Israel’s Military Leaders Fueled a New Wave of Terror Attacks, and They Knew It

By Gideon Levy

They knew that if they raided the center of the camp it would result in great bloodshed. The Israel Defense Forces and the Police Special Anti-Terror Unit can no longer invade this brave, determined camp without spilling a lot of blood. They also knew that no “huge terrorist attack inside Israel” was thwarted by the operation, as the IDF mouthpiece also known as Yedioth Ahronoth proclaimed Friday. They invaded the camp in the morning, while the children were on their way to school—fortunately, at least the UNRWA schools were on strike that day—just because they could.

WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? That the killing of 146 Palestinians in the West Bank in 2022 (according to B’Tselem), most of them noncombatants, would be meekly accepted? That the killing of about 30 people in the month of January would pass quietly?

That residents of the Shufat refugee camp, who are maltreated every day and every night by police and Border Police officers who invade their homes in strange operations, from tax raids to nighttime arrests, destroying their property and their dignity, will shower their abusers with rice? That someone whose grandfather was murdered by a settler and whose 17-year-old friend was killed last week by the Border Police was not liable to commit an attack?

And what were the commanders of the Jan. 26 insane operation in the Jenin refugee camp thinking? What was the point of the operation, aside from a demonstration of power? To suppress terrorism? It only fanned the flames.

“Had Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, chief of Central Command, known that this would be the result, he might not have approved it,” journalist Alon Ben-David said on Channel 13 News. And what was the general thinking, that there was another option? After all, everyone knew the Jenin operation would set off a dangerous wave of violence. It’s not possible to invade the Jenin refugee camp without a massacre, I wrote here after my visit in mid-January, and no massacre in the camp could pass quietly.

The military leaders may have thought they were thwarting terrorist attacks, but they fueled a new wave of attacks, and they knew it. It follows, then, that not only the blood of the dead in Jenin, but also in Jerusalem, indirectly, is on the hands of those who carried out the operation in the Jenin camp.

Once again, Israel is the one that started it. There is no other way to describe the chain of events. In the Jenin refugee camp today are dozens of young gunmen who are willing to sacrifice their lives. Killing a few of them does not diminish the determination of the rest. Jenin is a special refugee camp, whose equal in fighting spirit can only be found today in the Gaza Strip. The camp’s militancy flour-

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