When he learned that the Israeli army had launched a raid this week to comb the occupied West Bank city of Jenin for weapons and explosives, Mahmoud Sarahat and his friends took action to fight back. His comrades shot Israeli soldiers, while he helped evacuate the wounded and dead, he said, taking their guns to give to other fighters.
After two days of violence, in which 12 Palestinians and an Israeli soldier were killed, the Israelis quit on Wednesday, leaving behind destroyed homes, destroyed infrastructure and renewed anger at Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. But it is mixed with frustration with the Palestinians’ own leaders for their failure to set a better future for their people, let alone protect them.
“We want the Authority to go,” Mr. Sarahat, 23, said of the Palestinian Authority. “They left us for dead.”
Israel called its 48-hour assault on Jenin, which it said was aimed at rooting out Palestinian militants, a necessary operation to prevent attacks on Israelis: It said all 12 Palestinians killed were fighters, and at least nine were claimed as fighters by militant groups.
But Jenin residents described the raid as two days of terror that highlighted their growing sense of hopelessness, vulnerability and abandonment across the West Bank.
While Palestinians hold Israel fully responsible for their predicament, many are also disillusioned with the Palestinian Authority, a political body created decades ago as a kind of state-in-waiting, with limited powers. -administrative in parts of the West Bank. Today, the Authority offers little more than jobs whose salaries are struggling to pay, and many Palestinians view it as ineffective, or as a subcontractor for work.
The Palestinian Authority employs thousands of security forces charged with law enforcement within Palestinian communities. While the forces are expected to contain Palestinian armed groups and prevent them from attacking Israelis, they do so inconsistently, at least in part because their members sympathize with the fighters.
The commanders of the forces communicate directly with the Israeli military to avoid clashes, but they cannot directly defend their people from Israeli forces. Nor can they protect Palestinians when Israeli West Bank settlers attack their towns.
Popular resentment boiled over this week when Palestinian officials arrived at the funeral of some of the 12 Palestinians killed in the attack on Jenin but were chased away by mourners shouting, “Get out! Out!” and “For shame!”
Maj. recognized Gen. Akram Rajoub, the most senior official of the Palestinian Authority in Jenin, expressed frustration but accused Israel of destroying the body.
“What brought the Authority to this point? The criminality of the occupation and its refusal to provide any political solution,” said General Rajoub.
Israeli officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the accusation that their government is undermining the Authority. As for the Jenin raid, they say it cleared a safe haven for militants attacking Israelis.
“They are targeting civilians and they are hiding behind civilians,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Wednesday. “And we denied them that possibility while avoiding civilian casualties.”
The Palestinian Authority continues to pay salaries to thousands of employees in Gaza, but the body has been sidelined there since 2007, when Hamas, a hard-line militant group, seized control of the territory.
The West Bank is finally controlled by Israel, led by Mr. Netanyahu has one of the most difficult line of governments in the country’s history, filled with officials who oppose Palestinian political aspirations. Peace talks aimed at ending the conflict and creating a Palestinian state broke down nearly a decade ago without a solution, and world powers like the United States, which have long pressured both sides to continue with them, seems to have given up.
The Arab world, too, is increasingly looking away.
A handful of Arab states have established diplomatic relations with Israel in recent years, setting aside longstanding demands that Israel prioritize resolving its conflict with the Palestinians. Other states, such as Saudi Arabia, have expressed a new openness to formal relations but have yet to announce them, despite concerted efforts by the Biden administration. However, other Arab countries remain deeply hostile to Israel but are too wrapped up in their own crises to offer the Palestinians anything more than rhetoric.
A Palestinian poll conducted last month found that half of respondents believed that the fall of the Palestinian Authority would benefit the people. The authority’s 87-year-old president, Mahmoud Abbas, was last elected to a four-year term in 2005, but remains in charge. Eighty percent of poll respondents said they want him to resign.
“They cannot trust their leadership,” said Khaled Elgindy, a scholar of Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “The region left them. The Arab states deprioritized their cause. There is no US-led peace process and no interest in starting one.”
That created “a sense of Palestinian hopelessness,” he said.
That sentiment permeated conversations in Jenin as residents examined the remnants of the invasion this week.
Israel’s invasion is centered around the Jenin refugee camp, a difficult place for Palestinians who fled or were chased from their homes at the time of Israel’s creation in 1948 and their descendants, who are considered United Nations refugees. Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war, but Palestinians hope it will one day become part of their own independent state.
The camp is actually a densely populated neighborhood with about 14,000 residents. On Thursday, signs of destruction were everywhere. Burnt cars and rubble from damaged buildings blocked roads and men worked around the area to repair broken power lines and water works.
Many buildings have holes in their walls that residents say the Israelis made to get inside, effectively using these houses as cover. Residents who fled the camp during the invasion returned to find that soldiers had occupied their homes and destroyed property.
Before dawn on Monday, Israeli soldiers broke through the wall of the al-Saadi family’s apartment building, waking them up, said the mother, Shadia al-Saadi. Soldiers soon herded the 12 family members into a living room, took their phones, zip-tied the wrists of the men under 50 and ordered everyone to remain quiet.
They stayed there for about 10 hours, with soldiers standing outside the door when they went to the bathroom, Ms. al-Saadi. The soldiers were so afraid of her 9-year-old daughter that the girl repeatedly vomited.
“We are hostages,” said Ms. al-Saadi.
As the family waited, soldiers outside clashed with Palestinian gunmen and bulldozers on the roads, with the Israeli military saying they had dug up roadside bombs and tripwires to dislodge them.
After the raid, the family discovered that the soldiers had used the building as a temporary base and ransacked their belongings. Furniture was overturned, windows were broken and clothes and dishes were pulled from wardrobes and cabinets.
“We don’t want to fix the house anytime soon because they’re probably going to come back and tear it down again,” Ms. al-Saadi.
Another fighter, Mohamad Abu al-Kamel, 28, explained how the struggle against Israel defined his life. He remembers as a child seeing his home destroyed by Israeli soldiers in a camp battle in 2002. The Israelis killed two of his brothers and imprisoned his father, he said. He spent time in an Israeli prison for his involvement with armed groups.
Now, he carries a rifle inherited from one of his slain brothers and intends to continue fighting, he said. His wife had recently given birth and he planned to pass the struggle on to the next generation.
“I will teach my son what my father taught me: to fight for this camp and for our honor,” he said.
Hiba Yazbek reported from Jenin, West Bank, and Ben Hubbard from Istanbul. Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from London.
