Key Developments (August 25 – 28)
A young Palestinian man from the Jenin area died on Friday, August 25, after he succumbed to wounds he sustained from Israeli gunfire in July. Izz al-Din Kanaan, 20, from the town of Jaba’ in Jenin, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper during the Israeli army’s massive two-day incursion into Jenin in early July that killed 14 people. According to reports, Kanaan was shot while he was on his way to donate blood, following pleas from local hospitals calling on residents to donate blood to help treat the wounded. A report by the UK-based The Times used CCTV footage captured the moment Kanaan was shot, verifying eyewitness accounts that he was not participating in any protests or armed clashes when he was killed. The Israeli army raid on Jenin in July was the largest-scale raid on the West Bank since the Second Intifada in 2002.
Israeli forces shot and injured five Palestinians during a raid on the Tulkarem refugee camp in the northwestern West Bank. The Israeli army raided the camp in the early morning hours of Sunday, August 27. The raid sparked clashes with residents, including members of the Tulkarem Brigade, a local armed resistance group in the camp. The brigade is composed of fighters from different factional affiliations like Fatah and Islamic Jihad, operating under the name of the Tulkarem Brigade. Following the raid, the Tulkarem Brigade released a statement that said, “our heroic forces concentrated a direct and heavy barrage of bullets and explosive devices in Tulkarem camp.” The group went on to say that they allegedly targeted and hit a sniper among the ranks of the Israeli forces. The Israeli army released no statement on the matter. The next morning, on Monday, August 28, Israeli forces conducted multiple raids across the West Bank, arresting at least 18 Palestinians. Armed confrontations were reported in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, with fighters responding to Israeli forces with live fire and explosives. In the Jenin district, Israeli forces opened fire at four Palestinians near the Dotan checkpoint outside of Ya’bad, Jenin, and detained three of the injured Palestinians. The fourth was transferred to a hospital in Jenin. The Israeli army said in a statement that it was carrying out “proactive activity” near Ya’bad and fired on the vehicle carrying the four Palestinians after they allegedly threw explosive devices towards an Israeli military post in the area. The arrest raids and shootings that took place over the weekend came amidst calls from the Fatah Revolutionary Council for Palestinians to engage in “unarmed resistance” against the Israeli occupation. Fatah is the ruling party of the PA, headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been in power since 2005.
Palestinians in the city of Ramallah gathered for a demonstration in the city center on Saturday, August 26, calling for the immediate release of prisoner Walid Daqqah from Israeli prison. Daqqah, a Palestinian writer and activist, has been in Israeli prison since 1986 and is currently battling an aggressive form of bone marrow cancer. Daqqah’s initial sentence was set to end this year, but the Israeli courts extended it by another two years over charges of smuggling phones into prison. On May 22, Daqqah was transferred to the intensive care unit at a hospital in Tel Aviv due to his deteriorating health, but just days later, he was transferred back to the Ramleh prison clinic, which has a well-documented history of medical neglect and human rights abuses. In recent months, Daqqah’s health has deteriorated, leading to a nationwide campaign to #FreeWalidDaqqah. The campaign has come on the heels of two high-profile deaths of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody — hunger-striking prisoner Khader Adnan died in the Ramleh prison clinic earlier this year in May, while Nasser Abu Hmeid, a Palestinian prisoner with cancer, died in the same clinic in December 2022.
Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians across the West Bank between Friday, August 25, and Monday the 28th, with attacks reported in the Nablus, Tubas, and Hebron areas. On Saturday dozens of Israeli settlers attacked the Palestinian town of Qusra in the Nablus district; the settlers were reportedly from the nearby Esh Kodesh settlement, which over the years has been a major source of violence for Qusra and the surrounding communities. In the Nablus village of Madama, located in the foothills below the illegal and notoriously violent Yitzhar settlement, Israeli settlers attacked residents and their homes on Sunday, under the protection of Israeli forces. According to local reports, the settlers attacked a number of homes in the village, while Israeli forces fired tear gas toward the Palestinians who had come out to defend their homes. A similar incident was reported in the Nablus-area village of Qaryut on Friday after Israeli settlers descended upon a local spring located on the village’s land; when the local residents confronted the settlers, Israeli soldiers fired tear gas at them. For years human rights groups have documented a clear policy of settler-state collusion, where the Israeli army works in tandem with violent Israeli settlers to target and attack Palesitnians.
Israeli Finance Minister and ultra-right nationalist Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday that Israel will not make concessions to the Palestinians as part of any normalization deal with Saudi Arabia. “We will not make any concessions with the Palestinians. It’s a fiction,” Smotrich, a far-right settler and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said in response to reported demands by the Biden administration to Israel, that the latter would have to make “significant concessions” if it wanted to strike a normalization deal with the Saudis. Smotrich, who holds powers over the Israeli Civil Administration, the body responsible for the planning and approval of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, staunchly opposes any creation of a Palestinian state. In his statements, Smotrich said that any Israeli discussions with Saudi Arabia on normalization “has nothing to do” with the West Bank. The U.S. has been working towards establishing normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia for weeks, with Biden hoping to strike up the deal as a major win for his administration ahead of next year’s elections. Saudi Arabia is one of the major powers in the region that has yet to officially establish diplomatic ties with Israel, though it has long been speculated that the two countries have engaged in some form of diplomacy under the table. Over the weekend, Libya erupted in protest after it was revealed that the country’s foreign minister met with her Israeli counterpart as part of discussions over potential normalization between the two countries. According to Israeli media, the U.S. was reportedly “furious” at Israel for allegedly leaking the news of the meeting, saying it would jeopardize future normalization agreements in Libya and the region. The widespread protests in Libya forced the country’s Prime Minister Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibeh to fire the foreign minister and pay a visit to the Palestinian embassy in Tripoli to reaffirm his commitment to the Palestinians and disavow any rumors of normalization.
In-depth
The Tulkarem Brigade (Katibat Tulkarem in Arabic) has existed in some form or the other since March 2022. It has largely been regarded as a relatively minor armed presence compared to the Jenin Brigade, and has received far less media attention than its Nabulsi counterpart, the Lions’ Den. Yet the Tulkarem Brigade has remained fairly resilient in the face of the continuous Israeli onslaught on the resistance group for the past year and a half.
After the assassination of its founder Saif Abu Libda, in April 2022 — a month after its formation — the Tulkarem Brigade expanded from what seemed like barely half a dozen members to an organization boasting 40 fighters by December. That was when Ziyad Nakhaleh, the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), formally announced that the Tulkarem Brigade was operating under the PIJ’s wing. But like its counterparts in Nablus, Jenin, and Jericho, the “Brigade” functioned more as an umbrella organization that also included the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the Qassam Brigades (the armed wings of Fatah and Hamas, respectively) in its fold. Following a string of deadly Israeli raids in Nablus and Jenin early in 2023, the Tulkarem “Rapid Response” Brigade was formed in March. It was led prominently by Amir Abu Khadija, who was assassinated during the first days of Ramadan in the same month. Under Abu Khadija, the Rapid Response group solidified the Tulkarem Brigade as an umbrella organization, now including members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (the “Rapid Response” title was a reference to the moniker of an Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade commander who was assassinated in 2002 during the Second Intifada — Raed al-Karmi).
All told, the Tulkarem Brigade has not launched many armed operations against Israeli targets compared to the resistance in Jenin, but it has kept up sufficient resistance (including the killing of an Israeli settler in May) to warrant a continuous Israeli counterinsurgency campaign against the group. Since March, Israel has launched regular raids into Tulkarem, Nour Shams refugee camp, and Tulkarem refugee camp. The month of August has witnessed an uptick in these types of raids. The Brigade fighters’ numbers have dwindled over recent months, and estimates as to the size of its membership vary widely, but hardly anyone believes it to surpass a few dozen fighters. While this might seem like a relatively insignificant force, Israel has remained committed to rooting it out no matter how small, fearing its potential to grow and become another incubator of resistance like Jenin. Moreover, Tulkarem, alongside Nablus and Jenin, has in the Palestinian popular imagination been considered part of the “triangle of resistance” or “triangle of fire” — the historic demarcation of the northern West Bank into an insurgent geographic entity that has been a haven of resistance against colonial rule as far back as the British Mandate and the nascent years of the Israeli state. Today, the Tulkarem Brigade is fighting to preserve that legacy, as the Israeli army seeks to snuff it out.
Important figures
- More than 230 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the year.
- Israel is currently imprisoning 5,100 Palestinian political prisoners in its jails, according to prisoners rights group Addameer.
- Israeli settlers have carried out close to 700 attacks on Palestinians and their property this year, a marked rise from the previous year, according to UN documentation
