One of the protagonists of Palestinian actor-director Mohammad Bakri’s 2002 documentary Jenin, Jenin – which deals with that year’s Israeli military attack on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank – is a young Palestinian girl with brown bangs and no-nonsense eyes.
Picking her way in her school uniform through the rubble of the onslaught that killed 52 Palestinians, she swears: “We will not give up. Yes, they destroyed everything but we will rebuild it.” She also warns: “We’ll keep on having children. They’ll become stronger and braver than ever.”
Fast forward 21 years, and Jenin is once again on the receiving end of Israel’s fetish for destruction.
On June 19, Israeli combat helicopters fired missiles into the camp, ostensibly as part of an arrest operation that ended up killing five Palestinians, including a 15-year-old girl named Sadeel Naghniyeh.
Then in early July, in the worst attack on the West Bank since 2002, the Israeli armed forces terrorised the inhabitants of Jenin for two days and killed at least 12 people, including children. The massive aerial and ground assault involved helicopter gunships, missiles, drones, armoured vehicles, bulldozers and more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers.
That is what happens, it seems, when Palestinians keep rebuilding – and keep existing. Indeed, Al Jazeera quoted 56-year-old camp resident Ahmed Abu Hweileh on the takeaway from the bloody escapade: “The message to the world and the occupation is that this camp will keep on going. They tried to destroy it and it came back up.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.