Last month, as the Israeli army started pulling out of Gaza under the ceasefire agreement, it announced an “operation” in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin and its refugee camp. For three weeks now, it has been terrorising the Palestinian people there, using fighter jets, helicopters, tanks, drones, and bulldozers to kill and destroy.
Emboldened by the world’s indifference, the Israeli government is clearly attempting to replicate Gaza in the West Bank. But the Gazafication of Jenin and other refugee camps in the West Bank is bound to fail, just as similar brutal strategies have failed in the past.
There is a reason why Israel picked Jenin for the start of its renewed bloody assault on the West Bank. The camp, which was established in the aftermath of the Nakba to house 8,000 Palestinians violently expelled from their homes by Zionist forces, has been an incubator of resistance for decades.
During the first Intifada, it became one of the nuclei of Palestinian organising and resistance. The youth who had known nothing but occupation became its voice, its fist, its heart.
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During the second Intifada, Jenin once again served as a hub of the resistance. In April 2002, the Israeli army invaded the city, murdering 52 Palestinians, destroying hundreds of homes, and displacing more than a quarter of the population.
Israel declared victory then, claiming to have crushed “terror”. Yet, from the ruins of Jenin, a new generation rose, carrying on the unshakeable will to resist.
In the 2020s, armed resistance activity intensified in Jenin and other refugee camps in the West Bank. This culminated in another brutal Israeli assault on the city in July 2023, just months before the outbreak of the genocide in Gaza. The operation involved the deployment of fighter jets, armed drones, tanks, bulldozers, and thousands of troops. The Israeli army killed at least 10 Palestinians, destroyed homes and infrastructure, and displaced thousands. And yet, resistance re-emerged once again and responded to calls from Gaza for mobilisation.
Jenin has become a hub of resistance for a reason. Refugee camps are not merely places where the displaced survive – they are the beating hearts of Palestinian consciousness. These are places where the wounds and trauma of the Nakba are passed from generation to generation, where sons and daughters inherit their parents and grandparents’ desire to return home.
Children grow up seeing their neighbourhoods raided, friends detained or murdered, just like 10-year-old Saddam Rajab from Tulkarem who was shot in the abdomen by an Israeli soldier on January 28 and the ambulance carrying him was blocked by Israeli troops at a checkpoint. Saddam died 10 days later.
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Children in refugee camps know the steep price of fighting for freedom, and as adults, they still choose to pay it anyway.
In the Gaza Strip, refugee camps like Jabalia have also been major strongholds of Palestinian resistance for decades for the same reason. Historically, Jabalia has been the largest refugee camp in Palestine, housing 100,000 people. In 1987, it produced the spark that ignited the first Intifada. It has been repeatedly targeted by Israeli military assaults which have left behind mass casualties and destruction.
After the start of Israel’s genocidal war, the Israeli army launched several assaults on the camp, each time following the same brutal template: massive bombardment, house demolitions, and displacement of civilians. Each time it claimed to have dismantled the resistance, only to return several months later for another “clearing operation”.
In the fall, the Israeli army launched a massive campaign of air strikes that devastated Jabalia. Some 90 percent of buildings are estimated to have been destroyed.
Yet the resistance persisted, launching operations that resulted in significant Israeli military casualties.
The ongoing assault on Jenin uses the same failed playbook to “dismantle” resistance through destruction. It has killed more than 45 Palestinians, including two-year-old Laila al-Khatib, forcibly displaced 20,000, demolished entire blocks, besieged a hospital, and cut off the city from the rest of the West Bank.
Wholesale destruction did not work in Jenin before and it did not work in Gaza, so why does Israel think it would now?
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This military strategy exposes Israel’s fundamental blindness. It sees resistance as something tangible – fighters to eliminate, tunnels to destroy, leaders to assassinate, weapons to seize. But in Palestine’s refugee camps, resistance flows through generations like blood through veins. It lives in the stories passed down, in the stubborn insistence on dignity under siege, in the resolve to rebuild what has been destroyed.
History has already written this story. In Jenin, in Jabalia, in every refugee camp across Palestine, generations have transformed spaces of temporary refuge into permanent monuments to an idea that cannot be killed. With each invasion, with each demolition, with each attempt to break the will of these communities, the resolve only strengthens. It lives in the determined step of a child walking to school through checkpoints, in the defiant smile of an elder rebuilding their home yet another time, and in the collective refusal to accept displacement as destiny.
This is why the Gazafication of Jenin will fail. You can kill revolutionaries, but you cannot kill the revolution. You cannot bomb an idea into submission. You cannot kill the will to be free.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
