Residents Return to West Bank Camp as Israel Ends Two-Day Assault

Palestinian families returned Wednesday to a partly destroyed refugee camp in the occupied West Bank after Israel ended a large-scale two-day military operation, with relatives organizing funerals for those killed in the Israeli assault.

Tensions remained high after the Israeli military and Gaza militants exchanged fire earlier in the day, followed later by a drive-by shooting in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. No casualties were reported in either incident, but at least seven people were hurt Tuesday in a car-ramming and stabbing attack in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli operation in the sprawling Jenin camp was the largest in the West Bank in more than two decades, involving hundreds of troops, armored vehicles and drone strikes. Israel’s military said it had targeted the area because it had become a launchpad for terrorist attacks and a haven for perpetrators over the past 18 months. It said it confiscated thousands of weapons and explosive devices and arrested some 30 terrorism suspects.

Twelve Palestinians, including militants and at least five children, were killed during the operation and 140 wounded, including 30 in serious condition, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. A 23-year-old Israeli soldier was killed late Tuesday as the military was withdrawing.

Some of the thousands who had fled the camp during the incursion came back to find destroyed homes and public buildings, residents said. The roads were littered with debris including crumpled cars. Residents and municipal crews had begun to clean the streets of bullet casings and first-aid equipment and repair damaged water and electricity lines, they added.

“The camp will not return to its former state,” said Shafeaa al-Saadi, a taxi driver who returned to find his home damaged in an airstrike.

He had left the day before in the predawn darkness with his wife and five children after huddling inside without power as shots rang out and the ground trembled with bulldozers. Saadi said the Israeli army had told him and his neighbors to leave, so in a cloud of tear gas they rode to the hospital in an ambulance and then went to a relative’s home.

The Israeli army says they didn’t force residents to leave.

Enas Abahre said around 20 Israeli soldiers commandeered her family’s three-story home in the al-Basateen district of Jenin on Monday morning, detaining residents in one room for more than 24 hours as they set up a sniper position. When the soldiers left, she discovered extensive damage to the home and Hebrew graffiti on the walls.

The camp, where Israel flattened homes with tanks and helicopters during a 2002 invasion, has re-emerged as a stronghold of Palestinian militancy in the West Bank. Tensions across the territory have risen since attacks last year by Palestinians and Arab Israelis that prompted Israel to step up raids into Palestinian areas to break up suspected militant cells and foil what it believed to be imminent attacks.

Since the start of 2023, more than 150 Palestinians—mostly militants but also children and elderly civilians—have been killed by Israeli forces and civilians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to Palestinian and Israeli officials. More than 20 Israelis and foreigners, nearly all civilians, have been killed by Palestinian attackers, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal.

Jenin’s Deputy Mayor Muhammad Jarrar estimated Tuesday that nearly a third of the camp, which covers around 250 acres, had been destroyed, calling the Israeli operation a collective punishment.

Itamar Yaar, a former senior Israeli national security official, said the operation this week had achieved narrow military goals by degrading the capability of militants in Jenin. That “is a tool that the Israeli civilian leadership needs to take from now and try to use it” to bolster cooperation with the Palestinian Authority in order to continue fighting more extreme elements, he said.

Such an effort would be complicated by politics inside both Israel and the Palestinian community. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has faced calls, including from his own Likud Party, for a broad military operation in the West Bank using the air force and armored corps.

“Our extensive operation in Jenin is not a one-off,” Netanyahu said Tuesday.

The Western-backed Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, has struggled to control Jenin. It failed to confiscate weapons and faces pressure from a variety of Iran-backed militant groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad that have developed extensive networks of support.

Analysts say the militant groups, which framed the Israeli withdrawal as a victory and pledged that Israel would pay a price, will try to keep edging out the Palestinian Authority, which is widely seen as powerless and beholden to Israel.

During funerals for Palestinians killed during the operation, some of the hundreds of mourners expelled leaders of the Palestinian Authority from the procession.

Earlier Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces said its air defenses intercepted five rockets launched toward the southern town of Sderot. In response, jet fighters targeted what the IDF said was a Hamas weapons-production facility in Gaza.

Write to Stephen Kalin at [email protected]