refugees

The Israeli soldiers and tanks have just withdrawn. And everyone, from the neighbours sweeping up the broken windows of their shops or fixing the windows of their cars to the militiamen who – with an M16 rifle on their shoulders and a headband with the legend “There is no god but Allah” – dare to go out into the streets again amid the admiring gaze of the little ones, agree on one idea: never has the Israeli army entered here for so long (32 hours) or in such an aggressive manner since October 7, 2023, when raids and deaths in the West Bank skyrocketed in parallel to the Gaza war.

The elderly Ahmed illustrates this by the twisted door of his building, which the soldiers blew up in order to enter and handcuff him: the missile against a mosque located dozens of meters away “sounded softer than in the videos of Gaza, but closer.” It is not Gaza, but Fara’a, a refugee camp next to the city of Tubas and one of the three points in the north of the West Bank where the Israeli army began this Wednesday one of its largest offensives in the West Bank since the Second Intifada (2000-2005), which has already claimed 18 lives. Fara’a has been the small game: a relatively brief and localized operation, compared to Jenin and Tulkarem, where the troops are expected to remain for several days, supported by drones and armored vehicles.

Hassan stands in front of the door of his house in the Fara’a refugee camp that was blown up by Israeli soldiers.Antonio Pita

Jenin is, in fact, the city with a hospital where Hazim Na’ya thought of taking her brother when she found him wounded. Three drone shots had hit the first floor of their building and the roof. As is usual in the Middle East, the family lives in the same building and Hazim lives on the third floor. After the bombing, she found herself with the rubble blocking her way and “in the middle of the dust and in the dark” (the army cut off the electricity as soon as the raid began) trying to reach her brother by following his cries of: “Help, I’m wounded!”

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“When I saw him, he was wounded in the chest, but all he was saying was: ‘The children, the children! They were upstairs!’ We went up to the roof and understood that it had been a direct hit, because Murad [de 14 años] He was headless. Then we had to pick up the parts. Mohamed [su hermano dos años mayor] “He was also dead. I couldn’t do anything there anymore, so I focused on getting my brother to the hospital. I thought about Jenin, but it was surrounded. There is only one ambulance here and it couldn’t get there because the soldiers opened fire when it came close. We waited for it for two and a half hours. My sister is a nurse and she was able to take care of him a little,” she recalls.

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KEEP READINGMural with images of the “martyrs” in the Fara’a refugee camp in the northern West Bank.Antonio Pita

In view of the situation, Na’ya put her brother on her back and walked him to the ambulance, which took an hour and a half to reach Nablus “on a secondary road full of rocks.” She shows a video on her mobile phone of her carrying her brother in the dark and another of him bleeding from the head, but she does not want to share them. “No one has to see what I saw,” she adds. In addition to her two nephews, a third has been left with such serious injuries that “it depends on God’s mercy,” she adds, hoping that she will not have to add words to make her situation understood.

He tells this in front of a municipal hall that normally hosts weddings or other events where the camp celebrates happiness together. Today, more than a hundred men with different faces come to offer their condolences to the relatives. Because his brother is so weak, Hazim greets the neighbours who shake his hand with the usual formula: “May God have mercy on them.” Paradoxically, he says, the troops used the place on Wednesday for interrogations.

View of the Fara’a refugee camp in the northern West Bank.Antonio Pita

They are four teenagers, “martyrs of Zionist terrorism,” as the banner in Arabic that some friends place at the entrance of the hall. It does not bear the logo of any armed faction, but of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to which Islamic Jihad, the main target of the Israeli offensive, does not belong. To their relatives, they were just kids playing games; to Israel, they were terrorists. Whatever the case, children in Palestinian refugee camps take up arms at ages when most only fight in video games. And, in the middle of the streets raised by the bulldozers and gunshot wounds at a hospital run by the United Nations refugee agency, do not appear likely to change.

In front of the blackened facade of the bombed-out mosque, two militants suddenly emerge with their rifles. “Since the war in Gaza began, the feeling is that they are not coming for someone, but for blood,” says one of them. “This was the most aggressive attack. Everything that was forbidden to use is now allowed. But they don’t realise that the more aggressive they are, the more motivated people here are to join the resistance,” says another, fingering his magazine. Next to them, a mural with drawings commemorates the “martyrs” of previous Israeli raids with graffiti to underline that their memory spans generations.

A militiaman with his rifle, after the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Fara’a.Antonio Pita

Hassan is philosophical about spending eight hours handcuffed together with his two nephews because, he says, being 63 years old, they handcuffed him with his hands in front (not behind, like his relatives), hardly tightening (that is why he was able to take them off first when the soldiers left without taking them off) and they allowed him to go to the bathroom. The nephews got the worst of it: “The first thing the soldiers did when they came in was separate the men from the women and children, and take all the mobile phones. They asked my nephew for the PIN and he said he didn’t know it, that it was his wife’s. They made me call his father and told him: ‘It would be a shame if you didn’t give it to us and we beat the kids until we didn’t care. The result will be the same.’”

They got it, obviously, and he says that they found a photo on the mobile phone of one of his nephews posing with a long gun next to militiamen. “They hit him pretty hard there,” he adds, although they did not arrest him. What worries him most now is that they blew up the entrance door to his building and he barely earns between 30 and 100 shekels a day (between eight and 25 euros) from selling the cucumbers he picks.

Electronics store in Fara’a, after the Israeli withdrawal.Antonio Pita

The militants leave within minutes: a military helicopter appears in the sky and a rumour circulates that the army is massing troops at a nearby checkpoint, which could indicate an imminent return to the camp, which does not happen. The checkpoint is where an endless queue of vehicles awaits the nonchalant search of two Israeli soldiers who, like the militants in Fara’a, are barely out of their teens. A barrier cuts off the quickest route to the camp and the military gives the order not to turn onto an extension of Highway 60, opened last year under pressure from settler leaders, because of the danger of passing through the Palestinian village of Huwara. Today it is empty because the settlers in the area (particularly radical ones) continue to cross through Huwara to – as they say – “show a Jewish presence”.

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