The Jenin refugee camp has become a hotbed of militancy as the power of the Palestinian Authority fades and Israeli forces step up operations in the West Bank.
JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — It is just after midnight. Young men gear up in black shirts and black face masks, tie ribbons with militant group insignia around their foreheads, and parade their weapons through the narrow streets.
Abbas’s strategy of lobbying the United Nations to condemn the Israeli occupation — instead of taking up arms against it — has long been dismissed here. Few said they would be paying attention to his speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Friday. Fifty-six percent of Palestinians support armed attacks against Israelis, and the same proportion expect Jenin’s armed resistance to spread throughout the West Bank, according to aAbbas’s Palestinian Authority , founded in 1993 as a five-year interim government to usher in the establishment of a Palestinian state, will turn 30 next year. It has not held elections since 2006, and an independent Palestine is.
The gun entered the criminal scene during the second intifada in the early 2000s and has since made its way to the West Bank, where it is assembled with spare car parts, scrap metal and other makeshift materials in workshops across the region’s ungoverned areas in the far north and far south. A Carlo can cost less than $1,000 .
With the gun market booming, the near-nightly gunfights between Jenin’s young militants and Israeli soldiers have turned increasingly lethal.Earlier this month, hundreds of young men, carrying guns and explosives, turned out to protest the demolition of the home of Raed Hazem, who fatally shot three Israelis at a Tel Aviv bar in the spring before being killed by security forces.
In recent years, the gangs have rebranded themselves as “battalions.” The “Jenin Battalion” saw recruiting momentum after a 2021with family ties to Jenin, and has served as a model for similar “battalions” in Nablus, Tulkarm, Bethlehem and other West Bank towns, Eisin said.