in two decades, as Monday’s deaths bring to an end a year of violence that saw some of the worst bloodshed in the area.
Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in confrontations have also died.
Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians hope that they will be able to establish an independent state.
The Palestinian self-rule government in the West Bank and three Arab countries with normalized ties with Israel – Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – condemned Israel’s incursion, as did the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
A spokesman for the Israeli military, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said Monday that Israel had launched the operation because some 50 attacks over the past year had emanated from Jenin.
During Tuesday’s operations, the military said it seized weapons and explosives and demolished tunnels beneath a mosque in the refugee camp. According to Israeli media, the army had arrested at least 120 suspected Palestinian militant since Monday.
The mayor of Jenin said that around 4,000 Palestinians fled the refugee camp in order to find a place to stay in relatives and shelters. The people in the camp were without water or electricity.
There were reports of damage to the shops in Jenin after the rubble was strewn across the streets. There is a skyline filled with black smoke every now and then over the camp, which has been a scene ofIsraeli-Palestinian violence ever since. It was a center of militant activity in the early 2000s.
The Hamas militant group praised Tuesday’s attack in Tel Aviv as “heroic and revenge for the military operation in Jenin” and later claimed the driver was a member, though it was not immediately clear if the attacker was dispatched by the group or acted on his own. Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a large presence in Jenin, also praised the assault.
But the current violence is also different from the intense years of what was known as the second intifada, a period that claimed thousands of lives. It’s more limited in scope, with Israeli military operations focused on several strongholds of Palestinian militants.
It was similar to Israeli military tactics during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces growing pressure from his ultranationalist political allies for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers.
The large-scale raid of the Jenin camp, which began Monday, is one of the most intense military operations in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades.
The attack came as Israeli troops pressed ahead with their hunt for Palestinian militants and weapons in a refugee camp, after military bulldozers tore through alleys and thousands of residents fled to safety. The two-day Palestinian death toll rose to 10.
In response to Israel’s military operation in the West Bank a Palestinian man drove his car into a crowded bus stop in Tel Aviv and began attacking people with a knife.