To the last drop of blood, and the last breath echoing in a body exhausted by months of affliction. A Qassamist resister carried his soul on his palm and a machine gun on his shoulder. He was with his friend in arms, idea, and homeland, confronting violent bombardment from an Israeli army unit. Bullets fired in two opposing lines, to fall. The resistance fighter is a martyr, and his colleague undertakes the rest of the mission, before joining his comrade, and their blood and weapons remain witnesses to the legend of the resistance, which only grows young to give birth to a more luminous one.
The scene of the two martyrs was only one of dozens, if not hundreds, of incidents and events that took place during the raging ten days of the Second Jabalia War, which Israeli newspapers described as the fiercest and most brutal since the seventh of last October.
Many people are surprised how, after eight months of war, Israel is still unable to capture even a single member of the resistance!
This clip provides a practical answer to this question: How will they capture men who continue to fight even if only a moment of their lives remain? pic.twitter.com/rW4Gz7Ympg– Nayef Bin Nahar (@binnahar85) May 18, 2024
The brigades of the Israeli forces are filling the space, and its brigades are filling the gaps, and the flames of its fire, with a flood of blood, open the way for the defeated attempts, one after another, in the face of a resistance that plays the impossible with tunes of lead and flame, and weaves the coffins of its enemies from the ground and blood.
The smell of death today replaces the whiffs of incense and roses traveling through the centuries, since the first smiler of creation, and Jabalia, one of the gardens of the ruddy sun, and the countryside of Palestine, and one of the rays of the lights of civilization and development.
Failed attempts
Since the ninth of October, two days after the flood, Jabalia began to receive its share of violent Israeli revenge by bombing the popular market in the city, killing 50 martyrs in minutes.
In Al-Fakhoura School, where the classrooms and blackboards were drawing the story of an academic struggle, the residents of Jabalia were facing another massacre in which 200 people were killed under a wave of devastating shells, before the count of massacres continued in the steadfast city.
During the past months, Israel tried more than once to penetrate the Jabalia camp, but failed every time. However, it returned a few days ago, trying to achieve what it had failed to do on previous occasions.
In the past ten days, it seemed to the Israeli forces, as they were trying to impose full control over the Jabalia camp, that their path was paved with many mines, as their tanks began to fall one after another under the fire of “Al-Yassin” and the flames of ambushes that the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades set up from time to time.
Just as tanks burn, and vehicles sink into the mud of Jabalia, Israeli soldiers are falling dead and wounded at a rate that is rapidly moving from the ones to the dozens, despite the scarcity of what Tel Aviv acknowledges of the victims of its soldiers, as the resistance confirms.
Days of fire, flame, and destruction, and buildings whose highs became low, the Israeli machine continues to crush, and the resistance continues to confront, and under the rubble the bodies of dozens of martyrs are still under the rubble, which also writes an endless story of the occupation’s crimes against the land and people in Jabalia and its environs, and in All over the sector.
According to what was announced by the Palestinian Civil Defense in northern Gaza, hundreds of martyrs were martyred as a result of the destruction of more than 300 homes, and perhaps what remained under the rubble that could not be recovered is close to or more than those who were pulled out from under the rubble.
As for losses in the occupation army, the resistance was able to destroy dozens of Israeli military vehicles, including a tank, a bulldozer, and a troop carrier, and its snipers continued to add new numbers to the list of Israeli dead, with victims increasing the level of anger and fury in Tel Aviv.
Due to the ferocity of the battle, both sides have become certain that it is a battle of life or death, especially for the Palestinians, for whom life means nothing more than dying with honor and steadfastness.
The fiercest battles of the flood
The Awan War began in Jabalia with the advance of the 98th Division, reinforced by the 7th Brigade and the 460th Armored Brigade, towards the camp, supported by teams of engineering battalions to build some holes, open gaps in the road, and work on discovering and sabotaging the tunnels. The goal was clear and specific, but the path to it was very difficult, and it was dispersed. The two brigades faced Palestinian bullets, and were later reinforced by the Paratroopers Brigade, which began bombing Jabalia in its first mission in this camp since the beginning of the flood.
Although the aforementioned brigades were able to enter the camp and penetrate deeply into it after they had failed to do so previously – and the resistance’s tactics may have played a role in that – these forces were forced to retreat every now and then under the bombardment of thunder bombs fired by the resistance, and under the fire of professional snipers in the Al-Qassam Brigades and others. From the Jabalia faction.
With the scale of the destruction that the Israeli army spread in Jabalia, in parallel with the scale of the failure, it has become clear – according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz – that the majority of soldiers believe that their leaders are pushing them into an absurd operation with no hope of victory.
The ferocity of the battles in Jabalia is increasing as a large number of homes have turned into booby-trapped snipers, exploding with those inside them when Israeli soldiers enter them in search of a tunnel opening or in an attempt to recover a body, treat an injured person, or take cover from a sniper’s flames, which again adds difficulty to the war that It is fought by soldiers trained in traditional warfare, especially since Hamas fighters have become more professional and experienced, according to what their enemy Israeli media reports.
Haaretz newspaper quoted occupation officers as saying that after 7 months of war, and 4 months after the army announced its dismantling of the Hamas brigades in the northern Gaza Strip, Hamas fighters have become more experienced.
One of the officers said, “We see that they have changed their tactics, and are focusing more on booby-trapping buildings, while many reserve soldiers are complaining about being called up under a conscription order that is not time-specific.”
Why and how does Jabalia survive?
Multiple factors contribute to Jabalia’s steadfastness, the strongest of which is the patience of the resistance, its increasing experience, and its consideration of Jabalia as a battle of death or life. In addition to this legendary factor, other extremely important factors are added, the most prominent of which are:
- The geographic configuration in Jabalia, with its long and complex tunnels, very close neighborhoods, and high population density, is what makes the Israeli movement there slow and faltering, especially for the Israeli army, which moves in adjacent military units, each trying to pull each other together, before the resistance with flames cuts their rope of support.
- The narrow distance of confrontation: due to the nature of the ground, which imposes a high level of contact on both sides, which also narrows the positioning options for the Israeli army, which finds itself confronted with artillery raining down from more than one house and street, which reflects the extent of the destruction caused by the occupation in Jabalia.
- Variation in military plans: While the resistance owns some of the parties to the initiative and has the ability to exploit the land and its resources, the entity faces intelligence blindness, according to the expression of political researcher Saeed Ziad, while the resistance was able to gain more than one opportunity by circumventing the Israeli units from more than one side. They were able to monitor the movements of tanks and vehicles, booby-trap buildings on their way, snip at their soldiers, and even cut off their supplies, as happened last Friday.
- The level of air support: Or as researcher Saeed Ziad calls it, “weak fire preparation,” as the Israeli soldiers relied on a scorched earth policy, and implemented a policy of “we will never enter it as long as they remain in it,” a policy that the Israeli army still adheres to, but as Ziad points out, “ Part of this fiery momentum was lost for several reasons, some of which were political, some technical, and some operational, which left him facing a major problem. The soldier was accustomed to having the ground leveled in front of him before he advanced, and was accustomed to not getting off his tank before the ground was completely cleared.
This situation made the Israeli priority find itself facing sometimes “friendly” and unfriendly fire, most of the time coming from above them, from between their hands and from below them.
Among these many indicators, Jabalia creates one of its never-ending historical stories since it shook hands with its mountains and the gardens of the sun, to be the beginning of history and the most wonderful news of steadfastness.
City of refuge and history
The Roman “Azalea” was the first city in that mountainous section near Gaza, then it settled after its name and history, and the days unleashed urbanization in the foothills and peaks of the city, which today hosts one of the most heinous crimes of the occupation and the most valiant of resistance.
For decades, that city has become one of the headlines of the Palestinian struggle and the history of its resistance to occupation, and for weeks it has been writing a present of blood and a future of liberation, as its people see.
Bulldozers and bullets destroyed farms and citrus fields, and ancient sycamore trees were destroyed. As for man, he is the hardest and strongest fortress, and the first target of occupation fire.
Because every child in Jabalia is a revolution, Jabalia witnessed fierce battles and waves of death emanating from the earth or descending from the sky, and Jabalia was associated with death, steadfastness, and perennial trees that cannot be melted by the sun or flames.
Since the Nakba of 1948, Jabalia has turned into a huge camp, and has witnessed events that were etched in the memory of days by martyrdom and blood, including the incident of the winter of 1950, which witnessed extreme cold and storms that led to the uprooting of all the tents and the displacement of the displaced families, starting from that intense summer, the beginning of random urbanization, through single-storey houses. One, and dwellings closer to nests than to homes suitable for humans.
Over time, the camp’s population increased from 35,000 displaced people at the end of the 1940s to about 116,000 in 2023, distributed over an area not exceeding 1.4 square kilometers.
During the past five decades, the camp has been subject to forced displacement and the destruction of homes, buildings, and rooms, under more than one name, and by more than one means of violence.
The cradle of derogations and the trap of soldiers
From the neighborhoods of Jabalia Camp, the spark of the stone intifada was launched on December 8, 1987. The stones were a record of Palestinian anger that reached its peak when an Israeli truck driver ran over a group of Palestinian workers, killing 4 of them and wounding others.
Time was filled with blood and flames in Jabalia, and the stone revolution lasted 6 years, ending with the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
This uprising continued until the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993, without bringing any peace to the camp, which remained a destination for visitors to the dark in the form of death-filled missiles, and whose glorious history recorded a large number of assassinations and massacres that permanently and repeatedly targeted the leaders of the resistance factions. A number of them took Jabaliya as a stable, a place, a field of jihad, and a martyrdom.
Among its most famous martyrs who left their immortal marks on its red memory:
- Mahmoud Judeh, one of the prominent leaders of the Islamic Jihad movement, was assassinated by an Israeli bombing in 2004.
- The martyrs Shadi Suhail Muhanna and Muhammad Ahmed Qandil from the leadership of the Al-Quds Brigades in 2005.
- A massacre in the home of Palestinian scholar Sheikh Nizar Rayyan, in which 16 people were killed, including Sheikh Nizar, his wives, and a number of his children, in 2009.
In addition to these, the camp experienced severe seasons of aggression, including what is known as the Days of Regret, in which nearly 100 Palestinians were martyred, and more than 600 others were displaced within 17 days of the year 2004.
The matter happened again in 2005 with another massacre that claimed the lives of 19 martyrs during a Hamas military parade. In 2014, 20 Palestinians were killed as a result of an Israeli bombing of an UNRWA school.
Between the massacres and blood, between the peaks full of magnificence and the foothills drenched with blood and flame, Jabalia continues to write its history, which was dug by the horseshoes of the invaders and conquerors, then the invaders and the resistors, and it still has the rest of what history should write in a geographical area that cannot be narrowed without surrender.
