(Reuters) – The city of Jenin, a Palestinian militant stronghold in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has been a hotbed of conflict between the Israeli military and Palestinians in recent years.
The Israeli military killed at least nine people on Wednesday in a major operation in the West Bank that involved Jenin and other cities, ratcheting up tensions as a war rages in Gaza between Palestinian militant group Hamas and Israel.
Here’s what you need to know about Jenin.
REFUGEE CAMP
Jenin is a small city in the hilly, far north of the West Bank, near the border with Israel, and contains a teeming, concrete and cinder-block refugee camp by the same name housing some 14,000 people.
They are descendants of Palestinians displaced when Israel was created in 1948, and most are impoverished and unemployed. This has generated die-hard hostility to Israel and support for Palestinian militant groups.
Jenin has one of the highest rates of unemployment and poverty among 19 refugee camps in the West Bank, according to UNRWA, a U.N. agency that delivers basic services to Palestinian refugees.
Alienated from mainstream Palestinian leadership and raised in an era of social media, a new generation of Palestinians has formed a clutch of militant groups in the West Bank such as the Jenin Brigade which includes fighters from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
Jenin produced many of the suicide bombers who spearheaded the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, between 2000 and 2005. To curb it, Israeli armoured forces carried out devastating raids in the city where militants had an array of light weapons and a growing arsenal of explosive devices.
The Israeli military regularly accuses militant groups of basing fighters within densely populated urban areas such as refugee camps that date back to 1948. Many of the militants live in the Jenin camp, often with their families.
Since March 2022, Jenin and outlying areas in the north of West Bank have drawn intensified Israeli raids after a spate of Palestinian street attacks.
Militant groups present in Jenin include the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad and Islamist Hamas.
FADING PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY
Jenin used to be a bastion of 88-year-old Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction, a rival of Hamas, which started the Oct. 7 war in Gaza with a cross-border raid on Israel which killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.
But Fatah has lost ground to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Their growing presence has arisen in part from inaction by the security forces of Abbas’ Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA), which exercises limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank and says Israel has undercut its credibility on the street.
But their strength also feeds on what critics say is the weakness of Abbas, whose formula of statehood negotiations with Israel collapsed in 2014, with no revival on the horizon, and perceived endemic incompetence and corruption within the PA.
Israel says the Jenin refugee camp is a hub for planning and preparing militant attacks as well as a safe haven for fighters funded by Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
BATTLEGROUND DURING 2000-2005 UPRISING
Jenin was the scene of some of the worst violence during the second Intifada, which began after the collapse of U.S.-backed peace talks in 2000 and mushroomed into an armed conflict between Israel and Palestinian militant groups.
In April 2002, Israel carried out a major armoured assault on the Jenin refugee camp, part of a wider West Bank operation which Israel said aimed to stop militant attacks including a spate of deadly suicide bombings.
A U.N. report issued in August 2002 said 52 Palestinians had been killed in Israel’s Jenin incursion, as many as half of them civilians, while Israel lost 23 soldiers there.
The report, which disputed a claim by then-Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat that 500 people had been killed in Jenin, faulted all combatants for putting civilians in harm’s way.
The report listed more Israeli than Palestinian abuses, especially Israel’s refusal to let humanitarian workers enter the camp. But it also said Palestinian fighters were lodged in civilian homes.
RENEWED VIOLENCE
Jenin has re-emerged as a flashpoint during the current wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence that has convulsed the West Bank for more than two years, with frequent deadly confrontations.
Violence in Jenin persisted in 2024.
In May Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians and wounded 25 others. A doctor and a teenager were among those killed during a major operation that involved dozens of vehicles.
In June, Israeli forces killed three Palestinians and wounded at least 13 others in a raid on Jenin.
This month, Israel said it killed two senior Hamas militants in an airstrike on their car in Jenin.
(Writing by Ahmed Elimam; Editing by Michael Georgy)
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