The hills around Jenin have changed compared to 20 or 30 years ago, the green of the olive trees has given way to the white of the reinforced concrete houses, all square, that form the colonies.
From the plain where the city was born they are clearly visible, as is Mount Carmel that hides the city where many come from: Haifa. Since the Nakba of 1948 their fathers and grandfathers have left their homes forced by the army of the newborn State of Israel. Some went to Lebanon, some to Jenin, others continued on to Jordan. Since that day they have been refugees from a State that does not exist, the Palestinian one. Those who live in Jenin or the West Bank and had a work permit could at least go and see what was behind that wall, the others not, especially those who live abroad and do not have the right to return.
Sixty kilometers of distance between Haifa and Jenin that seem like a universe, beyond the separation wall there is what is defined as the only democracy in the Middle East, but born on someone else’s land.
The heart of the clashes
As we approach the city, checkpoints close roads and divert others. “After October 7, we never know where they are or how long they will last,” a driver who is reversing tells us: that two-way street that connects several towns is now one-way, not the one we are traveling on. The alternative is to change roads, extend the journey by at least 40 minutes, and hope that it is not closed, too.
Jenin is not a city like the others, Jenin is the heart of the resistance that from 2021 to 2023 has replaced Gaza in the news also thanks to the strategy of Hamas, to silence, to put a conflict to sleep and then suddenly attack at dawn on October 7, 2023. In that silence Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem have become central, with increasingly frequent Israeli raids and with an increasingly stronger radicalization of the conflict, and of young people. So much so that Jenin is called the little Gaza.
“My brother was a painter in Israel, he had never been a member of any organization but one day he decided to become a fighter and in that moment it was as if a piece of him died, because that road is one way.” Ahed is the sister of a “martyr”, of a boy who died with a rifle in his hand and buried with a tombstone where photos and words remember his sacrifice for that land. Her brother’s name was Yusuf and he died a little over a year after choosing that road that Ahed knew had only one way out: martyrdom.
In their house there is a small altar dedicated to Yusuf. There are photos of him as a child, a little faded, others with the uniform of the “Jenin Brigades” and a Kalashnikov in his hand, others still at university. The many Yusufs who in just over 20 years of life have cohabited in a single person, who lived in a place full of contradictions that also pushes people to be so.
“He chose to fight after a dear friend of his died in an Israeli raid, he wasn’t the first to die because of the occupiers but he was particularly close to him”, Fatimah tells us, adding: “One day he said to me: ‘Mom, how can I go to university every day while everyone around me is dying’. He thought I would get angry, he thought I would try to make him change his mind but here we know that this is the destiny of young people: martyrs for our land”.
The serenity with which she tells her story is unsettling, maybe it’s a mask or maybe she really believes in what she’s saying. Fatimah takes a plastic bag from under the altar, opens it and inside there are some sneakers almost completely destroyed. “She was wearing these, there’s still her blood …”, she tells us while Ahed gets up.
The mother instead remains seated next to Yusuf’s altar, she has a white cloth in her hand, it is stained with blood, now turned brown. More than 3 months have passed since her son’s death and she guards that shroud jealously, she holds it close and brings it close to her face as if looking for a now vanished smell that reminds her of her son. The imperturbable woman from a moment ago has disappeared in front of a tangible memory of her son.
A single perspective
Ahed precedes us through the alleys of the refugee camp, one of the most controlled places in the world by two factions at the same time: those who defend it as if it were the Apache fort and those who enter armed from outside every night to kill and arrest. Those who defend the refugee camp suddenly materialize in front of us: there are five of them, all armed. They talk intensely with Ahed, she is the sister of one of their martyrs and this opens the way for us.
“We don’t want photos and we don’t want to tell you our names but if you want we can talk,” begins the one who is supposed to be the leader. They are all very young, the leader is six feet tall, dark with curly hair, a face like many of those you see in Palestine. He was a bricklayer but after October 7 his work permit in Israel was cancelled, like that of all Palestinians, and today he spends his nights shooting in these streets. In recent months, life has seemed to have stopped and what the night raids can’t do, hunger does: almost no one works here anymore, UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinian refugees) used to be important as a support, today it has become indispensable for all the families in the camp. The mass of workers, both men and women, who cross the wall every day to earn a salary are now stuck in a limbo from which it doesn’t seem possible to escape.
“We were born knowing that we would have to do this and for some years it has been an inevitable destiny for everyone,” he tells us. Yusuf was his friend, they are almost the same age and one of them shows me Ahed’s brother’s rifle. “We don’t have enough for everyone, but we know that when one of us dies the rifle is picked up by another.” They have a proud look despite their young age, here in the Jenin camp you grow up quickly and it is difficult to have a clear first memory of the Israeli army because the presence of the soldiers is a constant, you grow up in a perpetual battle.
“The last raid ended just three hours ago, they arrested a boy in a house a little further up the hill but the fighting had been going on all night”, adds a second boy, also armed. They have sleepy faces but their job, even during the day, is to guard the access roads where there are also chevaux de frise positioned in the middle of the road.
From a video that Ahed shows us we recognize the street we are walking on except that on the screen there is an armored Israeli army SUV and soldiers shooting and advancing. Ahed points to a point, it is her brother Yusuf who is shooting from behind the column of a building where we are at this moment. “They were advancing but they didn’t understand where the shots were coming from, he managed to keep them away for a while, until they understood where the shots were coming from”, she says as the images continue. When Yusuf realized he had been discovered, he ran but they shot him from behind. Despite this, he dragged himself up the stairs that Ahed shows us and makes us walk down, she relives every moment, every step, up to the point where there is a hole in the ground: “This is where the stun grenade exploded, right on his foot… Then he dragged himself to there”, she tells us pointing to the end of the second flight of stairs. The pool of blood is still evident but what is most noticeable are the riddled walls: the soldiers fired hundreds of shots, a few dozen of which hit and killed Yusuf, the others missed.
Three very young boys, aged between 11 and 13, join Ahed’s detailed account. They follow us, they are curious, they have listened to Ahed’s story even though they already knew it by heart. They ask where we come from and what work we do. They have the curiosity of children. When we ask them what they want to be when they grow up, the answer comes in chorus and without hesitation: fighters and, they add, in 10 or 15 years they too will be martyrs. They also show us a video on a smartphone: they are holding a wooden rifle and together with four other boys they are training on how to open a path during a fight or how to defend themselves in case of attack. They smile, on the one hand it is a game, on the other it is emulation of their older brothers or cousins. “You see, here it is the only perspective we have”, Ahed reiterates.
The alternative
The Jenin refugee camp is one of the few places where everyone fights together regardless of political affiliation: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah or Popular Front, the fighters collaborate, not only in firefights but also in training. The mantra here is: “Better to be a martyr than in prison”, because if even before October 7, 2023 the conditions of thousands of Palestinians in prisons were not good, today it is hell. There is no longer any way to communicate with those inside, the few who come out have lost half their weight and tell of continuous torture. On a wall of the Neve Tirtza prison there is a writing, which reads: “Welcome to the Neve slaughterhouse”.
There is only one way to communicate with the prisoners: sending messages to a radio in Ramallah that reads them at certain times of the day in the hope that the recipients have a radio to receive them. “Before October 7 there were many, today only one radio for every four or five cells, but those who have been released say that they spread the word and somehow it gets through,” says Marwa, a young woman of 27 who until a few months ago lived in the house next to Fatimah and Ahed’s. “My brother is a martyr, he was a fugitive for two years and the Israelis often broke into our house in the middle of the night because they thought they would find him, one day after breaking everything they arrested my husband, set fire to the house and then blew up the walls too,” says Marwa while we are on what was once the roof of her house. Today she has returned to her parents’ house, still in the Jenin refugee camp, and is raising her two-year-old son alone.
Her brother was found a few months later at the home of a Hamas militant and they were both killed. “We are Hamas, we have never hidden it, we want the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea. Here we fight against the rest of the world, we are alone but we have our children,” adds Marwa as she picks up her son who has an evocative name: Qassam, like Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the jihadist fighter killed in 1935 in Jenin by British forces and the inspiration for the military wing of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Every day Marwa sends a message to Ramallah radio but she has no news of her husband and there are no hearings in sight: the detention has been extended from time to time for more than a year and this procedure could last for years. “I hope that one day he will be released to hug our son again but the thought that he could remain in Neve Tirtza for more years makes me feel sick.”
Jenin and especially its refugee camp will be the heart of the resistance even after the end of the war in Gaza. In recent years, more and more young people have left their studies and work to take up the rifle and more and more young people are being killed.
Leaving the camp, a clearing opens up with a rather recent concrete wall, it is the new cemetery created because the martyrs had filled the old one. The dates of birth and death confirm that people die young here and the photos and effigies on the tombstones say that more and more people die fighting against Israel.
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