A Palestinian woman looks from inside her house at the spot where an IDF drone killed 13 Palestinians last week, in Nour Shams in the West Bank, on Oct. 23.GORAN TOMASEVIC/The Globe and Mail
Flipped and burned-out cars. Homes partially smashed to rubble. A scorch mark in the middle of the road where an air strike struck a crowd of people, killing gunmen but also innocent bystanders, including children.
These scenes are not from the Gaza Strip, where Israel and Hamas have been trading devastating blows throughout a 17-day-old war, but from the streets of a crowded refugee camp in the West Bank in the aftermath of an Israeli incursion last week.
The body count in Nour Shams – 14 dead Palestinians and many more injured, plus one dead Israeli sergeant and nine wounded soldiers – has fed fears that the ferocious violence in and around Gaza could spread here to the usually calmer West Bank.
“It’s a war here too,” said Fatimeh Magniyeh, a member of the political committee in the camp, which is home to 14,000 people. The 61-year-old said Israeli troops came so close to her house last week that she encountered them when she went outside to pick a tomato from her family’s property. “One of them said to me, ‘We’re here because either you kill us or we kill you.’”
The bloodshed in Nour Shams is the worst the West Bank has seen in more than two weeks of escalating violence that has left more than 90 Palestinians dead, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society. That has already made October the deadliest month in the occupied territory since the heights of the last intifada, more than two decades ago. And of course that’s in addition to the more than 5,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza by Israeli air strikes, according to the territory’s ministry of health, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel, which Israeli authorities said left more than 1,400 people dead.
Precisely what happened in Nour Shams between Wednesday night and Friday morning is clouded, like events in Gaza, by two irreconcilable narratives. Heavily politicized perspectives are backed by videos that, depending on who edited them, reveal either Israeli forces striking a blow against Hamas-aligned fighters or inflicting wanton violence on Palestinian civilians.
The Globe and Mail was among the first Western media organizations to reach Nour Shams since last week’s Israeli incursion, which saw chunks of the main road torn up by a bulldozer, making it onerous to get in or out of the camp. The entire West Bank has been under Israeli military occupation since Israel won a war against the combined armies of its Arab neighbours in 1967.
All but one of those who died in last week’s incursion were killed in what the Israeli military says was a drone strike against “an armed terrorist squad that endangered our forces in the area.” In a video taken from a drone and posted to the official X account of the Israel Defence Forces, two men can be seen walking down Manshiya Street, which is named after the neighbourhood in the Israeli port city of Jaffa that many elderly residents of Nour Shams called home before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which led to the creation of the Jewish state.
One of the men can be seen brandishing an assault rifle, before both disappear under a black tarp hung over the street to provide shade.
The video then jumps to footage of a black-clad man in another location firing an assault rifle. Then it cuts back to the black tarp, where three or four men – not visibly armed, but again wearing the all-black clothing favoured by Hamas members – seem to be chatting on the road. Then there’s an explosion that tears through the tarp and damages buildings on both sides of the road.
According to The Times of Israel, the air strike came after an Israeli border policeman was seriously wounded, and nine others slightly hurt, when someone in the camp threw an improvised explosive device at them. The seriously wounded border guard, Sergeant Maxim Razinkov, later died of his injuries. Hamas later announced that its members, along with those of its allied militant group Islamic Jihad, had taken part in “vicious fighting” against the Israeli military in Nour Shams and “appeared in the centre of the camp once the army withdrew.”
A photograph of the elder Iyad Tanuh, who was killed in a firefight with Israeli forces in 2004, lies in the rubble of his family home in Nour Shams, which was destroyed last week.GORAN TOMASEVIC/The Globe and Mail
When The Globe visited the scene Monday, there was a small crater in the middle of the street, and the concrete buildings on both sides were scarred by shrapnel. The road had been washed, but dark red blood stains were still visible on the broken pavement. Neighbours came pouring out of their houses to tell the stories of the 13 people – nine men and four boys – they say were killed there Thursday afternoon.
“It was like a horror movie,” said Fathi Hamed, whose 33-year-old son Mohammed – who lived on Manshiya Street and had stepped outside for a cigarette just before the blast – died eight days after he became a father for the first time. “We heard a big sound and came out of our homes to see all these people were dead. Whoever was standing on the street when the bomb fell is a martyr now.”
Thirteen-year-old Uday Abu el-Haija was one of four children between the ages of 11 and 15 who were playing soccer on the street when the bomb was dropped, said Usama Abu el-Haija, Uday’s cousin. Everyone knew there were Israeli troops inside the refugee camp Thursday, Usama explained, but the streets were the only place for kids to play in Nour Shams, which has no parks or leisure facilities. “I had to carry my cousin’s body,” he said numbly.
An Israeli military statement sent to The Globe said “over 12 terrorists were neutralized” in the operation in Nour Shams, a number that would appear to include the boys who died in the attack, if the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s death toll is accurate.
The residents of Manshiya Street said there were no gunmen on the street before the attack, though none could provide video evidence to contradict the edited materials published by Israel. A local councillor loudly accused a Globe reporting team of working for Israel’s Mossad spy agency by repeatedly asking for video or photographic proof of what had happened.
One case in which there is video evidence is the death of 16-year-old Taha Mahameed, who was shot in another part of the refugee camp hours after the attack on Manshiya Street. Taha is recorded – in a video taken by his sister Sima from her vantage point, looking out the window of the family’s home – creeping into the streets after dark and peering to his right. Three shots ring out, and Taha collapses to the ground as Sima screams.
“The boy was just standing there looking. He wasn’t aware of what was going on. They shot him in the leg and the stomach and in the head,” said Asya Mahameed, his stepmother, who witnessed the entire scene. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
Ms. Mahameed said Taha’s father, Ibrahim, tried to reach his son after he was shot, to drag him to safety, but was shot in the back and is now in critical condition in hospital. Local officials said Taha’s body lay bleeding in the street for hours before anyone could collect it.
Israel says its troops went into the refugee camp “to arrest wanted persons, thwart terrorist infrastructures and confiscate weapons.” Local residents say dozens of people were arrested and taken away.
Down a rubble-strewn alley off Manshiya Street is the partially destroyed house of Walla Abdullah, who said Israeli troops entered the building on Thursday evening and blew up the first floor with dynamite while she and her two daughters and two grandchildren were still upstairs. She said the Israelis had come looking to arrest her son, 17-year-old Iyad Tanuh, for unknown reasons. Iyad, she added, had the same name as a relative killed in 2004 in what she described as a “gunfight” with Israeli troops in Nour Shams.
Usama Abu El-Haija, centre, holds a picture of Uday Abu el-Haija who was killed by the Israeli Army in Nour Shams.GORAN TOMASEVIC/The Globe and Mail
A picture of the elder Mr. Tanuh – faded blue in the sun but hailing him as a “martyr” – lay intact amid the broken pieces of concrete that used to be the first floor of the home. Ms. Abdullah said it was “a miracle” the second floor hadn’t collapsed in the blast.
While some of those arrested in last week’s Israeli raids across the West Bank were known Hamas members, residents of Nour Shams said the soldiers also appeared to be targeting anyone who had shown public support for the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. The Israeli military said “dozens” of suspects were questioned, after which “over 20 wanted individuals suspected of terrorist activity” were apprehended.
“Anyone who put a ‘like’ on Facebook, or who wrote ‘may God protect them’ was arrested,” said Ahmad Shalabi, a 36-year-old construction worker who, like thousands of Palestinians, lost his job as a labourer in Israel when the country tightened security after the attacks. “We learned not to discuss politics.”
Other residents of the camp say they’re bewildered to have been caught in the middle of it all. “We were just inside our home and they started bulldozing,” said Subhi Sa’aydeh, a 31-year-old construction worker who huddled in a back room with his wife and their two infant children on Thursday while an Israeli bulldozer ripped off part of the front wall of their home as it made its way through the camp.
“Maybe they want to catch Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” Mr. Sa’aydeh said. “But why me?”