When Israeli soldiers arrived at the modest house along an alleyway in Nur Shams camp on Wednesday night, they sent the women and four of the children out into the street, but kept hold of Malak Shihab.
They took the muzzle off their dog and it went straight up to the slight 10-year-old girl and sniffed her. Terrified, she pleaded to be with her mother, but the soldiers seemed to have just one phrase in accented Arabic: “Open the doors.”
The platoon pushed her up to each of the doors in her aunt’s house, according to Malak’s account, while they remained braced behind her ready to fire at whoever might be inside. One door wouldn’t open, and in her desperation to obey, the girl remembers hammering on it with her head.
“I don’t know why. I just wanted it to open,” she said on Saturday, accompanied by her parents as she retraced her actions on the first night of the Israeli incursion.
The door was finally forced open with a rifle butt which left a hole above the handle, but there was no one on the other side and the soldiers moved on.
Malak has experienced several army raids in her short life – but this was the first time she had been used as a human shield by soldiers. The Nur Shams camp on the eastern edge of the West Bank city of Tulkarm, is known for its militancy. It has its own armed force, the Nur Shams brigade, a mix of followers of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other radical groups.
The raids on the camp, and two other militant strongholds on the West Bank, Jenin and el Far’a camp, were a particularly ferocious iteration of a pattern that has repeated itself through the decades.
Each time, the soldiers come looking for militants and usually kill a few, leaving devastation and traumatised civilians in their wake before withdrawing. The mess is cleared up, and the fallen fighters are quickly replaced by younger militants.
“Mowing the grass” it is called, by certain Israeli generals and pundits, and the cynical phrase is repeated on the West Bank by Palestinians with added irony as they are well aware they are the “grass”.
In the course of last week’s incursion, the IDF cornered and killed the Nur Shams brigade’s 26-year-old leader, Mohamed Jaber, better known as Abu Shujaa, along with four of his fighters, who Israel said would otherwise have mounted attacks on Israelis. The five men died in a gunfight at a mosque 50 metres from the Shihabs’ house.
Abu Shujaa’s death represented a significant success for the IDF, in need of positive news after 10 months of bombing Gaza without finishing off Hamas. The force had learned the lessons of the 7 October attack by striking first, the military briefers said.
The damage done to Nur Shams was also dramatic. The camp was first established in 1952 for those displaced by Israel’s independence war, Palestine’s original Nakba, or disaster. In the al-Manshiya district at the heart of the camp most houses showed signs of damage, and the roads had been turned into rutted rubble-strewn tracks by IDF bulldozers, sent in first to eliminate any lurking roadside bombs.
Each time the troops have moved in, more children in Nur Shams have been exposed to violence. In the last raid, nine months ago, Malak fainted from the smoke from a blast outside the family home. So this time, her father, Mohammed, sent her, her mother and siblings to his sister’s house. But she was no safer there.
Asked how she felt three days later, Malak said: “Scared but also angry. I don’t know why I feel angry, but I just do.”
The IDF was approached for comment on the alleged use of a child as a shield during a house search. Similar allegations were made during an earlier incursion in Nur Shams in April, and were denied by the army.
By Friday, the soldiers had ended the latest raid and withdrawn and by Saturday the clear-up was well under way. The local bakery had reopened and was selling plastic bags of pitas or bread rolls.
The baker, who wanted to be referred to as Abu Jihad, recalled how the males from his family, young and old, had been rounded up in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and were taken with tied hands to a warehouse at one end of the camp. There they were interrogated about the whereabouts of the brigade and their arms caches, and kicked and punched in the process.
“There was no mercy, even on children. Why take a 13- or 14-year-old boy from his house and beat the shit out of him and break his phone?” the baker said, referring to his own son.
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On the road outside, the camp’s main thoroughfare, bulldozers were clearing the torn asphalt and other wreckage, while cement lorries and sewage trucks crawled along in both directions. The phone company had set up a kiosk under a parasol to oversee repairs to the lines.
The small alleys leading up the hill, the capillaries of Nur Shams, remained clotted by decades of damage and the immediate trauma of this latest, most destructive attack. Black tarpaulins suspended along their length, a shield from the electronic eyes of Israeli drones, reinforced the overall sense of gloom.
“I have lived through the six-day war (in 1967) and two intifadas but I never saw anything like this,” said Um Raed, a 72-year-old woman sitting outside on a street of wrecked and burnt houses. “What can we do? We are patient, but we are also so very tired.”
In an open doorway nearby, neighbours stared at a mat of dried blood, the start of a broad rust-red stripe leading into the interior of a house.
It was the blood of Ayed Abu al-Haija, a 63-year-old man with mental health problems who had trouble understanding the gravity of the threat around him. His granddaughter had seen him standing in his doorway from an upstairs window on Wednesday afternoon and urged him inside.
But then she heard a “weird noise” and when she went downstairs, Ayed was lying on his back with part of his skull missing. His nephew Haytham believed he had been hit by an Israeli sniper firing from a high window up the street. The Palestinian health ministry estimates that 20 Palestinians were killed in last week’s raids, but did not distinguish between civilians and militiamen.
In his life and death, Ayed Abu al-Haija had embodied a cycle of violence which has, in every turn, taken the region further from a peaceful settlement. He had been imprisoned and brutalised as a youth in the 1970s, and his mind never recovered. That left him vulnerable to a sniper’s bullet half a century later.
As far as Haytham was concerned, the blame travelled much further back, to the British, who had promised land to the Jews that was not theirs to give, and whose rule over Palestine from 1920 to 1948 ushered in the state of Israel.
“Our tragedy is your responsibility. This blood is on the hands of the Britons,” he warned.
Nur Shams shows its recurrent trauma like rings on a tree. The route from the Abu al-Haija house down to the main road was lined with pictures of martyred members of the Nur Shams Brigade, each brandishing a rifle. Photos of Abu Shujaa and the four other fighters killed last week are likely to be stuck up alongside them in the coming days.
At the end of the alley sat the camp’s most likely future. In a semi-circle of plastic chairs, surrounded by admiring men and boys, was a young member of the brigade, in cap and black T-shirt, his black M-16 assault rifle casually balanced on his lap. He could not have been older than 20 and was pale from sleeplessness and lack of sun, his white skin marred by bruising on his right side – left by debris from a grenade blast, he said. He was brimming with confidence.
“The resistance is stronger than ever,” he insisted. “Every time they do an incursion it gets stronger. That’s why every incursion is worse than the one before. Abu Shujaa is gone, mercy on his soul, but 100 fighters will take his place. How do you think the children here will grow up? They will take a gun and go to the battlefield.”
