fetal- It was not an easy night for the Athama family, last Friday, in their home in the eastern neighborhood of the city of Jenin, north of the West Bank. None of them could sleep all night because of the shooting and the bulldozing and destruction operations carried out by the occupation army around the house.
The eastern neighborhood has been under a tight siege since the start of the military operation on the city of Jenin at midnight last Wednesday, during which the occupation forces imposed a curfew and began extensive bulldozing and destruction of streets and infrastructure, which led to damage to water networks and power outages in the neighborhood and large parts of the city.
For 3 days, not a single drop of water reached the neighborhood, while residents exhausted all the water available in their homes. Despite the Civil Defense’s attempts to deliver quantities of mineral water, residents’ testimonies confirm the severe shortage in the quantities of water available in the entire neighborhood.
battlefield
Othaima told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that since the first day of the raid, the occupation forces entered the eastern neighborhood in large numbers, and bulldozers began destroying everything in it. The soldiers stormed many homes, and some families were detained in one room, while the rest of the homes were turned into military barracks.
The occupation forces seized a large number of citizens’ homes in the neighborhood, and deployed snipers on the roofs of the buildings overlooking it, while soldiers moved from one house to another by creating holes in their walls.
According to Othma, some people resorted to the bathrooms to avoid the army’s bullets and snipers. The citizen confirms that they have been living in the middle of a war zone for 4 days and until now they cannot predict when the occupation army will end its operations.
The occupation forces had turned the Khalid bin al-Walid Mosque into a military point, bulldozed its surroundings, smashed its windows, and destroyed the streets leading to it. Residents say that the mosque is located on a high hill that reveals the depth of the neighborhood, which prompted the occupation forces to position themselves there and deploy snipers inside it.
Last night, an Israeli sniper fired 9 bullets at an elderly Palestinian man (82 years old) who was walking in the street opposite the mosque, killing him instantly.
Exodus through the mountains
Through rough mountain roads, a number of children, no older than 5 years old, were fleeing their homes with their families, in an attempt to reach a safe area.
“We walked for an hour, climbing the mountains. They didn’t allow us to go to the city center. They said that leaving the neighborhood was forbidden, so we took these roads. We had children with us asking for water, and we couldn’t provide it for them. We walked in the mountains of Suweitat until we reached the street, hoping to find someone to take us,” said Abdul Abu Riya, one of the displaced.
He added that they can endure hunger, but people cannot live without water, especially with children, and that they live in fear and anxiety, and food is running out in homes. He continued, “Children are crying for food and water, some families need milk for their children, except for diabetics and hypertensive patients, all of them cannot move, the army threatened us and told us that our fate would be death if we did not abandon what it called terrorism.”
According to the residents of the neighborhood, what the occupation army is doing is a punishment for the residents and not for the resistance fighters who are not in their homes but in the field, and it is destroying their property and starving and terrorizing them as civilians. The occupation army hung leaflets on the walls of some of the homes from which it withdrew, saying, “Do not allow the criminals to control your future, for your future is in your hands.”
Yesterday, testimonies were spread by citizens who were forcibly displaced from their homes by the occupation, stating that the soldiers told them that they would not be able to return before 10 days, which raised questions among them about the duration of the military operation.
Despite the release of some video clips, Saturday morning, documenting the extent of the great destruction in the eastern neighborhood, the trapped residents confirm that the situation on the ground is “more catastrophic” and that the number of homes that have become uninhabitable is large.
For several months, the occupation has intensified its raids on the eastern neighborhood of Jenin, in parallel with the repeated raids on its camp, claiming that resistance fighters are active there.
Water cut off punishment
Yesterday, campaigns were registered in the villages of Jenin governorate to collect donations of food parcels, cartons of mineral water and bread, to send to the residents of the city and the camp. However, these campaigns clashed with the occupation preventing the residents from entering the eastern neighborhood and the neighborhoods of Al-Damj, Al-Fallujah and Al-Hawashin in the camp.
On the opposite side of the neighborhood, the occupation forces have besieged Jenin Governmental Hospital, and for the fourth consecutive day, military vehicles stationed in front of its main entrances are preventing entry and exit except after a thorough search.
This only hospital, which serves nearly 400,000 citizens in Jenin Governorate, suffers from a water outage after the reserve tanks ran out. Its management resorted to using quantities of water – coordinated with the Civil Defense – and transporting them daily to the kidney department and its water tanks.
The hospital director, Dr. Wissam Bakr, said that the Civil Defense had transported 300 cups of water to the hospital over the past three days, at a rate of 100 cups per day.
The biggest dilemma, according to Bakr, is the hospital’s dialysis department, which needs large amounts of water every day. They are trying to keep the department operating to serve its patients in the governorate, “but if the siege continues for additional days, we may be forced to stop dialysis in the hospital.”
Today, the occupation forces prevented the civil defense water tankers from transporting water to the government hospital tanks. In the morning, the Jenin Battalion and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the Jenin camp announced that their fighters “encountered a number of occupation soldiers in a tight ambush, which led to a number of deaths and injuries among them.”
Immediately, the occupation sent reinforcements from the Jalameh checkpoint to the entrances of the eastern neighborhood and the old town, and the vicinity of the hospital in addition to the camp, while the clashes intensified, and the sound of gunfire was heard, and the citizens’ calls and appeals continued to spare them from the occupation’s revenge.