‘Jabalia is the birthplace of uprisings’: Israeli army withdraws, but the camp remains
Palestinians return to their homes following the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Jabalia area in the northern Gaza strip, June 2024
Tareq S Hajjaj writes in Mondoweiss on 1 June 2024:
After a bloody 3-week invasion, the Israeli army finally withdrew from central parts of the Jabalia refugee camp, remaining in central locations on the outskirts of Jabalia and Beit Lahia. It left devastation in its wake.
This is the second time that the army has launched a ground invasion of the camp and its neighboring town. At the start of the year, Israel had declared the end of the “intensive” phase of fighting in northern Gaza, withdrawing from Jabalia and other parts of the north after having supposedly “dismantled” Hamas’s military presence there. Almost five months later, the resistance had already regrouped in the north. By early May, the second invasion of Jabalia, the al-Zaytoun neighborhood, and the Tuffah area commenced, but three days in, the Israeli army withdrew from al-Tuffah and al-Zaytoun, east of Gaza City. Jabalia, however, was different.
Most reports kept repeating the same mantra: the fighting in Jabalia this time around was fiercer and more violent than the first invasion. It could be noticed in the marked rise of Israeli military casualties since the start of the Rafah invasion to the south. Resistance factions launched repeated salvos of rockets toward Israel, targeted Israeli tanks on the ground in Jabalia with mortar fire and RPGs, and shot at soldiers in sniping operations. Footage of those operations was broadcast online and on Aljazeera’s round-the-clock coverage.
But what was most significant about the Jabalia invasion was the news that the Qassam Brigades had captured more Israeli soldiers in an ambush on May 26.