Falasteen Salameh’s sons were in the family home when the soldiers came for them. The young men, Nour (22) and Munir (24) still smile down from photos on the walls: both bearded, one in a baseball cap and the other in an Adidas jumper. Salameh hasn’t seen them since they were locked up last November: visits are prohibited, though the family has heard rumours, including that one was beaten badly and lost a tooth, or maybe more.
The UN Human Rights Office has said thousands of Palestinians, across the West Bank and Israel, have experienced “arbitrary, prolonged and incommunicado detention by Israeli authorities” since last October. The UN also documented allegations of torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including sexual abuse of women and men, saying in July that at least 53 Palestinian detainees have died.
Twenty days after her sons were taken away, soldiers took Salameh too, she says. “‘I will arrest you, I promised your son Nour that I will arrest his mom’,” she recalls a soldier telling her.
The diminutive 46-year-old, who stands at 5ft or less, says she was handcuffed and blindfolded. She spent 20 days under investigation in an isolated cell, accused of supporting terrorism by feeding and sheltering her sons. She was then sentenced to six months in prison by a military court, and to paying a fine of 3,000 shekels (about €730). Salameh was moved to Damon prison, near the city of Haifa, about 60km away. It felt ironic, she says, as her grandfather had owned land in Haifa before he was pushed out by the Israelis. She had always wanted to go there – she just didn’t anticipate that this was how it would happen.
Salameh’s daughter Ritaj – a barefoot girl with chubby cheeks, wide eyes and dark curls – was three years old when her mother was arrested: Salameh remembers her sitting on an armchair as soldiers led her out of their home. “It was the hardest moment for me… I didn’t want to look at her because I didn’t want that sight in my mind.”
Ahmed, Salameh’s husband, says he begged the soldiers not to do it. He shows me a video of a door broken down and smashed windows. Outside was a blackened wall where a missile hit; there were bullet holes in the narrow walkway leading to their home. A black Star of David had been spray-painted on another wall nearby.
Over the following months, the 44-year-old says, his daughter’s behaviour changed: she became anxious and began to wet herself, “when she used to go to the toilet normally”. When the raid siren sounded, she would scream. He tried to comfort Ritaj by saying that her mother had gone to buy a doll for her; upon Salameh’s release, one month before we met, Ahmed handed her a doll to gift Ritaj so his words would be true.
‘If a fighter is killed, at least he was holding a weapon against the occupation, but others lost their lives at their windows or on their roof, doing nothing’
— Falasteen Salameh,
Salameh was not allowed to have visitors in prison. She says she shared a cell with 13 women, who got one hour outside a day for fresh air and a shower. The food provided was not enough, she says – a friend estimated that her weight had dropped by 20kg.
Now, Salameh says, Ritaj is “very nervous, she doesn’t leave me alone. When I go to the toilet, she comes with me. She’s afraid I’ll leave again.”
Her sons, who are accused of being resistance fighters, have still not been charged, she adds. No one can visit them apart from a lawyer. The only information she gets about them is from other prisoners, after they are released.
“As a mother, I really don’t know what was their affiliation. They are part of the camp. They were with their friends, I really don’t know what they were doing – do you think they share with me?” She wasn’t surprised either, however. Salameh says her sons were first arrested aged 15 and 17. At that point, they were throwing stones or Molotov cocktails, she says - they didn’t yet have more sophisticated weapons (stone-throwing can carry a 20-year prison sentence for Palestinian children, according to humanitarian organisation Save the Children).
“They are not exceptional,” Salameh says about her sons. “[The Israelis] are targeting everyone – if you are with the battalion or not with the battalion.”
***
In Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank, it’s not hard to spot vehicles from the battalion, a grouping of local Palestinian militants. They have no number plates, and their dark windows are rolled up when everyone else has been instructed to keep theirs down. This is despite the dust and detritus that wafts through, disturbed by wheels on frequently bulldozed roads – a consequence of what locals say is a deliberate Israeli effort to destroy infrastructure. An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson says dozens of explosive devices have been encountered on roads and their surroundings “necessitating engineering actions to destroy them”.
Jenin refugee camp has been a centre of Palestinian armed resistance for as long as most people here remember. Though it’s called a camp, it’s more like an inner-city neighbourhood. It was set up shortly after the 1948 war to house Palestinians ousted from family land during what they call the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”. Generations have grown up under military occupation here. The camp is currently home to about 17,000 people, according to the Palestinian Authority; the city itself contains about 68,000.
Israeli military raids are regular. Many residents have been forced out, with some spray-painting phone numbers on their damaged homes; one alongside the words “until we come back”.
***
Salameh interprets the raids as “revenge” and “collective punishment” for the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023. “What the Israeli occupation means for me – it’s an invasion,” she says. “We’re in a real fight, a real battle. Now my only concern is my daughter – I think only about her safety.” Her daughter has fallen into a deep sleep, mouth open, on her lap.
Two of Salameh’s nephews have been killed – one was 28-year-old Adham Jabarin, a battalion commander. Jawad Bouaqneh, a 57-year-old teacher and father of six, was shot trying to give Jabarin first aid.
“We are used to it, we are expecting someone to become a shaheed [martyr] at any time,” says Salameh. “If a fighter is killed, at least he was holding a weapon against the occupation, but others lost their lives at their windows or on their roof, doing nothing.”
“The Israeli occupation has no mercy, no humanity,” says Ahmed. He walks me out of their home, pointing upwards towards the noise of buzzing, which he says must be an Israeli surveillance drone. He becomes distressed, his voice raised. “They beat me and my wife and they took us out in front of our child… We are very upset, very angry, the anger is inside us because of their policies and what they are doing.”
***
Though international attention is focused on the mass death and destruction in Gaza, analysts say a slower kind of war has been taking place in the occupied West Bank for years. The UN recorded nearly 1,000 Palestinians killed there between January 2020 and the beginning of June 2024, with at least 271 of them in Jenin governorate. There were84 Israeli fatalities over the same period, with six of those in Jenin.
Since October last year, a child has been killed on average every two days, according to Unicef. Last year, a BBC Analysis said Jenin was the deadliest location.
The exposure of children to violence was reflected in the drawings produced by youngsters in Jenin refugee camp’s Not to Forget centre on a recent afternoon. There were pictures of raids, weapons, tears and blood, along with trees, the sun, and their friends’ names.
A 12-year-old girl, all in pink, drew Jenin camp as a jail with bars. “This is the blood that bleeds in the camp,” she says.
A boy, aged 13, held up a drawing of a big house, with an extension he says would offer resistance fighters a place to hide. “They are protecting us,” he says. His two uncles and a cousin were among the dead battalion members. When he is older, he adds, “I want to become a paramedic and help the guys. We should support them because they lost their souls and homes for us.”
An 11-year-old, wearing rose-coloured glasses, has written the word “Gaza” against a Palestinian flag. “We are not going to forget the children of Gaza,” she says. Her aunt is in Gaza and her father was arrested during a raid, she adds.
***
Eitan Diamond, who manages the Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre in Jerusalem, told me that, under international law, “the population in [an] occupied territory does not have any duty of allegiance to the occupying power. From their perspective, the occupant is an alien power that seized control of their territory through force of arms.” However, though some resistance is legal, it must be “undertaken in a lawful manner”, which means not attacking civilians, for example, and keeping to “military objectives”.
I spoke, on the basis of anonymity, to three members of the Jenin battalion, founded in mid-2021. At least 75 of the battalion’s members have been killed, but recruitment is booming, they say, and there are at least 200 members now.
The eldest member (26) explained that the Jenin battalion is a local effort associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Al-Quds Brigades, which receives some support from Iran. Most of their fighting is reactive, during the Israeli raids, though they sometimes go to shoot at military checkpoints. He says they don’t have members who also belong to Hamas or Fatah, but they co-operate with them. They also share information on Telegram messaging channels, so they can keep informed of Israeli movements. They do six-hour shifts each day, he says, with jobs that can include intelligence-gathering, guarding the entrance to the camp, or making bombs. Their members are as young as 14.
When I ask whether they receive weapons from Iran or Hizbullah in Lebanon, he says most of their weaponry is “homemade” or “modified”: they assemble it from different pieces and they are “not very modern”. “Everyone is talking about this axis of resistance with Hizbullah and Iran. But we don’t see the weapons they are talking about.”
Despite the murder of civilians on October 7th in Israel and the devastating reaction those attacks have provoked for Palestinians, all three members of the Jenin battalion I spoke to say they approved of the Hamas attacks of October 7th, during which Israel says about 1,200 people were killed, the majority of them civilians. “We are proud of what Hamas did… They put the Palestinian issue back on the table,” says the 26-year-old.
In terms of what can be achieved by their fighters, he asks: “Do we have another alternative? We are not giving up, we are not surrendering, in the end we will die.”
He accuses the Palestinian Authority (PA) – which was formed in the 1990s as part of the Oslo Accords and peace process, and has limited control over the West Bank – of trying to spread rumours and sow discord to “crack down” on them.
“The PA’s role is as a collaborator, they are traitors who are serving the Israeli occupation,” he says. Three days before we spoke, the PA’s security forces reportedly killed a young member of the Jenin battalion while attempting an arrest.
The man says the PA had proposed that battalion members lay down arms and join its security forces, but “we don’t trust them… The PA is playing a dirty game here.” A widespread view among Palestinians across the West Bank is that the PA is corrupt, undemocratic and ineffective, and that its elites – comfortable with their place in the status quo – have let a Palestinian state move further out of reach. The last parliamentary elections took place in 2006 and presidential elections in 2005, with new ones repeatedly postponed.
***
Jenin’s residents know when a raid is imminent, because the PA’s security forces withdraw. “This is really embarrassing us as an authority,” says Jenin’s governor, Kamal Abu Al-Rob, during an interview in his office. He says that Palestinian security forces are required to “disappear” when Israelis enter a Palestinian area, as necessitated by the Oslo Accords. “We are really squeezed... We can’t act.”
Behind him is a picture of his son, Shamekh, a 25-year-old doctor, who was shot dead by Israeli forces the previous November. An IDF spokesperson says that on the day of Shamekh’s death, IDF forces were operating to apprehend two “wanted individuals” when “terrorists threw explosives and fired”. The spokesperson says the soldiers fired back, only to get “reports” of “Palestinians being injured”. Abu Al-Rob says his other son, a third-year medical student, was also hurt and still struggles to walk unassisted.
‘Do you think that the fighter in the camp is not looking for a peaceful life?… It’s a dream for a Palestinian to have, finally, a state and a peaceful life, a standalone community and a standalone economy’
— Mohamad Kamil, Jenin Chamber of Commerce
Despite his personal tragedy, Abu Al-Rob does not support armed resistance. “It is not helping,” he says. “There is no balance of power here, you have armed groups fighting a big organised army, so we don’t see winning as a possibility in any way.” If Palestinians can stick to their international agreements and remain peaceful instead, he believes, Palestine could have its own state within the next decade. Countries including Ireland, he points out, have already recognised a Palestinian state.
Abu Al-Rob takes this position despite the fact that lawyers say Israel is not operating by its agreements or international law, and not just in Gaza, where nearly 40,000 people have now been killed, the majority of them civilians. While an “occupying power” can “enforce law… the raids that Israel has actually mounted in Jenin have involved excessive force and were unlawful on those grounds”, says Diamond.
[ Jenin: a martyrs’ capital and a hornets’ nestOpens in new window ]
Abu Al-Rob takes out documentation showing that he received notice of nearly 2,500 Israeli operations between October 7th, 2023 and mid-July 2024 – including arrests, raids and air strikes – some 80 per cent of which were inside Jenin refugee camp. He says the governorate, with a population of about 375,000 people, has lost at least 150 million shekels (€35.86 million) worth of infrastructure – at a time when the Israelis are withholding taxes from the PA. The Palestinians are also losing money from trade, while unemployment is soaring because borders and checkpoints were shut by the Israelis on October 7th, meaning those with jobs in Israel were let go.
Alongside that, Abu Al-Rob says, the Israeli raids made him believe “they really want to erase our history”, because soldiers have destroyed sites of historical significance and stolen bricks from old buildings.
An IDF spokesperson says the military “is fighting against terrorist organisations in the Judea and Samaria [the Israeli name for the occupied West Bank] and the Jordan Valley area, who since October 7th have increased their efforts to carry out terrorist acts, with over 2,000 attempted attacks occurring since the beginning of the war. The IDF conducts nightly counterterrorism operations to apprehend suspects, many of them are part of the Hamas terrorist organisation.”
The spokesperson says the IDF does not intentionally target civilians or civilian infrastructure, but, in the West Bank, “terrorists use civilian infrastructure, including medical and religious facilities, for terrorist purposes, thereby directly endangering uninvolved civilians. When entering areas where terrorist organisations operate, the IDF seeks to uncover routes where life-threatening explosive devices have been planted and to eliminate the dangers arising from the use of civilian buildings and infrastructure by terrorist organisations… Additionally, civilian buildings suspected of hiding weapons were searched, and significant quantities of weapons and life-threatening explosives were found.”
“It’s like another Gaza,” says Mohamad Kamil, director of Jenin’s Chamber of Commerce, when asked about the situation there. “This is more than apartheid, it’s completely ethnic cleansing… Do you think that the fighter in Gaza is not looking for a peaceful life?… Do you think that the fighter in the camp is not looking for a peaceful life?… It’s a dream for a Palestinian to have, finally, a state and a peaceful life, a standalone community and a standalone economy. If I come and steal your home, can I ask you to be resilient? And can I ask you to be peaceful?”
***
In the sitting room of an apartment back in the camp, Karam is recalling an assassination he witnessed less than two weeks before.
The 12-year-old – a smiley boy in black runners and cargo pants – is one of five children. He recently finished sixth grade, and was at his uncle’s business, helping wash cars, when a 4x4 vehicle “entered the roundabout very fast”. It rammed the man in front of Karam, Jenin Battalion member Nidal Al-Amer, then “pushed him on the floor”.
Karam thought it was a “normal accident”, until the people inside the vehicle, which had Palestine number plates, began “shouting ‘Nidal’ from the windows”. He realised this was an Israeli “undercover unit”. Al-Amer was allegedly involved with planting and detonating an explosive that killed an Israeli sniper team commander in June.
“I was very shocked, I froze in my place, I remained silent and raised my hands,” Karam recalls. His cousin rushed Al-Amer to hospital, leaving him alone. “I took a phone and called my father and said the Israeli undercover unit came, killed someone and left. He said immediately, ‘I’m coming’.”
Karam’s father, Rami, arrived to find his son “just watching the blood”.
“I started crying. I don’t know why,” says Karam.
Since that day, he is terrified. “Before… when there was a raid we stayed in the camp – now I say we have to leave.”
At the same time, he dreams of joining the battalion and protecting the home he loves.
A year ago, Karam told me, he travelled to Turkey with a traditional dabke dancing group made up of performers from the camp. But he missed Jenin the whole time. “I like the camp,” he says. “Here we all know each other. The kindness of people, the relations between people are very strong. I like the atmosphere. If someone visits they will help them, they support everyone. I feel proud.”
He sees the Israeli soldiers as cowardly. “They don’t face the fighters face to face, instead they either strike them from the air or they use undercover units. Israel has no right even to raid our camp – even when we go resist against them we don’t harm them the way they are harming us.”
All young people want to join the battalion now, he says. “No one is thinking of other things in the camp or other alternatives for life except for fighting. I want to fight and if I die I will go to heaven.”
Earlier this year, during an iftar evening meal, Karam told his family that it might be his last Ramadan before he dies as a fighter. His father Rami, a 44-year-old taxi driver, grimaces as he recalls that moment.
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