Israel’s attacks in the occupied West Bank have killed both fighters and civilians, and left only destruction behind.
Tulkarem, occupied West Bank – “I saw him and I knelt over his body, not knowing what to do. All his face was bloody, full of shrapnel – and his leg was cut off.”
These are the words of Mohammad Saaida, whose 14-year-old son Mujahed was hit by an Israeli air strike while playing football with his friends in Nur Shams refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem on October 19.
Immediately after the attack, Israeli forces prevented ambulances from reaching the teenager as he fought for his life for more than an hour, according to the Saaida family and the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS). One ambulance was even hit by an Israeli army vehicle during the raid, according to the PRCS.
Four other boys were gravely injured in the attack and later died – along with eight other mostly young men.
Saaida – sitting with his wife, his two other sons and three daughters – recalled his deaf son Yousef running towards the family home carrying his younger brother’s body moments after the neighbourhood had been shaken by the loud explosion.
“I was standing outside near the corner where Mujahed was playing football with the other children when the missile was fired,” Saaida said. “Yousef ran towards me with Mujahed on his shoulder. He said the name of his brother – he was saying ‘Mujahed!’ I fell to my knees when I saw them. I knew what had happened.”
His brother’s name was one of the only words that Yousef, 25, had ever spoken – and one of the last his beloved sibling would ever hear.
In Arabic, Nur Shams loosely translates to “the light of the sun”. But there has only been darkness and grief for those living in the besieged refugee camp since October 7.
Such is the gravity of devastation and loss of life in Gaza that a preliminary judgement at the United Nations’ International Court of Justice in December found cause to investigate charges that Israel is committing genocide.
Life in Tulkarem’s two refugee camps – Nur Shams and Tulkarem, home to a densely packed population of more than 40,000 people – has been tragic since the outbreak of war.
A few homes over from the Saaidas lives Omar Zaghdad, whose 11-year-old son Yousef was killed in the same air attack as Mujahed during the Israeli military’s three-day siege of Nur Shams.
“I knew my son was playing football in the street with his friends when I heard a big explosion,” Zaghdad said. “When I went outside, I saw six little bodies… Everyone was screaming and crying over them as they bled. All of them were young boys – dying for no reason.”
“Yousef was bleeding for an hour and a half. I begged the soldiers to let them take him to the hospital and they refused,” he added. “There were no ambulances, no doctors, no nurses. They stopped anyone coming to save them.”
Light of the sun
Like the Saaida family, Zaghdad believes his son and the other boys would have survived the attack were it not for the army’s obstruction of emergency vehicles.
The Tulkarem Governate says at least 79 people have been killed by the Israeli military in the city since the outbreak of the war on Gaza.
Walking through the streets, some of the scenes of destruction were not dissimilar to those televised to the world from Gaza – where at least 60 percent of civilian infrastructure has been either damaged or flattened.
Here in Tulkarem, homes are regularly demolished by Israel as residents – mostly descendants of those displaced from their homes in the forced expulsions of 1948’s Nakba – continue their lives among the rubble.
In the nearby Tulkarem camp, the roads have been so badly damaged by Israeli forces that they have been rendered practically unusable.
Scores of families from the camps are known to have been displaced, and now shelter in tents, schools or mosques.
Locals say there have been at least a dozen air strikes in the camps since October 7 – along with multiple large-scale raids.
Each time, Israeli forces prevented ambulances and healthcare workers from reaching those injured, charities such as the PRCS say.
Locals also say the military is targeting and killing journalists covering the events.
media contacted the Israeli military for comment on these incidents but received no response by the time of publication. At the time of the attack, the Israeli military said the October 19 air strike hit a group of Palestinians “that posed a threat to the soldiers in the area”.
Just as in Jenin, Hebron and other regularly targeted West Bank cities, troops in Tulkarem seize homes and use them as military barracks and outposts as they lay siege to refugee neighbourhoods.
Residents believe Israel is waging war against the camps and is attempting to take advantage of the assault on Gaza to eradicate resistance groups in Tulkarem.
The camps are home to a group named the Tulkarem Brigade comprising fighters from the armed wings of Hamas, Fatah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad – who have, at least for now, put aside their competing political objectives and visions for a future Palestine.
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