The streets looked like Gaza. Houses reduced to debris, walls pockmarking through bullet holes, roads torn apart by bulldozers. District after the neighborhood was abandoned.
But this was not a Gaza, a territory that was destroyed by the war between Israel and the militant group of Hamas, where tens of thousands were killed and the people of hunger stalks. It was the occupied West Bank, another Palestinian area where the Israeli army has tightened control of the most radical action against militance there in a generation.
The contours of the new offensive unfolded during a recent visit from the New York Times reporters to the city of Jenin, one of the once densely populated neighborhoods that have been cleaned up since an operation started in January. Until recently, more than 10,000 people lived in one of those areas. Now it is empty – its roads blocked by hills dirty and flanked by piles of rubble.
This week the Israeli army said that the houses in Tulkarm would demolish, a city near Jenin, to make busy neighborhoods and streets more accessible to Israeli troops and to prevent the re -rise of militants.
“They take my future away,” said Muath Amarne, a 23-year-old university student, Wednesday on the day he heard that his house in Tulkarm would be destroyed.
Israel has carried out frequent military operations in this area in recent years, but the troops almost always left within a few hours or days. However, since January, the army has retained its longest -running presence in the heart of the West Bank in decades.
The campaign focused on Hamas and another Palestinian militant group, Islamic Jihad. In recent weeks, however, collisions have become rare, in a sign that Israel and the Palestinian authorities on the West Bank have arrested or killed many of the militants.
The two most affected cities, Jenin and Tulkarm, have long been controlled by the Palestinian authority, the semi -autonomous body that cooperates with Israel on safety and of which many Palestinians hoped to evolve into the government of a future state.
But the extensive presence of Israel in these cities in the West Bank undermines the powers of the Palestinian authority. Israel has argued that the authority did not do enough to stamp the military on the territory.
“We are at a turning point in the conflict,” said Mohammed Jarrar, the mayor of Jenin, in an interview at his office in March. “Israel pretends that the Palestinian authority does not exist.”
The Israeli attack started days after a cease-fire in Gaza was maintained in January. Around that time, the government added a new goal to its war goals: giving a blow to militants of the West Bank.
Days later armored vehicles supported by helicopters flocked into the Jenin camp.
Israel said it killed more than 100 militants and has arrested hundreds since the operation began. It has displaced around 40,000 Palestinians – More than any other military campaign on the West Bank Since Israel has conquered the territory in the Middle East of 1967 in the war.
That has called for the fears of some Palestinians of a second Nakba – the Arabic word for a disaster used to describe the mass smell and expulsion of Palestinians during the war on the creation of Israel in 1948.
“I’m afraid I can’t go home like in 1948,” said Salema Al-Saadi, 83, a resident of the Jenin camp who said she was displaced for almost eight decades ago.
At the end of February, Minister of Defense Israel Katz told Israeli troops to prepare to stay in Jenin and Tulkarm the following year.
If that happens, it would be a major change in the way in which cities of the West Bank were governed since the founding of the Palestinian authority in the nineties. Around that time, Israel gave the most administrative responsibilities about the cities to the Palestinian authority.
The Times Reporters visited the camp in Jenin accompanied by a senior Israeli military officer in an armored staff carrier to gain rare access to limited areas. The Times did not allow the Israeli army to screen its cover before publication, but it agreed not to photograph the faces of some Israeli troops.
Armed Palestinian groups had built weapons factories in the camps, carved in the most busy districts and improvised explosive devices planted under roads to cancel Israeli soldiers.
The Israeli armed forces patrol the camps in Jenin and Tulkarm day and night. They built built by building in search of weapons and have blown up houses that they were used for military purposes.
They have also expanded roads, according to aerial photos, something that would make it easier for soldiers to reach densely populated parts of the camps. The army has demolished buildings and roads that it states that it is steeped in terrorist shelters and booby traps.
“They indicate that they want to annex,” said Ammar Abu Bakr, chairman of the Jenin Chamber of Commerce, who reflects a fear of many other Palestinians.
The Palestinian fears are fed by the fact that powerful ministers in the hard-line government lawyer of the West Bank of Israel, the home of almost three million Palestinians and 500,000 Israeli settlers.
The camps – busy neighborhoods that, according to Palestinians, say that the plight of Palestinian refugees embodies – have housed tens of thousands of people for decades. What were once clusters of tents have evolved into concrete structures in poor neighborhoods.
Mr. Abu Bakr, the chairman of the Jenin Chamber of Commerce, and Mr Jarrar, the mayor, said that they were told by Lieutenant -Kolonel Amir Abu Janab, the Israeli military liaison for Jenin, that Israel was planning to transform the Jenin’s te -camps, which has a pinging of a neighborhood, those who omes a tota -inde -omies, those who omes like a districts of a neighborhood of a neighborhood, those who omes like a neighborhood of a neighborhood of a neighborhood, those who omes. awaken.
They said they were also told that UNRWA, the UN agency that helps Palestinians and runs schools and clinics on the West Bank, would no longer play a role in the Jenin camp. Israel has a long time Had tense relationships The desk and hostility to UNRWA has grown since the Gaza war started on October 7, 2023 with a Hamas attack on Israel.
Cogat, the Israeli military agency that maintains contacts with Palestinians, refused to comment.
The Israeli army has denied that they have forced people to leave. But Palestinians said they were violently threatened if they refused.
Kifah Sahweil, 52, said that an Israeli drone flew close to her house in Jenin a few months ago and told her by a speaker to lift and leave her hands. She said the drone warned that her house would be the target if she did not satisfy.
After Mrs. Sahweil ran outside with her son, the drone followed and instructed them where to go until they left the camp, she said.
“I felt they would kill us,” said Mrs. Sahweil.
The senior military officer who led the visit to Jenin said that the Israeli troops have demolished militant infrastructure such as tunnels, weapon caches and production locations, and suggestions rejects that Israel was striving for the recovery of safety. He spoke about the condition of anonymity in accordance with the military protocol.
He pointed to a damaged former train station that was built in 1908 when the area was part of the Ottoman Empire. He said that militants had built a secret tunnel underneath that blew up the army.
About six miles from the Jenin camp, hundreds of displaced Palestinians were spread in apartment buildings intended for university students.
Mohammed Abu Wasfeh, 45 and a resident of the Jenin camp, helped to establish newcomers in apartments with one room while children played outside. For him, the most painful part of the relocation was not forced out of his house, but not knowing what had happened to it.
“We live in the unknown,” he said. “We experience a winding and destabilizing journey.”
He added: “We have lost control of everything.”
Lauren Leerby contributed reporting.
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