JENIN, West Bank – Ramadan nights in this Palestinian city are normally spent late watching drama and comedy series during peak TV season, praying or drinking coffee and smoking hookah in night cafes.
But this year, amid widespread Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank, residents in Jenin are staying up late awaiting the next military raid on their city.
“We are exhausted,” said Israa Awartani, 32, who works in a theater. “We start to think, ‘When is it my turn? When will it be my son or another relative?”
Over the past week, Israeli forces have launched a widespread campaign of raids on villages and towns in the West Bank in response to a spate of recent Palestinian attacks in Israel that have left 14 people dead. Israeli authorities have imposed temporary economic sanctions and arrested dozens of people.
Israel says the ramped up military activities are a counter-terrorism effort to prevent further attacks, and it has targeted the birthplaces and villages of the recent attackers. However, Palestinian residents and critics say the operation amounts to collective punishment and is counterproductive, as it will only further fuel the cycle of hatred and bloodshed.
At least 14 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the start of Ramadan on April 2, including 16-year-old Mohammad Zakarneh, who was shot dead Sunday during one of the Israeli raids on Jenin, his mother said. He left work at a greengrocer’s and was on his way home to break his fast during Ramadan. The Israeli military declined to comment on his death.
Also killed was Ghada Sabteen, 47, a widow and mother of six who was shot in the leg as she approached soldiers at a checkpoint near Bethlehem. The Palestinian authorities have called for an investigation into her murder, but the Israeli military has not commented on whether it will conduct an investigation.
On Wednesday, Mohammad Assaf, a 34-year-old lawyer, was shot in the chest and killed during a raid on the city of Nablus, reportedly shortly after dropping his children off at school.
Israel’s military operation comes in the wake of the worst wave of violence in Israel since 2016. The latest attack, on April 7, was carried out by a 28-year-old Palestinian gunman from Jenin who opened fire outside a crowded bar in Tel Aviv. , which killed two people and injured 13 others. He was later shot dead by Israeli police. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack.
This week, Palestinian authorities also condemned Israel’s raids on the West Bank and killing of civilians, calling it collective punishment, and urging the international community to intervene. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it holds Israel fully responsible for the consequences of its actions.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and controls more than 60 percent of its territory. It maintains a dual justice system there — one for the five million stateless Palestinians and one for Israeli settlers — and restricts Palestinian movement and other rights, a system that a growing number of human rights groups and proponents have called apartheid.
The Israeli government, in response to a recent such accusation from a United Nations researcher, said it was unfair to blame Israel for the system, given the threats from armed Palestinian groups in the occupied territories.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Sunday that Israel had gone on the offensive.
“The State of Israel will do whatever it takes to overcome this terrorism. We will settle accounts with anyone directly or indirectly affected by the attacks,” he said, adding: “We will be everywhere at any time whatever is necessary to eradicate these terrorist operations.”
He said there were “no restrictions” on the country’s security forces.
For the past week, Israeli forces have raided Jenin almost every day or night, local officials and residents said. The city, like most Palestinian urban centers in the West Bank, is administered by the Palestinian Authority, but Israeli forces continue to conduct regular nighttime raids and arrests in these areas. In January, during one such raid in the village of Jiljilya, a 78-year-old Palestinian-American man died while in custody.
Rather than stem the latest wave of attacks, Israel’s actions will have the opposite effect, a Western diplomat in Ramallah said. Israel’s aggressive approach threatens to spark a new cycle of frustration, despair and casualties, said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters.
Every morning before she leaves for work, Ms Awartani checks the latest news on local social media.
“I’m afraid I’ll go to work and suddenly meet Israeli soldiers in the street who could shoot me,” said the mother of three girls, twins aged 7 and a 3-year-old. “I could die, I could be paralyzed. Who will take care of my daughters then?”
Ms. Awartani works in accounting at the well-known Freedom Theater, the epicenter of cultural resistance in Jenin. The theater canceled its Ramadan programming month out of respect for those killed during Israeli raids on the city and the refugee camp.
Mustafa Sheta, the theater’s manager, said he was afraid to take his four children to school every morning, worried that Israeli snipers would still be on rooftops.
Ms. Awartani said her sister-in-law refused to go to sleep until her two college-age sons did, fearing they would leave the house at night and be shot and killed during a robbery.
“We are all afraid of losing our children,” said Mrs. Awartani.
Jenin was also the target of economic sanctions. On April 9, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz closed the Jenin-Israel border crossings, preventing tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel from coming to Jenin for shopping — a key pillar of the city’s economy.
Jenin’s merchants and businessmen licensed to enter Israel were no longer allowed to cross, and the transportation of all goods and products from Jenin was also banned. Permits issued to 5,000 Jenin residents to visit relatives in Israel were also revoked.
Border crossings were reopened on Saturday, but it was unclear whether other restrictions would also be lifted.
“The goal is always to increase the pressure, but it never works. If it worked, you wouldn’t see the same cycle of violence that we see every year,” said Tahani Mustafa, a West Bank analyst with the International Crisis Group. “Israel is reusing the same heavy-handed response to what it sees as Palestinian provocation.”
The Recent Increase in Violence in Israel
In the wake of last week’s attack in Tel Aviv, some Israelis said the violence had evoked memories of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, and its violent repression by Israel, a period of unrest that lasted from 2000 to 2005, during which about 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis.
Israel’s response also evokes memories of the intifada among Palestinians, which left scars that are still visible in Jenin. In the part of the city that was originally a refugee camp, bullet holes poke the walls of many buildings. Many homes were built after 2002, when Israel razed hundreds of buildings in response to a series of suicide bombings.
All along the walls are posters of those killed by Israel – some of them members of Palestinian militant groups, some of them civilians. The faces of the victims of the past week of violence have yet to be added to the walls of the camp.
On a recent morning at intersections and roundabouts, schoolchildren walked past stacked tires like pillars and dumpsters used to block roads to slow down Israeli raids. Hours after Israeli troops withdrew, one container was still smoldering as children walked home.
At a jewelry store in Jenin’s main shopping district, the lights glittered from rows of gold jewelry. But there were few buyers.
With Israel banning the crossing to Jenin, business owners say they lost more than half of their customers at the end of Ramadan, one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year.
The jewelry store’s owner, Abdullah Dawaseh, 60, said just as Palestinians survived the intifada, they would survive it.
Hours earlier, the Israeli military had invaded a neighborhood less than half a mile from the commercial barrier.
“If you punish an entire population, the entire population explodes,” he said, speaking from behind a counter full of diamond rings. “Just as they want to be safe when they go to the market, we also want to be safe when we go to the market.”
Reporting contributed by Rawan Sheikh Ahmad in Haifa, Myra Noveck in Jerusalem and Gabby Sobelman in Rehovot, Israel.