Inside the brutal siege of Jenin

The Israeli military is destroying civilian infrastructure, blocking access to medical care and carrying out mass arrests in its largest operation in the West Bank in years.

On August 28, Israel launched Operation Summer Camps, the largest military invasion in the northern West Bank in more than two decades. In Jenin, Israeli forces first entered the city before imposing a full-blown siege on the refugee camp a few hours later; the army simultaneously conducted operations in Tubas, Nablus, Ramallah and Tulkarem.

Since 2021, the Israeli army has repeatedly targeted the Jenin refugee camp, under the pretext of fighting armed resistance groups. Most of the victims of these attacks are non-combatant Palestinian civilians and minors, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Palestinian residents and journalists say the current assault is the most intense and violent in years, with at least 19 Palestinians killed in Jenin, including children. The events come amid a dramatic increase in Israeli military operations and settler violence across the West Bank following October 7, which brutally killed nearly 700 Palestinians in the territory – 185 in the city of Jenin alone.

The army also reportedly shot 83-year-old Tawfiq Qandeel in the Jenin camp on September 30, leaving him to die in the street without access to medical care. Two days later, a video circulated on social media showing Israeli military vehicles driving over Qandeel’s body.

Bombs, bulldozers, bullets

While the Israeli military claims to be fighting the Jenin Brigades and other Palestinian resistance movements, the ongoing operation has devastated large swathes of the refugee camp’s civilian infrastructure, constituting a clear form of collective punishment.

“They blew up our house, they blew it up!” Khayriyeh Khrayneh, 72, repeated to +972, moments after she was forced to flee her home near the eastern neighborhood of Jenin refugee camp.

Four days into the operation, the city became a ghost town, while the camp turned into a battlefield. Palestinians were forced to stay indoors as Israeli soldiers turned buildings into military bases and sent snipers onto rooftops. Civilians, including children, the elderly, and the chronically ill, were denied access to water, food, and medicine as part of the total siege on the camp.

“We didn’t even get a glass of water,” Khrayneh said, as they were trapped between bombs, bulldozers and live ammunition. Khrayneh and her young daughter escaped their home at gunpoint, taking nothing but a small black handbag containing her ID cards and passports.

Her three sons (the youngest is 16) and her husband were all taken away by the Israeli army, part of what eyewitnesses in the camp describe as a campaign of mass arrests targeting Jenin’s men and boys. Khrayneh’s husband is diabetic and requires constant medical care; her eldest son, 41, is battling cancer.

“He had just finished a chemotherapy session,” Khrayneh recalled, fighting back tears as smoke rose above the rubble of her home just metres away.

Although the press was denied access to the camp, the sound of explosions and machine gun fire echoed throughout the city of Jenin. A large number of Israeli D-9 bulldozers, armored personnel carriers and armored jeeps moved through the city streets. The skies over Jenin were filled with drones; they could be surveillance drones or deadly quadcopters, which Israel has routinely deployed in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Some Palestinians managed to escape the camp – mostly women and children, often driven out at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers who had invaded their homes and detained the families’ men and young boys.

Those who fled describe the ferocity of Israeli military tactics over the past week: anti-tank grenades destroying civilian infrastructure, attack dogs unleashed on families, Palestinian detainees used as human shields, and sporadic and indiscriminate live ammunition.

Blocking hospitals and ambulances

As the military operation rages inside the refugee camp, residents of the city and its surroundings have not been spared the effects of the siege. With the army roaming the streets and shooting at cars, Palestinians in Jenin have been subjected to a strict curfew, and access to the city from outside has been severely restricted.

“We have been locked in our homes for days,” Saed Souki, from the town of Al-Batal, just outside of downtown Jenin, told +972. “We haven’t had access to the most basic supplies, like flour and baby food, for days.” Any attempt to circumvent the siege has been met with brutal force: on September 1, the Israeli army shelled and killed three Palestinian children from Seela Harthiya, west of Jenin, as they rode their Vespas after delivering bread to Jenin residents.

Even ambulances were unable to cross the city to reach the refugee camp. According to the head of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin, Mahmoud Al-Saadi, “ambulances were machine-gunned and paramedics were denied access to Jenin, even to retrieve the bodies of the killed Palestinians, despite obtaining permits in coordination with the Israeli army.”

At the start of the operation, the army also imposed a complete lockdown on Jenin Government Hospital, the city’s only public general hospital. The Israeli Border Police, Magav, was tasked with controlling the hospital’s entrances and exits and declared the immediate area a “closed area by military order.”

The government hospital continued to receive patients via ambulances, but only after they were stopped and checked by Magav officers, who sometimes forced patients out to check their identity papers.

From outside the city, the road to Jenin is peppered with checkpoints and roadblocks imposed by the army, hindering the movement of not only Palestinians, but also journalists and medical personnel. With Israeli operations extending throughout the West Bank, leaving Jenin is becoming as dangerous as staying there.

“I have been here for four days and I have not been able to go home because of the ongoing events,” said Huda Badran, a nurse at Al-Amal Hospital, adjacent to the Jenin refugee camp. Badran, who is originally from Tulkarm – 60km southwest of Jenin – said this was the first time in her 18 years working at the clinic that she had not been able to go home for almost a week.

“You can’t know what’s going to happen,” she says, and given the simultaneous military operation in Tulkarem, “I’m taking risks leaving here, but also going home.”

The Israeli military says Palestinian resistance groups have been the main target of the assault on Tulkarem; those killed in recent days include a co-founder of the Tulkarem Brigade, Mohammad “Abu Shuja” Jaber, as well as fighters Majd Daoud and Dousom Srouji.

But as in Jenin, residents of the Nur Shams and Tulkarm refugee camps have been placed under siege, with no access for media or medical personnel. When the Israeli army withdrew from the Tulkarm camps on August 30, it left a trail of destruction, leaving at least three people dead and dozens injured.

The army resumed its assault on both camps on September 2, killing at least one teenager, Mohammad Kanaan, 15, and wounding his father with a bullet to the waist. This time, the Israeli army not only prevented journalists from accessing the camps, but also directly targeted media personnel.

“Another Gaza”

It remains unclear how long the Israeli military intends to continue Operation Summer Camps. Jenin Governor Kamal Abu Al-Rub reportedly tried to coordinate a ceasefire with the military to allow urgent aid to be delivered to the refugee camp, but his efforts were rebuffed.

After the Jenin Brigades killed an Israeli soldier in a joint ambush on the fourth day of the siege, Israeli operations intensified. “We have no intention of letting terrorism … raise its head,” Herzi Halevi, head of the Israel Defense Forces, said in a statement. “That is why the initiative is to go from city to city, from refugee camp to refugee camp.”

Yet these Israeli military attacks have only increased the resentment of the Palestinian civilian population – which bears the brunt of the attacks – and encouraged the recruitment of resistance groups.

“What do you think they are doing? They are pushing for escalation so they can completely depopulate us,” said A., a 30-year-old Jenin resident who asked to speak on condition of anonymity for fear of Israel’s campaign of mass arrests.

“They make our lives unbearable,” A. adds. “This naturally pushes us towards confrontation, and when we do, the Israeli army escalates its abusive practices even further.”

As A. spoke to +972, Israeli forces had set fire to the Jenin farmers’ market, bulldozed at least 70 percent of the streets in the camp and surrounding areas, and completely cut off water access to the camp and 80 percent of Jenin. While Israel reportedly plans to designate the entire West Bank as a “combat zone,” Israeli security officials warn that “the Jenin operation is just the beginning.”

“You know what Jenin is? It’s another Gaza, and Gaza is Palestine,” says A.. “We can’t keep separating them, because we’re being targeted as Palestinians, and the same thinking will be used here and there to keep pushing Palestinians off their land.”

The IDF did not respond to +972’s requests for comment at the time of publication; their statements will be added if received.

Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian writer based in Ramallah. Twitter: @MariamBarghouti.

Translation: JB for

Source: +972 Mag