Israel kills 14, including child, in latest invasion of Jenin

The Israeli army continued its attacks on the West Bank city of Jenin for a second consecutive day on 22 January 2025.
Mohammed Nasser APA images

As Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip halted last week, it redirected its violence to the occupied West Bank.

Israel’s military, police and domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, jointly launched on 21 January a large-scale, open-ended military operation in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, mere days after the Palestinian Authority concluded a deadly operation that lasted more than a month.

In its latest invasion of Jenin, Israel has killed at least 14 Palestinians, including a child, and injured at least 50 as it entered its fifth day on Saturday.

About 2,000 Palestinian families were forcibly displaced from Jenin as a result of Israel’s deadly raid.

The Israeli invasion is a continuation of the PA’s dirty work in the camp, which saw the killing of 15 Palestinians – including three children – between 5 December and 17 January, as the Israeli army now “seeks to reach several targets that PA forces have failed to,” Tel Aviv daily Haaretz reported.

The Israeli military invaded Jenin using vehicles with Palestinian license plates on 21 January. The troops who invaded undercover were shortly followed by massive military reinforcements, including armored vehicles and bulldozers, as Israel launched the so-called Operation Iron Wall.

Israeli troops raided Palestinian homes, forced residents to leave the refugee camp, and arrested numerous young men.

The Israeli military carried out several aerial bombardments in densely populated civilian areas. The bombardments included drone strikes, as well as helicopter gunfire.

Israeli snipers reportedly positioned themselves on building rooftops, while Israeli forces blocked paramedics from reaching the injured, according to Wafa News Agency.

Israeli forces besieged the Jenin public hospital and damaged the infrastructure around it and destroyed the main roads towards it, with rubble blocking the entrance. Patients and medical staff were stuck inside the hospital, unable to leave, and medical supplies, food and other basic and urgent necessities could not reach the hospital.

The director of the hospital told CNN that five medical staff were injured by Israeli gunfire.

The director of another hospital in Jenin also told the broadcaster that the youngest of more than a dozen injured patients was 4 months old, injured by gunfire shrapnel in the camp.

“The camp is nearly uninhabitable,” said Roland Friedrich from the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA). He added that the agency has not been able to provide full services to the Jenin refugee camp since the Palestinian Authority raided it.

One Palestinian woman, Iman Muhammad Eid, 45, died on 21 January after Israeli forces obstructed her ability to reach the hospital. She had shown symptoms of a heart attack, according to the Palestinian Authority’s health ministry.

Israeli forces reportedly set up iron gates at the entrances to West Bank towns and villages, fragmenting them into isolated zones and restricting the movement of people.

Killing children

An Israeli sniper shot and killed 16-year-old Motaz Imad Abu Tabeekh shortly after the Israeli military invaded the Jenin refugee camp. “There were no confrontations in the area” when the Israeli sniper shot the child around noon on 21 January, Defense for Children International - Palestine said.

“As a fragile ceasefire takes hold in Gaza, the Israeli military now turns its attention to Jenin, whose residents have been targeted with lethal force again and again,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP.

“Palestinian children are still not safe as Israeli forces continue to target Palestinian childhood with impunity.”

Israeli forces have killed at least seven Palestinian children in the West Bank since the start of the year – four by drone strikes and three others by live ammunition.

This toll does not include three Palestinian children killed during the Palestinian Authority raid on the Jenin refugee camp which started in the first week of December and concluded this month. DCIP has yet to determine the perpetrators responsible for each child’s death during the PA raid, as the subsequent Israeli military incursion has hindered such investigations.

Israeli drone-fired missiles killed six Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, in Jenin refugee camp earlier this month. Mahmoud Ashraf Gharbieh was sitting with his father when an Israeli drone fired at a group of civilians on the evening of 14 January.

“The square in Jenin refugee camp is a community gathering point and a bustling area where residents do their daily shopping, and Israeli forces targeted Palestinians, including Mahmoud, with deadly drone strikes when they posed no threat to the Israeli military,” Ayed Abu Eqtaish from DCIP said.

Since the beginning of the year, Israel has killed 34 Palestinians in the West Bank.

“Lesson” from Gaza

The mayor of Jenin, Mohammad Jarrar, said Israel’s attack on the camp is “by far the hardest and most troubling” in recent months.

Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz has indicated that the operation draws on lessons from Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Katz suggested the military’s aim is to remove armed resistance from the camp, and that “terrorism does not return to the camp after the operation is over – the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza.”

In December 2023, two months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Israeli military said it had operational control over northern Gaza areas, among them Beit Hanoun and Jabaliya.

In October 2024, the Israeli military reinvaded Jabaliya and its refugee camp and laid a complete siege to the area that lasted two months, during which it prevented the entry of aid, leading to warnings of an imminent famine.

Armed Palestinian resistance continues to emerge, perhaps even especially in neighborhoods that Israel devastates, regardless of how deadly or repressive Israel’s invasions of those areas may be. That is one lesson Israel consistently refuses to heed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even suggested that the Jenin invasion involved a policy shift and that Israel’s war goals have expanded.

“This is another step towards achieving the goal we set – strengthening security in Judea and Samaria,” he posted on X, referring to the name Israel uses for the West Bank in order to manufacture a pseudo-biblical claim to Palestinian land.

“We are acting systematically and resolutely against the Iranian axis wherever it extends its arms – in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Judea and Samaria – and with our hands still outstretched.”

Israel’s extreme-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich made a similar statement.

“After Gaza and Lebanon, we have now begun [to implement] a shift in our [West Bank] security policy and a campaign to eradicate terrorism in the region,” Smotrich said.

Smotrich, who leads the Religious Zionist party, said the new shift in policy was added to the war goals after his party demanded it, Haaretz reported.

Anwar Rajab, the spokesperson of the PA “security” forces, said Israel’s assault on Jenin is part of a broader series of Israeli occupation attacks on Palestinians. The hypocrisy was striking, considering Rajab had led the deadly PA assault on Jenin which the Israeli operation is now continuing.