2023-07-05 08:49:35
Young Palestinians take shelter during an Israeli military operation in the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, July 3, 2023. JAAFAR ASHTIYEH / AFP
Appointment is given, Tuesday, July 4, with Israeli commanders of the division of “Judea and Samaria” (the occupied West Bank) at the Salem checkpoint, Israel’s gateway to the great Palestinian city of Jenin. This is where their men have been conducting, since Monday, the largest army operation in the West Bank for twenty years. In a few hours, Israel will signal their withdrawal. Result: twelve Palestinians killed and fifteen severely injured. On Tuesday evening, an Israeli soldier was also killed in Jenin during the withdrawal.
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Crossing the yellow Salem barrier on Tuesday, commanders are proud of their new acquisition, a small, armored, lively and air-conditioned Tigris personnel carrier, fresh from the factories of Kibbutz Sasa, in the Gallilee, which made its fortune in the 2000s in supplying the US Army with armor for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They take Israeli journalists and, unusually, three foreigners – two Britons and a Frenchman – to Jenin in two small convoys. The Israeli army never invites the press to accompany its soldiers in operations. In the spring of 2022, one of his snipers killed an Al-Jazeera journalist in Jenin, Shireen Abu Akleh. He was not prosecuted.
The army now intends to demonstrate that the Jenin refugee camp is no longer a fortress, a sanctuary for insurgents from all over the West Bank and the heart of an insurgency that is slowly waning in the face of the repression that she’s been leading for two years.
A thousand men dispatched
The road that connects Salem to Jenin is lined with villages. The whole region locked itself at home on Monday. A few businesses have since reopened, cars slalom through tire fires and piles of stones scattered on the road. At the entrance to Silat Al-Harithiya, very young boys stone the Tigris. The soldiers descend on the asphalt and disperse them by firing stun grenades.
Further on, a homemade bomb explodes under the bumper of an Israeli light armored vehicle, damaging its front tires. New stop. The vehicle continues on its rims. Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Hecht, who for a year has assumed with resignation the difficult task of carrying the word of the army in English for foreigners, fails to button his helmet and despairs: “I have too fucking a big head. »
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Penetrating into Jenin via Haifa Street, armored vehicles ran into dozens of young Palestinians: roadblocks, throwing of stones, rubbish and oil, a few shots. The Israeli raid threatens both the inhabitants of the camp, where the fighting quickly died out, and those who live on the lines of circulation of armored vehicles in the heart of the big city and in the alleys where they slalom. A frightened Palestinian adult cowers behind a sheet metal palisade, hoping to make himself invisible.
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