Pedro González
Journalist
The punitive operation against Jenin by Israeli forces came to an end on Wednesday, having “destroyed the [Islamic Jihad] terrorist command centres and seized a huge quantity of weapons”, in the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is the largest bombing ever carried out against this Palestinian refugee camp, established in 1950, barely half a square kilometre in size and home to some 20,000 people, at least 20% of whom have fled, including an undetermined number of Palestinian fighters, whom Israel consistently refers to as terrorists and accuses of using civilians as human shields to prevent retaliation for attacks on Israeli territory and citizens. The latest of these was carried out by a suicide driver, who drove his car into a group of passers-by on one of Tel Aviv’s most commercial streets.
Both the refugee camp and the city of Jenin itself are juxtaposed to Israel and, since 2021, have been the target of intermittent attacks, following successive Israeli intelligence reports that they were an important stronghold of Palestinian armed organisations opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in the aftermath of the so-called Six-Day War of 1967. In addition to the dozen Palestinians killed, the Israeli army has arrested some 120 suspects, but still claims to be pursuing “more than 300 armed terrorists who are said to be hiding in Jenin”.
In a teleconference with Ron Ben-Yishai and Ruth Wassermn-Lande, both of whom are renowned Israeli experts on the Middle East, they once again point to Iran as the inspiration for the increasing number of terrorist actions carried out by Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, under the common denominator of provoking numerous simultaneous fronts that force the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to multiply.
This operation, the largest against this camp since 2002, has been preceded by attacks almost every week for the past two years. Wasserman-Lande claims that “Jenin had become a nest of terrorists for several decades”, closely monitored by Israeli espionage.
But in any case, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has intensified markedly over the past twelve months. A count by both Agence France Presse and Wasserman-Lande, based on official sources, indicates that 187 Palestinians and 28 Israelis have been killed in this new undeclared war, while the number of detainees, all Palestinians, is well over a thousand.
Tempers between Israelis and Palestinians have been exacerbated by other operations carried out several months ago by Israeli settlers against Palestinian homes and businesses in the West Bank, destructive actions which, according to the increasingly depleted Palestinian Authority, “have been carried out with the passivity, if not the complicity, of the Israeli police”. Particularly lethal was the one carried out by a settler commando on 21 June against Turmusaya, located in the centre of the region, adjacent to the Jewish colony of Shilo, whose members are said to have reduced dozens of homes inhabited by Palestinian families to ashes.
What both moderate Palestinian leaders and extremists in Hamas and Islamic Jihad seem to agree on is that Israel is stepping on the gas in its alleged plan for the de facto annexation of the West Bank. They come to this conclusion following the Israeli Council of Ministers’ agreements of 18 June. It was decided that the current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, would head the Settlement Planning Bureau. Until now, the office has reported to the defence ministry, which oversees each of the six steps required to establish a settlement in Judea-Samaria (West Bank). Smotrich, who has always been a staunch supporter of Greater Israel, has abolished four of these procedures. From now on, it will be enough for him to authorise the construction of a new Jewish housing colony, and for a Planning Committee to give its approval, without any other political, civil or military authority being involved in this abbreviated and rapid process.
There are already 700,000 Jewish settlers in the territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem, which Benjamin Netanyahu declared in his previous term in office to be the “sole and indivisible capital of the State of Israel”.
Asked by Atalayar, veteran Ron Ben Yishai, believes that the Jenin operation will not trigger a new intifada; that Palestinians in the West Bank will continue to go about their business as usual, but that “extremist terrorists will continue to do the same thing, namely to serve as an instrument of Iran’s attempts to destabilise the region”. A Lebanisation, whose weakest link would be Jordan, in the words of Ruth Wasserman-Lande.
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