Every time Israeli troops entered his refugee camp, Alaa would grab his assault rifle and coordinate with others. shabab—young people, as everyone in the West Bank euphemistically calls the militiamen, from Nur Shams to try to lay a typical urban guerrilla ambush on the soldiers, who soon left after overcoming a mixture of gunshots, Molotov cocktails and explosives made from butane cylinders. “Normally, they would come in to arrest someone, there would be some confrontations and they would leave. At most they used a drone, but for surveillance,” explains Alaa, with an M-16 on his shoulder decorated with a sticker from his companions who no longer accompany him. Last week, while the burials of the 1,400 killed in the massive and surprise attack by Hamas were taking place, they “brutally entered” this camp with 12,000 inhabitants near the city of Tulkarem, in the West Bank.
The troops left the area in darkness and cut off communications. The young people began to coordinate with walkie talkies, while the bulldozers made their way through the narrow alleys of the camp, amid drone shots and bombardments from Apache helicopters, as if the clock had turned back two decades. “The number of houses they entered, nor those they demolished, nor the aggressiveness is not normal. They put shooters almost on every corner,” he says. The result: 13 Palestinians (five of them children) and an Israeli border policeman killed in 27 hours of operation.
Alaa does not remember anything like it because it is the bloodiest incursion into the West Bank since the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when he was just a baby who would end up growing up with no horizon for improvement until he joined the Al Quds Brigades – the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad. that here monopolizes posters, graffiti and bands on the forehead― and, now, at 21 years old, get excited about the fragility that Israel showed last October 7, in what is already the bloodiest day in its history. “Gaza has given us extra strength to defend our people and we send a message: you are not alone,” she says.
Posters calling for revenge
Darkened by the thousands of corpses in Israel and Gaza, the cycle of violence runs in full swing in the West Bank. At least 82 Palestinians have died in the West Bank since last day the 7th, at a rate unprecedented in two decades. Above all, in confrontations with Israeli soldiers, although the number of civilians killed by ultranationalist settlers has also exploded, who have placed posters in Hebrew with slogans such as “Revenge” or “Destroy [Gaza] + Annex = Victory.”
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In Nur Shams, there is no need to look for signs of the raid. Bullet holes wider than usual (apparently from a type of Israeli ammunition that expands upon impact), cars burned or damaged by the passage of bulldozers, buildings in ruins, asphalt torn up on the only street where armored vehicles can fit , sandbags, steel anti-tank barriers, signs of shrapnel on the outside of the houses, a small crater from the missile that killed seven Palestinians…
The Israeli army says in a statement that it discovered dozens of homemade explosive devices in the camp and “neutralized at least 12 terrorists”, some of them in an aerial bombardment, a common resource in Gaza, but practically unprecedented in the West Bank in the last two decades. A video recorded with a cell phone shows at least six bodies on the ground, none with a firearm nearby. Another, four young people together at the moment of impact.
Culture of martyrdom
One of them is Mujahed Qazli. He was 15 years old and his image today dominates the typical Arab living room in which the sofas occupy three walls and where the neighbors sit to offer their condolences to the family. Um Muyahed (the matronym with which she prefers to be named) shows herself whole, in part because pain and pride are mixed when a son loses his life in the context of the conflict with Israel, either actively (immolating himself in a suicide attack) or as a victim innocent, like a civilian in the bombing of a home. It is the so-called “culture of martyrdom.”
The mother says that Mujahed did not usually pray, but in the last few days he began to ask God that, if his time to die came, he would be like a martyr: “just like the children of Gaza.” “Of course I see how the Israelis act and I am afraid of losing more children, but in the neighborhood there is no family that has not lost one. And it is easier for us, who have several children, than for other families. We have five boys and four girls. Well, now four and four,” she assures.
He wears a pendant with the photo of Mujahed around his neck and holds a Muslim rosary in his hand. To pose, she puts on the kufiya, the traditional scarf that has become a symbol of Palestinian identity. He explains that, when the bombings on Gaza began – which have increased in intensity until claiming more than 5,000 lives – “the young people in the countryside began to go and throw stones at the soldiers.” “Then others couldn’t stand it and went to shoot at the military checkpoints, out of rage at what they were seeing on television and on the phones,” he says. A teenager enters with his face covered and a headband from the Islamic Jihad militia. “This is what the young people of the countryside are like,” he justifies, about that labyrinth of streets inhabited by refugees from the Nakba, the flight or expulsion of some 700,000 of the million Palestinians who lived in current Israel between 1947 and 1949.
Another teenager, Anas Turabi, 17, claims that the military used him as a human shield. But he downplays it because what really bothered him was that they hit him “like a sack of wheat.” “Every time we entered a house, the soldier opened the refrigerator and if he didn’t see food he would hit me,” he says while showing bruises on his side.
Turabi says that they handcuffed him with his hands behind him and a uniformed man took him out onto the street and made him walk right in front of him, with the rifle resting on his shoulder. It was 10 hours in which from time to time he attached an explosive to a door. They walked away and, when it exploded, he ordered him to enter the building first in case there were militiamen inside waiting to shoot.
The Israeli army says it interrogated “dozens of suspects” and arrested 20 during the raid, out of nearly 600 in the West Bank since the Hamas attack. Rural residents’ accounts of the raid follow the pattern of previous raids on other West Bank towns: a dozen soldiers enter, sometimes by force, separate the men from the women and children, and interrogate the former. . Farhan, 17 years old, was at his uncle’s house when the soldiers entered: “First they asked for all the IDs and cell phones. And me the password. I refused, but they threatened me and I was scared. I ended up giving it to him. He investigated and quickly found a photo with Gaza martyrs. He showed it to me and asked: What? Are you also a Hamas terrorist?”
Despite the raid, there are no very sad faces. Alaa admits that the images of the deaths in Gaza distress him, but he is confident in the role of “the resistance when [los soldados israelíes] enter by land.” “I am not from Hamas, but here we all fight together. And what he did gives me strength to continue fighting, seeing how false and weak that army is. “It is not an army, it is a candy.”
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