CAMP JENIN — Two horses stationed at the intersection of dirt roads mark the entrance to the Jenin refugee camp. “Welcome to Little Gaza.”
An open-air powder keg, watched by Israeli drones from which Palestinians seek refuge by hoisting dark tents from one building to another. Macabre kites which draw a suffocating cover over the maze of alleyways and streets. There is no open space that isn’t marked by debris left from the Israeli army’s increasingly frequent raids.
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Raids which happened even before October 7, the day Hamas terrorists attacked Israeli civilians.
We enter Camp Jenin the day after one of the most intense clashes between the IDF and the internal resistance on this site.The Israeli forces penetrated the refugee camp, resulting in 15 casualties. “Why us, why here?” cries a woman sitting on a battered plastic chair while trying to cradle her toddler.
A young resistance
The woman, Fatima, explains that “there were only women and children in that building, but the IDF launched two rockets” that incinerated the upper floor. We ascend, accompanied by Amir, who points to a pile of ashes on the floor that used to be his room. He tries to salvage a book, picks it up, flips through it with difficulty, and looks at us with a tentative smile, as if to say “not all is lost.”
Fatima’s story is shared by almost all of the approximately 22,000 displaced individuals — according to data from the The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East— who inhabit Camp Jenin.
This city within a city does not visibly display symbols, such as the green banners of Hamas, the black ones of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the myriad of flags representing various groups and subgroups like the Balata Brigades, Nablus Brigade, Yabad Brigade, and the Lions’ Den. But they do all share a common trajectory — a drift towards extremism that significantly separates them from the Palestinian National Authority led by Abu Mazen.
Change is possible, we must try.
The children patrolling the alleys with modified M-16 or AR-15 rifles bear evidence of this. They have long set aside their textbooks, picking up the firearm left by an arrested father or an older brother who died during the clashes.
On their magazines, they carry photographs of fallen relatives: “The only resistance left to us is the armed one.”
IDF raids and the responses from the Palestinians have made the resilience of Camp Jenin increasingly fragile — and young. The two “martyrs in the making” point us to another dwelling with an entrance squeezed into a narrow alley. At the threshold stands Iman, with a weary look and a half-moon bandage over his left eye. He claims to have been beaten during an IDF incursion. One of his sons was arrested, and another was bound for hours.
The second floor of the house is a graveyard of furniture and carpets, and on the terrace are the remnants of a rocket. “It’s American,” claims a friend of Iman’s, pointing to the hole in the middle of the floor and the damage to black plastic containers where water is collected twice a week.
Dreams of martyrdom
As night falls, Camp Jenin is a mixture of spices and fires rising at irregular distances. The darkness of the night is a game of Russian roulette, but this time the clashes do not come near the camp; IDF bulldozers and armored vehicles choose other targets.
In the morning, Farah Abu al Hija is waiting for us. She heads the NGO Not-To-Forget. “Change is possible, we must try,” she says, making her way through a blood-smeared tiled alley where children zigzag. One of them wears a Superman costume. “We need to act quickly,” emphasizes the woman, looking with a melancholic smile at the young superhero.
We ask, who do you think is the camp’s number one enemy? “The Palestinian Authority is the long arm of the Israeli occupation, and Abu Mazen works for Benjamin Netanyahu. Our boys, if not in Israeli prisons, are in Palestinian ones and then handed over to them.”
“My nephew is five years old. A few days ago, he said to me, ‘Keep these,’ handing me some of his photos taken from a family album. ‘You can use these at my funeral when I too die as a martyr.’ He lost his brother in one of the bloodiest fights against the IDF since October 7 here, in ‘Little Gaza.’ His dream now is to fall for the armed resistance against Israel so that he is remembered forever.”
As Farah speaks, her eye falls on the new cemetery in Camp Jenin, a sparse quadrilateral of barren land and white stones, with a couple of rough wooden coffins without covers laid nearby. A young man sits with his back turned, not uttering a word. He stares fixedly at a tombstone as a tear runs down his cheek, the image a grim premonition of what may come.
