The Siege of Jenin

On August 28th, the Israeli military began its largest concerted assault on the occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada, in what Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described as “an attack to prevent terror.” Accompanied by tanks and bulldozers, and backed up by airstrikes, hundreds of troops entered Palestinian cities and towns across the region, including Tulkarem, Tubas, the Al-Faraa refugee camp, and Jenin, which was a central focus of the incursion. Over the next nine days, Israeli soldiers killed 36 Palestinians in the northern West Bank, eight of them children, and injured another 145; 21 of those killed were from Jenin. Under the guise of “destroying terrorist infrastructure,” as one Israeli military official put it, Israel destroyed an estimated 70% of the city’s critical infrastructure, including water, sewage, and electricity lines, as well as commercial buildings, medical facilities, and residential areas.

Wahaj Bani Moufleh, a 24-year-old photographer with the Palestinian–Israeli visual journalism collective ActiveStills, documented the Israeli invasion of Jenin and its environs. Moufleh is from Beita, a town south of Nablus, where residents have held weekly protests since 2021 to oppose the construction of an Israeli outpost on their land. It was at one such protest last Friday that Israeli forces shot and killed 26-year-old American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi; soldiers have killed 17 Palestinians at protests in Beita in the past few years, including Moufleh’s cousin, Zakaria Hamayel, in 2021. Moufleh’s first published photograph was of his cousin’s body in the hospital. “This camera is the weapon with which I have fought the occupation ever since then,” he told Jewish Currents.

In Jenin, Moufleh described seeing “the army storming and destroying the city.” In the ten-day period before Israel withdrew troops, soldiers drove numerous Palestinian families out of their homes at gunpoint—in some cases unleashing attack dogs to expel them “to places unknown, to a fate unknown,” in the words of the writer Mariam Barghouti, who reported from Jenin during the invasion. “The people in the camp were already refugees from 1948, and now they had to evacuate again,” Moufleh said. “It was like a new Nakba.” Those who stayed found themselves trapped in their homes without water or electricity. Outside, bulldozers and other military vehicles rolled through the streets, and snipers roamed, shooting live ammunition at passersby—including the 83-year-old Tawfiq Qandeel, who ventured outside to obtain food, only to be gunned down and, later, run over by an armored truck. Meanwhile, airstrikes—once rare in the West Bank but increasingly common since October 7th—rained down from above, damaging large swaths of the city.

The assault, which Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz has described as “a war in all relevant senses,” represented the escalation of already severe violence in the occupied West Bank, where soldiers and settlers have killed more than 650 Palestinians, including nearly 150 children, since October 7th. And despite Israeli forces’ withdrawal from Jenin on Friday, there is every indication that the attacks will continue. “The overall operation in Jenin is not over; it is only a pause,” a military source affirmed to CNN. Israeli media has reported that the army is planning long-term military action across the West Bank, with intentions to classify the entire region as a “combat zone.” “We are mowing the lawn, [but] the moment will also come when we will pull out the roots,” Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told reporters on September 4th. Katz has insisted that Israel must take its approach to dealing “with terror infrastructure in Gaza” as a model for its attacks in the West Bank—a shift that is already evident in Israel’s use of airstrikes, and in new restrictions on West Bank Palestinians’ freedom of movement and the cancellation of work permits as a tactic to devastate the local economy. According to Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, these developments suggest a “risk of the genocide leaking into the West Bank.”

Moufleh’s photographs catalog the Israeli incursion, the sheer scale of destruction of homes and infrastructure, and the grief the city is left with in the aftermath of the army’s rampage, pointing to the immense human costs of Israel’s escalating war on Palestinians.

— Maya Rosen