Israeli campaign leaves West Bank camp in ruins

Over more than 300 days, Israel has deployed soldiers, tanks, helicopter gunships and even airstrikes in Jenin and other cities, leaving a trail of destruction that has triggered what aid groups call the most severe bout of Palestinian displacement in the West Bank — more than 40,000 people initially, now down to about 32,000 — since Israel occupied the region in 1967. In a report released Nov. 20, Human Rights Watch alleged Israeli forces’ actions amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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Coming under particular Israeli ire are the refugee camps in the area, set up as tent encampments for Palestinians displaced by Israel's creation in 1948 but which hardened over the decades into slum neighborhoods Israel considers nodes of militancy.

Three of them — Jenin, Tulkarm and Nour Shams camps — have been depopulated and all but occupied by the Israeli military for roughly nine months, with soldiers systemically demolishing homes.

Of those, the Jenin camp, which holds legendary status among Palestinians for a 10-day battle between militants and Israeli forces in 2002, has fared the worst, incurring destruction that many people here compare to Gaza.

For Palestinians who saw the camp and surrounding city of Jenin as a symbol for resistance against occupation, it has come to exemplify a sense of despair, and weariness with a fight that has never seemed so fruitless in bringing about a Palestinian state.

Sheta, the theater general manager, had staged works with political themes — until he was detained — without charge, he says — from December 2023 to March this year.

The Freedom Theater became famous staging adaptations of works such as George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun,” a tragic novel about three men fleeing refugee camps.

Though the theater has regrouped elsewhere, it’s not the same. “We consider the theater arrested by the Israel army, because we can’t be in the camp,” he said. “Our soul is there.”

Using satellite data from October, the United Nations estimates that more than half of the camp’s buildings — almost 700 structures — are destroyed or damaged, with entire residential blocks razed or blown up. Several streets have been ripped apart or blocked by the 29 berms erected by Israeli forces; many other streets were widened with bulldozers to create corridors aimed at facilitating future military operations.