Palestine- Israel conflict: Jenin then and now a new generation of militants who cannot be controlled | Mint - Mint

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Jenin had witnessed this violence two decades ago when in 2002 it was attack helicopters hovering above the West Bank city’s refugee camp over a week of brutal fighting.

The latest raids faced drone strikes as Israeli soldiers entered the West Bank reducing the centre of the camp to rubble. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the Jenin operation was targeting a major Palestinian militant command centre, with Israel carrying out an airstrike on Monday afternoon near a mosque in the camp that the army said was being used by Palestinian gunmen.

When the smoke had cleared in what became known as the Battle of Jenin in 2002, more than 50 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were dead, 13 of them killed in a single ambush trying to fight through the booby-trapped streets.

It seems nothing has changed since then.

Only this time west-backed Palestinian Authorities have been marginalised so much that it consequentially created militants, who possibly cannot be controlled.

Jenin camp was set up in the 1950s to house refugees fleeing their homes in 1948 after the creation of the state of Israeli. The ghetto-like area, plagued by poverty, has long been a hotbed of what Palestinians consider armed resistance and Israelis call terrorism.

Guardian reports 18,000 Palestinians lived in the crowded camp, but the exact figure is not known. The UN’s Palestinian refugee agency puts the number at 14,000, while official Palestinian data from 2020 says it is home to 12,000 people.

Scenes of death, disaster remains the same even two decades later, but Jenin and the wider West Bank have changed in the past two decades.

Israeli officials have said the present Israeli military operation, being dubbed as the biggest in the West Bank since Israeli troops went into Palestinian cities during the second intifada, with 2,000 troops deployed, could last for days.

In 2002, the violent days in the West Bank, meant Israeli tanks on streets noisy with gun battles with angry funerals to follow. During the second intifada, Israeli troops went into Palestinian cities surrounding Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah, and putting the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem under siege.

Nothing changed in 2023, when armoured bulldozers have been pushing their way into the camp, with snipers on rooftops in an operation that was approved 10 days ago.

Then, as now, Jenin’s refugee camp was a place where the writ of Palestinian security forces was considered weak.

The assault in 2002 occurred a few days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large gathering for the Jewish holiday of Passover, killing 30 people.

3 July, 2023's raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a rocket was fired from the area last week.

If there is a difference, it is that during the second intifada, Palestinian security forces and fighters associated with senior Palestinian figures were drawn into the escalating violence.

In this cycle of violence, it has been the absence of Palestinian security forces that has contributed to the recent escalation, as pointed by Guardian.

The level of armed resistance from within the camp during the last major Israeli raid in June caught Israel unaware, with videos showing an explosion that wounded seven of its soldiers and helicopters and drone strikes deployed to rescue injured troops.

That led to pressure from Israeli politicians on the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters for a “large-scale operation" across the occupied West Bank.

It was an incident that underlined Netanyahu’s weakness. The years in which his governments have undermined and marginalised the Palestinian Authority as both a plausible peace partner and a viable government, allied with his association with emboldened far-right settler groups, has contributed to the growing vacuum in Palestinian society on the West Bank.

That has emboldened the armed groups in Jenin and other cities, including Nablus, as a new generation has become disaffected with the Palestinian Authority.

But Netanyahu has been weakened in other ways. Facing large scale protests over his controversial judicial reform bill, which restarted its legislative process on Sunday, he might hope for a show of strength as a distraction, amid calls from some political figures to suspend demonstrations amid the operation.