Jenin Refugee Camp Residents Thought IDF Troops Had Left. The Result: Two Teens Shot Dead
Basel holds a photo of his late brother Mohammed. An army that sees teenagers as a threat, to the point of justifying the firing of three bullets at a 14-year-old, is a cowardly one. Or one lacking all restraint. Credit: Alex Levac
A few dozen Palestinians who thought the Israeli army had withdrawn from their refugee camp tried to return to their destroyed homes to retrieve a few belongings. Then two army jeeps showed up and soldiers opened fire
In the WhatsApp group of the Jenin refugee camp on Monday, September 8, a rumor spread that the army had finally departed. The Israel Defense Forces had first launched a raid there on January 25 and since then has evicted all the camp's residents and destroyed most of their homes. Now, for more than half a year, Jenin has been a ghost camp.
About 21,000 people, most of them young, third- and fourth- generation refugees, have been expelled under the cover of the almost two year-long war in the Gaza Strip and are now living as refugees. They are sheltering with relatives in the Jenin area, with no idea as to whether they will ever be allowed to return to their own homes – if ever. The children are not attending school, there are no longer any sources of income and no one is talking about the fate and bleak future of these people, in the shadow of the even greater horrors in Gaza. A similar fate has befallen inhabitants of two other camps on the West Bank, in the Tulkarm and nearby Nur Shams camps. Little remains of either of them.
Abdulkarim Sadi, the local field researcher on behalf of Israel's B'Tselem human rights organization, estimates that in the Jenin camp alone, in addition to all the damage to infrastructure including roads, the water system, sewage and electricity, approximately 8,000 homes have been totally destroyed and about 1,000 partially ruined since late January. There are no confirmed figures because no one has been allowed to enter the camp since then.
In this context it is easy to understand what happened that Monday – how easily the rumor that the soldiers had left the camp spread, and how easily hope was reignited: hope that quickly became not only false but also fatal. Two adolescents were shot and killed and two other young people are still in intensive care at the hospital in the city Jenin, after a fruitless attempt to return home that day to see what remained of the camp and to try to retrieve a mattress, a television set or a photo album.
Images of residents seeking to return to the ruins of their homes to rescue some meager belongings cannot but bring to mind the early 1950s, when beleaguered Palestinian refugees tried to return to their homes in Israel to recover a sack of flour that had been left behind and the soldiers of the then-young IDF ambushed them and shot at them mercilessly. "Infiltrators" is what those people were called back then, a term that almost seems parallel to the epithet of "terrorists" today. And they all have shared the same fate. Indeed, the 1996 book by historian Benny Morris, "Israel's Border Wars 1949-1956," deals among other things with the cruelty experienced by those forced to "infiltrate" into Israel after they were expelled or had fled, to recover a few meager items left behind all those decades ago.
A week after the shooting of people who had merely returned to their homes for a brief time, we made our way this past Tuesday to the city of Jenin, in order to hear the story of one of the victims of the merciless shooting of children and teens in the local refugee camp, almost like that in Gaza. The army is the same army and the merciless shooting at youngsters is the same merciless shooting. Only the scope is different, at least for now.
Up on the third floor of a multistory building, in a relatively well-maintained apartment with a living room with wood-panelled walls, lives the bereaved Alwana family. Propped up there is an enormous picture of their son – young Mohammed, all of 14, who was killed – seemingly looking out into the room. In this death poster he has an innocent face and the trace of a smile, sporting an Adidas shirt and blue sweatpants. In an even larger poster that was hanging outside the house during the four days of mourning, he is seen wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words "Paris Time"; this was a child who had never been to Paris, nor will he ever be there. His brother, his mother and two of his uncles tell us about his life that had ended suddenly a week earlier. On the day of our visit his father was out running errands in Qalqilyah, where two other youngsters were killed, exactly while we visited his home in Jenin.
Mohammed was a ninth grader at a school in the city of Jenin. He was shot and killed on the first day of the new school year, which began late in the Palestinian Authority because of a strike by teachers who had not received their pay. His mother, Jihan, in her black clothing, is 35; her husband Sari, 42, works for the Palestinian Education Ministry in the town of Qabatiyah; until their tragedy they were the parents of three children.
On the fatal day, Mohammad woke up earlier than usual, at 6:30 in the morning, apparently because he was excited about entering ninth grade. Basel, his older brother, 15, slept in the same room with him and he too woke early, before his first day in 10th grade. Together they ate breakfast and rode their bikes to school.
Basel came home first; it had been a short day, focusing on getting the pupils oriented. Mohammed went first into town to buy ajilda – a chamois cloth to clean the car, as he had been asked to do. When he arrived home, he told his mother not to prepare lunch; he said he would ride his bike to bring back a grilled chicken. Together with their younger brother, Rimar, 4, who had come home from kindergarten, they all ate together. Later in the afternoon a friend of Mohammed's suggested that they celebrate the first day of school at the shawarma stand outside the entrance to the refugee camp, not far from the Alwanas' home. The two friends rode their bikes there and bought a shawarma when suddenly Mohammed noticed several dozen people heading toward the entrance to the abandoned and lifeless camp, not far from the local government hospital, in a place where, before the war in Gaza, there stood a sculpture of a horse made of ruined ambulance parts, in memory of the local residents killed during Operation Defensive Shield, in 2002. The monument was smashed by the IDF at the start of the current war, along with every other one in every public square in Jenin.
Mohammed asked his friend to keep his shawarma for him because he wanted to get closer to the people walking toward the camp, to see where they were going. He was several meters away from them, but as he drew a bit closer to the group, suddenly two IDF jeeps hurtled into view, one from inside the camp and the other from outside. Eyewitnesses – drivers who were standing outside the hospital – told field researcher Sadi later that the army vehicles sped out and stunned the group, who believed there were no troops in the vicinity. Then eight soldiers leapt out and immediately opened fire at the local people, with no prior warning, straight into the upper parts of the bodies of two boys, one of them Mohammed, and two other youths. Sadi is convinced the soldiers could see very clearly that they were shooting at youngsters.
The soldiers fired three bullets at Mohammed: one bullet at his chest, one bullet at his left arm that penetrated his armpit, and one bullet that entered his abdomen and exited through his back. They also shot and killed another boy of his age, Islam Majarmi, a refugee camp resident who had come along with his parents who are now living in exile at the home of relatives in Qabatiyah, to see their home, or what remains of it; Islam took a single bullet to his chest. Two other youths were shot and seriously wounded. Sadi estimates that the soldiers fired eight to 10 bullets at the group.
The IDF Spokesman informed Haaretz this week that, "During the course of IDF activity on Monday, September 8, a gathering of a number of suspects was identified in an area under an order prohibiting entry into it. The suspects approached in the direction of the force and constituted a threat to it. The troops embarked on the procedure for arresting a suspect, which includes opening fire to eliminate the threat. The details of the incident are being investigated."
As noted, according to the testimonies gathered by B'Tselem's Sadi, the shooting began immediately, with no warning. As to the extent of the threat posed by two unarmed boys of 14 to an armed and armored military force, it is of course possible to argue. An army that sees them as a threat, to the point of justifying the firing of three bullets at the upper body of a 14-year-old boy, is a cowardly army. Or a savage army lacking all restraint. Does a no-entry order mean that anyone even drawing near will be shot to death on sight?
At the time of the incident, the mother Jihan was out shopping, together with her mother, in the family car. A friend had phoned her husband and told him Mohammed had been wounded and had been taken to the local hospital. So as not to worry his wife too much, Sari called his wife and asked her to return home because he needed the car. She immediately had a bad feeling. En route home, a relative phoned her and asked what had happened to Mohammed and her foreboding increased. She phoned Sari: "What's happened to Mohammed? Has he been hurt?" He said their son had had a fall and was at home. But by the time Jihan arrived at home, everyone already knew Mohammed was dead.
Sari drove off to the hospital joining Basel, who had ridden his bike there. They were both then shown the youth's body, which was buried that same night in the city's cemetery.
For its part, the Majarmi family asked to bury their son Islam at the cemetery on the border of the refugee camp, and after coordination with the army they were given permission to do so. We have visited that cemetery on a number of occasions; by now it is probably bursting with graves.
Mohammed and Islam had never met; they never knew each other.