Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The BBC reports that Israeli forces have invaded three Palestinian refugee camps in the Palestinian West Bank — Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams — and expelled their inhabitants. The ghost towns will be occupied by the Israeli military for the next year, according to Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that the residents would not be allowed to return.
The Israeli operation against the camps began January 21, virtually as soon as Trump was inaugurated.
I suppose there isn’t any point in bringing it up, given the determination of United States and other major powers to bestow impunity on the extremist Netanyahu government, but article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 says, “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”
The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that Israeli tanks rumbled their way into the Jenin camp Sunday evening, in the biggest escalation of Israeli military violence against Palestinians since 2002 during the second Intifada or uprising.
Operations in the camps at Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas left 61 Palestinians dead according to the Pelestinian ministry of health, in addition to the displacement of tens of thousands and the broad destruction of property, houses and infrastructure.
“Jenin Refugee Camp: Not to Forget,” by Mujaddara, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
The refugees in these camps were driven out of what became Israel in 1948 by Zionist gangs, deploying firebombs and small arms. The refugees just expelled from the Jenin Camp had been chased out of their homes in the Carmel area south of Haifa in 1948 and made homeless, losing all their land and property to militant Jewish immigrants from Europe.
Here are some narratives of what Zionist immigrants did to Palestinians in their own city of Haifa in 1948:
- “On February 29th ,1948, Zionist terrorists rolled down a barrel of explosives from Haifa’s Jewish neighborhood, Hadara Ha Carmel, into al-‘Abasyah Arab neighborhood, which resulted in the destruction of most of the neighborhood. The bomb ended up terrorizing the nearby Arab neighborhoods into fleeing soon after that incident.
On March 22nd, 1948, Zionist terrorists disguised as British officers planted a car bomb in Iraq Street that killed and injured 36 people, mostly women and children, plus the destruction of several public buildings.”
The refugee camp at Jenin was full of people who never accepted their expulsion. By 2023 there were about 24,000 people living there. Inhabitants suffered from crushing poverty and unemployment, since the property of their grandparents had been stolen by the Zionists, leaving them penniless. Its young people formed self-defense militias such as “the Lion’s Den” to protect against incursions by Israeli squatter-settlers, who have increasingly attacked Palestinian towns and camps. The Israeli state has incentivized some 700,000 Israeli squatters to invade the Palestinian West Bank and usurp land.
UNRWA reports of the contemporary situation, “An increase in Israeli settlers’ violence was witnessed from 14 to 16 February reported in several locations, including Masafer Yatta, Wadi Qana, Wadi Al Faw, and Araba. In one incident in Al Maniya on 14 February, armed Israeli settlers physically assaulted Palestinian villagers, throwing stones and setting fire to their property. Some 16 Palestinians were reported injured.”
The current extremist Israeli government has encouraged the squatters to attack Palestinian towns, shooting them up and setting fires, with the aim of expelling the 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank.
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