Nour Shams and Jenin camps and one Via Dolorosa

A few days ago, I visited Nour Shams camp for Palestinian refugees in the Tulkarm area, and before that I visited Jenin camp, both of which are subjected to repeated Israeli invasions and oppression.

It became clear, in light of the continuing Israeli failure to stop the resistance or capture most of the resistors, that the occupation army was implementing collective punishments against the campers by barbarically destroying homes, institutions and shops, and massive bulldozing of roads and infrastructure, including water and electricity networks, in the hope of striking the popular incubator of the resistance. And weaken it.

In the midst of this oppression, the occupation army does not hesitate to kill unarmed civilians, even if they are children. Statistics indicate that the occupation army and settler colonialists have killed 243 Palestinian martyrs since the beginning of the year, the majority of whom were civilians and 39 of whom were children.

In Nour Shams camp, which, as its residents said, suffers from poor media coverage, I met the family of the martyr Abdul Rahman Abu Daghash, and his father told me that his martyr son was spending his days toiling to secure a living for his family, and he was sitting on the roof of his house with his brother and their wives when forces invaded. The occupation occupied the camp, and when he stood up quickly, a sniper from the occupation army shot him, and a bullet penetrated below his eye, destroying his brain and skull and taking his life.

Martyr Abdul Rahman is the father of three children, the eldest of whom is a girl in her first year of school. His son, who was present at the funeral home, is still in kindergarten. His third daughter is not more than two years old, and his wife is about to give birth to their fourth child.

Palestinian martyrs are not just numbers. Therefore, I mentioned all this information that I heard, and my heart breaks as I follow the movements (and expressions) of the child who lost his father, and has not yet understood the meaning that he, his two sisters, and his unborn brother have become orphans forever.

The second martyr whose life was claimed by the occupiers in Nour Shams civilian camp is another civilian, his name is Aseed Al-Jabaawi.

He happened to be in a place where the occupation snipers decided to kill another Palestinian as part of their collective punishment campaign against the Nour Shams camp. He was also a 21-year-old worker. He had taken the high school exam, obtained an average of 82%, and was accepted into the university, but was unable to enroll. Due to his limited financial situation, he decided to work to save enough money to cover his later studies expenses.

When I met his mother in the funeral home where the women of the camp gathered, many of whom were mothers, wives, and sisters of martyrs, I saw the sadness of the world in her facial expressions, and I suffered as I searched for words to support her in that difficult situation, because what could alleviate the pain of a mother who spent her life raising her son? He continued to grow every day until he became a young man, and in an instant, without reason or justification, the occupation cut the thread of his life, canceled his hopes and dreams, and rent his parents’ hearts with a wound that will never heal.

The crimes of the occupation in Tulkarm and Jenin, the Aqabat Jabr camp in Jericho, and everywhere in Palestine, are accompanied by thousands of terrorist attacks launched by settler colonialists, with the protection and participation of Netanyahu’s army, the result of which, as the United Nations OCHA report indicated, is that the settlers They have carried out 1,614 attacks on Palestinians since the beginning of this year (2023), and began a new process of ethnic cleansing that forced 1,100 Palestinians to abandon their homes, and led to the ethnic cleansing of twenty Palestinian population centers in the so-called Area C from the Ramallah areas to the Jordan Valley and Hebron.

This reminds us of the ethnic cleansing of 70% of the Palestinian people by Zionist terrorist gangs in 1948 by committing 52 massacres, the most famous of which is the Deir Yassin massacre.

The two martyrs, Abdul Rahman and Asid, in Nour Shams camp, like hundreds of martyrs in Jenin camp, and the camps of Aqabat Jabr, Dheisheh, Qalandia, Balata, the Gaza Strip and others, were refugees who were victims of that ethnic cleansing and those massacres, and here are the herds of Zionist terrorism chasing them and assassinating them in their refugee camps, where they suffer greatly. Because of its miserable conditions for 75 years, thousands of Palestinian prisoners are crowded into its prisons, including 1,264 male and four female prisoners who are subject to administrative detention without knowing, or their lawyers knowing, the reason for their arrest or the nature of the charges against them.

As for Netanyahu, he insisted, with his usual impudence, to deliver a new humiliating blow to international law, the United Nations, the normalizers, and those dreaming of negotiating with him when he raised on the UN platform the map of the new Middle East as he sees it in green, with Israel in its heart in blue, and within its borders the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan. The occupier, whose map and the statements of his ministers represented an explicit declaration of its annexation, was parallel to his repeated declaration of the death of the “two-state solution” and that there is no place for an independent Palestinian state.

Any normalization will not stop the struggle of the Palestinian people, nor will it affect their determination to gain freedom and overthrow the occupation and the racist apartheid system, but after all that has been said, is there any justification left for normalization with Israel and its rulers?