JENIN, West Bank — After 15 months in an Israeli jail, Mustafa Sheta drove home with his brothers to Jenin. A lot changed while he was in prison, they said.
The fighters that once had daily run-and-gun battles with Israeli soldiers? Gone. The bustling population of the refugee camp that gave Jenin its reputation as the martyrs’ capital? Gone. The theater Sheta ran in the camp, which he nurtured into an internationally known lodestar of Palestinian cultural resistance? Gone.
It appeared that Jenin, known as the city that never surrendered, had surrendered.
“I was shocked. The concept of resilience in Jenin, it’s really important to people. Where are the fighters, the Palestinian Authority, grassroots organization, the local leaders?” Sheta said.
“It felt like we lost the war, like we are losing this battle.”
Jenin has become the quintessential model of how Israel — in a long-running campaign dubbed Operation Iron Wall — has largely subdued the northern West Bank.
Over more than 300 days, Israel has deployed soldiers, tanks, helicopter gunships and even airstrikes in Jenin and other cities, leaving a trail of destruction that has triggered what aid groups call the most severe bout of Palestinian displacement in the West Bank — more than 40,000 people initially, now down to about 32,000 — since Israel occupied the region in 1967. In a report released Nov. 20, Human Rights Watch alleged Israeli forces’ actions amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Coming under particular Israeli ire are the refugee camps in the area, set up as tent encampments for Palestinians displaced by Israel’s creation in 1948 but which hardened over the decades into slum neighborhoods Israel considers nodes of militancy.
Three of them — Jenin, Tulkarm and Nour Shams camps — have been depopulated and all but occupied by the Israeli military for roughly nine months, with soldiers systemically demolishing homes.
Of those, the Jenin camp, which holds legendary status among Palestinians for a 10-day battle between militants and Israeli forces in 2002, has fared the worst, incurring destruction many people here compare to Gaza.
For Palestinians who saw the camp and surrounding city of Jenin as a symbol for resistance against occupation, it has come to exemplify a sense of despair, and weariness with a fight that has never seemed so fruitless in bringing about a Palestinian state.
Sheta, the theater general manager, had staged works with political themes until he was detained — without charge, he says — from December 2023 to March this year. The Freedom Theater became famous staging adaptations of works such as George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun,” a tragic novel about three men fleeing refugee camps.
Though the theater has regrouped elsewhere, it’s not the same. “We consider the theater arrested by the Israel army, because we can’t be in the camp,” he said. “Our soul is there.”
Using satellite data from October, the United Nations estimates that more than half of the camp’s buildings — almost 700 structures — are destroyed or damaged, with entire residential blocks razed or blown up. Several streets have been ripped apart or blocked by the 29 berms erected by Israeli forces; many other streets were widened with bulldozers to create corridors aimed at facilitating future military operations.
The Israeli military says its operation in the camps is meant to dismantle militant infrastructure, including explosives factories, weapons caches and tunnels. It also aims to root out groups such as the Jenin Battalion, a loose alliance of fighters from different factions, including Fatah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The Jenin Battalion primarily fought Israeli forces but also clashed with the Palestinian Authority, which oversees the West Bank and collaborates with Israel on security matters; many Palestinians view the authority as corrupt and impotent.
But whatever resistance existed in the camp was crushed shortly after the operation launched in January, residents and Palestinian officials say, leaving Israel’s continued occupation a mystery for the roughly 14,000 people who were expelled and who have no idea when, or if, they’ll be permitted to return.
“There’s no Jenin Battalion anymore. Not a single one is alive. They picked them off one by one,” said Shadi Dabaya, 54, who was sitting among a group of men by the main entrance of the Jenin camp. They fell silent as an Israeli armored vehicle rumbled past, its antenna swinging above the berm blocking the street.
“We just hear them shooting all the time,” Dabaya said, nodding toward the Israelis. “They’ve turned the camp into a training ground.”
No residents have been allowed to visit, Dabaya added. In September, Israeli soldiers shot and killed two 14-year-old boys trying to enter the camp to retrieve some of their belongings. The Israeli military told the media that the boys had approached soldiers — “posed a threat to them” — and did not obey commands to stay away; it said the shooting was under review.
“With all the destruction, even if the Israelis withdrew from the camp tonight, we would need months to be able to live there — all the infrastructure is destroyed,” said Mohammed Al-Sabbagh, who heads the camp’s Popular Services Committee.
For now, he said, families are crowded into a block of 20 buildings with one-room student dormitories roughly six miles away from the camp. But months after they moved there, the Palestinian Authority — from which Israel has withheld tax revenue, along with taking other measures that strangled its finances — is unable to pay the $63,000 monthly rent.
“Those who accepted these awful conditions — crammed with their families in a tiny room meant for one student — even they will find themselves on the street,” Al-Sabbagh said.
The worst part, he added, was having no idea whether his home was still standing.
“If we knew what the Israelis are doing, we could at least figure out what to do ourselves.”
The operation in Jenin has spread its footprint well beyond the camp. Israeli soldiers who once traveled the surrounding city streets in armored vehicles for fear of attacks now conduct near-daily patrols unhindered, raiding shops and homes at will, residents charged.
Areas adjacent to the camp have been emptied, too. So far, said one Palestinian Authority official who refused to be named for safety reasons, 1,500 residents from those areas have been forced to leave.
“These people have nothing to do with the camp, but they’ve been forced out,” he said.
One of the affected neighborhoods is Jabriyat, a wealthy area overlooking the camp that has the feel of a ghost town, where villas bear the dusty patina of abandonment.
“All of us living around the camp are paying the price,” said Hiba Jarrar, one of the last remaining residents on her street in Jabriyat. From her balcony, she pointed to a building Israeli soldiers recently commandeered.
“There’s no resistance, zero. Not a single bullet is being fired by Palestinians. A soldier can raid any home on his own because he feels safe,” she said, adding that when she heard shooting in the past, she assumed Palestinians and Israelis were fighting; now she knows it comes from only the Israeli soldiers.
“You know what’s sad?” she said. “If anyone fought the Israelis now, people here would tell them to stop. They just want to live. They’re desperate.”
Palestinian officials say despite repeated requests, Israeli authorities have given no indication when they will leave the camp, and all attempts at facilitating visits there have been rejected.
“What’s happening in the camp is not a necessary security prerogative. There’s nothing requiring the Israelis to do what they’re doing,” said Palestinian Authority Security Forces spokesman Brig. Gen. Anwar Rajab, adding that his forces could handle security and that Israel was undermining their authority with its actions.
Rajab echoed the thoughts of residents, analysts and aid workers who see in Israel’s assault a larger plan to recast the camps as ordinary city neighborhoods, not refugee havens. Such rebranding would essentially erase the notion of Palestinians as refugees.
“It’s targeting a community by changing the topography on the ground,” said Roland Friedrich, director of affairs in the West Bank for UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. He added that Israeli officials in local media have said that once Operation Iron Wall is complete, there will be “no more geographic expression of the refugee issue.”
Another measure in the same vein, according to a Palestinian Authority official who requested anonymity for safety reasons, is Israel’s refusal to allow UNRWA back in the camp.
Among those hoping to return someday is Sheta, who after his release from custody went to the berm at the camp’s entrance — the closest he could get to his theater, which was founded in 2006 by a former Palestinian fighter from Jenin named Zakaria Zubeidi, along with a leftist Israeli actor and a Swedish activist.
His imprisonment, he said, was a time of routine beatings and humiliations, with soldiers strip-searching detainees, recording them with their phones and mocking them. The Israelis viewed Palestinians as “not even human. Or animals. Less than nothing,” he said.
He has since “returned to use the same tools” he had used before his arrest to resist Israel’s occupation, but he acknowledged people in Jenin had changed. “Their priorities are different. Some have lost trust in the Palestinian cause,” he said.
Some in the community thought he was “crazy” for bothering with nonviolent methods. But “if you lose your cultural front, you lose your identity, your heritage, your roots with this land,” he said. Besides, he added with a tired smile, if his methods weren’t effective, why did the Israelis arrest him?
“That at least proves to me my work annoys them, no?”
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