For two days Israel targeted militants in Jenin. What did it achieve?

By Taylor Luck, Neri Zilber, Fatima AbdulKarim

July 7, 2023

Ramallah and Tel Aviv

Israel’s 48-hour incursion of hundreds of troops this week into the northern West Bank city of Jenin, which has emerged as a potent stronghold for Palestinian militant groups, left behind some telling images.

What they promised for the future was not security for anyone, but escalation and a deadly cycle of violence that in recent years had been alien to the once-stable West Bank and that evoked comparisons among some observers to Gaza.

They also highlighted the increasing irrelevance and ineffectiveness of a Palestinian Authority caught between growing support for armed groups at home and an intransigent far-right government in Israel.

Families are now returning to smashed homes and rubble-strewn streets left by receding Israeli forces after the largest Israeli military incursion into the West Bank in two decades. The raid displaced thousands of residents from the targeted refugee camp, with more than 140 injured.

At a funeral Tuesday for some of the dozen young militants killed in the battle, which involved Israeli drone strikes and ground forces, angry mourners chased away two senior Fatah and Palestinian Authority (PA) representatives who arrived to express their condolences.

Palestinian protests also erupted against the PA and its aging autocratic ruler Mahmoud Abbas over its inability to protect citizens from increased settler attacks and its alleged facilitating of Israeli military operations. 

“We are talking about devastated families and households who are in need of more than just diapers and canned foods. We need to feel safe,” says Saja Bawaqneh, a 30-something lawyer whose family home in Jenin was damaged by Israeli forces for the second time in less than a year. “Over the past few years, we haven’t felt safe in our homes at all.”

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