Israeli army soldiers and vehicle columns have only just withdrawn from Tulkarem, in the northern occupied West Bank. In the Nour Shams refugee camp, east of the city, everyone is busy in the still smoking ruins. Armed with a small screwdriver, Hussein Moussa Alajma balances on the blackened scree which has replaced the small house where his telephone shop was located, on the ground floor, and the apartment, on the first floor, where his son lived. impotent father, aged 90. The building, which overlooks a square, was destroyed and caught fire or was set on fire in the process. He tries to salvage what he can, carefully unscrewing an iron structure to free it from broken concrete uprights. This could always be used again.
At the end of a month of January of rain and mud, Israeli soldiers – a thousand according to local sources – were deployed for a new operation which lasted almost three days. There was fighting and shooting in the two refugee camps in Tulkarem. With Jenin and Nablus, these are the three main cities where, continually, operations are carried out to arrest or eliminate fighters from clandestine armed groups, destroy weapons stocks or explosives manufacturing laboratories, with violence and blunders. the key. Far from Gaza, another conflict is taking place here, of a more complex nature, latent but permanent.
Since the start of the war triggered by the Hamas attack on October 7, similar operations have affected many points in the West Bank almost every day. Twenty-three raids for Jenin alone. In Tulkarem, one per week on average. On January 19, nine people died there, and two dozen houses were bulldozed. In Nour Shams, the soldiers only stayed a handful of hours, but a typhoon seemed to have hit the streets.
“Victims of this long colonial history”
” Everything happened really fast. We were inside, we couldn’t understand what was happening. The fire started, I managed to carry my father on my back to get him out of the flames. By the time we took refuge in another house, a bulldozer came and finished destroying the house”, says Mr. Alajma. In the surrounding area, five other buildings were destroyed within a radius of around fifty meters. Teenagers wander around the ruins trying to help out. Men work in chains to clear sections of wall. An entire dislocated electrical network is pulled towards a van, like the corpse of a giant insect.
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