Palestinian Authority forces are openly helping Israel fight its West Bank war
The circling drones buzz overhead as explosions echo. Bursts of gunfire between Israeli soldiers and fighters from the Palestinian refugee camp ring out. Israeli military jeeps patrol bulldozed roads outside the government hospital. Displaced camp resident, 29 year-old Noureddine Jarbou, sits in the courtyard watching the unending Israeli assault, his catheter bag attached to the side of his wheelchair.
Paralyzed from the waist down during an Israeli raid on the camp three years ago and then taken prisoner for two years, Jarbou looks across the choppy dirt road at his shattered coffee stand. Israeli troops have taken positions on rooftops and in buildings overlooking the area around the hospital, while Jeeps control the streets. It’s the fear of a potential sniper’s bullet that separates Jarbou from his ransacked livelihood. “Yesterday the army came, destroyed the lock, and had coffee,” Jarbou says about the Israeli soldiers he watched breaking into his roadside kiosk. “They smashed my CCTV cameras.”
This is not Gaza, where people are finally getting a moment of reprieve, amid an increasingly shaky cease-fire deal, after surviving 15 months of astonishing carnage that international human rights groups and United Nations bodies call genocide. It’s the city of Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank — the new focus of Israel’s war as it adapts for the second Donald Trump era.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the Gaza cease-fire to pivot the war, launching a military assault from land and air across the northern West Bank on January 21, adding the destruction of its Palestinian fighters to Israel’s war goals. His defense minister, Israel Katz, has declared that the army will remain in Jenin’s camp indefinitely as Israeli attacks widen throughout the Palestinian heartland, displacing an estimated 40,000 people so far and killing more than 70. For Palestinains, it is just further confirmation that Israel’s actual goal of the war is to destroy them as a people and disposess them of their homeland. [Continue reading…]