IIn the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, residents are struggling to return to normal life after the region’s longest and deadliest military operation in the past two decades. Traffic jams plagued the city center on Sunday for the first time in nearly two weeks since roads were repaired. The city slowly came back to life, with street vendors selling peaches and the season’s first pomegranates.
But sewage still flows in some places over roads dug up by military bulldozers. Many of the burnt-out buildings bear signs of heavy fighting, with bullet holes and broken windows dotted across their upper floors. Water and electricity infrastructure has been severely damaged, and it is unclear when these services will be restored.
Abu Mahmoud, 61, who opened his children’s clothing store for the first time in 10 days after it became clear that Israel had withdrawn, said the destruction of so much of the town was unprecedented.
“Even during the Second Intifada, nothing like this happened. They didn’t destroy roads and streets or go from house to house,” he said, referring to the bloody Palestinian uprising in the 2000s, when Jenin was the epicenter of violence.
“Young people in our town are fighting the occupation. It’s true that they can’t find work and they don’t see a future. But this is not something we started. The Israelis forced us to do it.”
In the early hours of August 28, hundreds of Israeli military, police and intelligence officers descended on the northern West Bank cities of Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus, Tubas and Qalqilya as part of what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) called Operation Summer Camp, employing what the UN called “deadly war tactics.”
The Israeli military has been targeting Palestinian militant groups in these areas since spring 2022 following a series of attacks against Israelis. Violence in the West Bank has also been fuelled by the actions of far-right settlers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition and those who support them.
So far, attacks have mainly targeted urban refugee camps, including the one in Jenin, which was built to house Palestinians forced from their homes after the creation of Israel in 1948. Today, the camps resemble overcrowded, underserviced slums, rife with poverty, crime and extremism.
The already deteriorating situation in the West Bank has worsened since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, with “Operation Summer Camp” beginning shortly after the IDF’s decision to raise its position in the area to a “second front.”
The new military policy appears to have been spurred by last month’s attempted suicide bombing in Tel Aviv – the first since the second intifada. The attack was the largest in the West Bank since the war began in October and, by some standards, the largest in the region since the second intifada ended in 2005.
The IDF said it had killed 14 militants, including local leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and arrested another 30 during the eight-day operation. It also said it had seized “large amounts of weapons” and destroyed “terrorist infrastructure facilities.” One soldier was reported dead.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah said 36 people were killed in the attacks in the West Bank and 21 in Jenin, but did not distinguish between combatants and civilian deaths. The ministry said the dead included eight children and two elderly people. Jenin Mayor Nidal Abu Saleh said damage to infrastructure was estimated at $13 million.
The new generation of camp-based fighters are only loosely affiliated with traditional Palestinian factions, and many who spoke to the Guardian said they would instead fight under the banner of whichever group can provide them with weapons and funding.
Abu Mahmoud said: “Imagine you are a young person here, with no work and no choice but to resist. Seven people I know have lost at least two children.”
“Israel does not distinguish between factions. In a way, neither do we. We are all Jenin.”
Residents of the city and the camp described horrific conditions during the assault, in which some 20,000 people were trapped in their homes with no water, electricity and little food, and ambulances transporting the wounded were blocked by soldiers searching for militants.
Kurd Amer, a 39-year-old teacher, and her husband, a civil servant, live with their four children in a modern five-story building one street away from the camp. Since 2022, soldiers have regularly used their roof as a sniping position. In 2023, the army locked all 50 people in the building in one room for 12 hours without food or water. Since then, most families have fled to relatives’ houses when they know the IDF is coming. If they stay, the soldiers kick them out anyway.
When Amer and her family returned to their apartment, they found her laptop broken, the toilet clogged and the balcony door broken. “There must have been one or more female soldiers there, because they had clearly used my shampoo and makeup,” she said. “There was blonde hair stuck to the hairbrush. This is nothing compared to what people in Gaza are going through, but it should not happen.”
She is desperate to sell the apartment and move to her in-laws’ village for her children, but unsurprisingly there are no buyers: “The apartment is for 400,000 shekels (£81,000) with seven years left on the mortgage, and I’d be lucky to sell it for half that,” she says.
It is hoped that a ceasefire in Gaza would go a long way in easing tensions in the West Bank, but despite renewed efforts by international mediators, an agreement on a ceasefire and hostage release appears nowhere in sight.
Instead, Jenin’s residents are preparing for something worse. As he assessed the damage to his home in the scorching midday heat, with sewage on his shoes, 18-year-old Qassem al-Haj said he doubted “Operation Summer Camp” had achieved its objective.
“Resistance will continue and grow stronger over the generations,” he said.