Is Israel finally starting to dismantle "refugee camps" that have turned into terrorist strongholds? Let's hope so! ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, March 31, 2025

Is Israel finally starting to dismantle "refugee camps" that have turned into terrorist strongholds? Let's hope so!

Wall Street Journal reporters embedded with Israeli troops fighting in Jenin. The report points out that this operation, and similar ones throughout the territories, are qualitatively different from those of the past:

Israel has never tried anything like what it is doing now: clearing the camps entirely. It is part of Israel’s aggressive security posture following the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, actively working inside enemy territory to pre-empt new threats. It also seeks to remedy lessons learned from the war in Gaza, in which Israel’s decision to cede ground allowed Hamas to regroup multiple times in areas where it had already been defeated.
“When I started, there were a lot of operations for two or three days,” said an Israeli military officer stationed in the Jenin area for the past year. “We go inside, kill terrorists, find IEDs and shoot them, and we find weapons.
Once each operation is over, the militants regroup and rearm. Now, the officer said, “We’re trying to make sure they won’t have time to recover.”

The IDF is finding that mosques have been used as sniper positions and they pointed out a camera in a UNRWA school used to monitor their movements to remotely explode IEDs.

Some of the IDF's goals are obvious. As they had done in years past in Gaza camps, they widened narrow streets to enable safer access for soldiers, and they have used massive armored bulldozers to dig up and safely explode IEDs buried in the streets. (I've never seen an NGO or the UN say a negative word about Palestinian militants mining their own streets.)

Some Palestinians think the end game is to destroy the camps altogether:

Palestinian officials and residents worry that Israel has bigger ambitions, using its war against militants as a pretext to do away with the refugee camps completely.

“They are changing the nature and structure of the camp, they are dismantling it,” said Abu al-Rub at his office in Jenin, the city that includes the camp.

The question that no one in the West seems to ask is why are there still "refugee" camps in Palestinian territory 77 years after 1948? By definition, no Palestinian living within the borders of British Mandate Palestine can be a refugee. The most you can say is that they were internally displaced persons in 1948, and no legal scholar on the planet would ever say that the status of IDP's remains for generations.

Hammad Jamal gives the answer.

“These camps are symbolic of our right to return,” said Hammad Jamal, who leads a committee providing basic services to the camp. “As long as they exist, they are a daily reminder that this issue is still unresolved.”

Exactly. They use their own people's misery to be unwitting and unwilling symbols. The Palestinian Authority could have built inexpensive and dignified housing for every resident of every camp over the past twenty years, and the world would have gladly funded that. But the camps aren't needed for shelter - they are needed to keep the false issue of "right to return" alive. They are proof that the Palestinians do not want their own state in the territories for their people but they want to destroy Israel by keeping millions of people in "refugee" status, teaching them that they will "return" one day to places they never lived.

The families of the camp are relocating to Arab American University dorms. The main campus in Jenin has been closed for unclear reasons - their webpages and social media accounts are silent about any closure, and their Ramallah campus remains open. I couldn't find any photos of the dorms themselves but the campuses are beautiful: