Last month, I met the commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades — part of the broader Tulkarem Brigade — in an alley in Tulkarem refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank. Ghaith Radwan greeted me with a slight smile and confident eyes, which did little to hide his evident caution. He and a number of resistance fighters in Tulkarem refugee camp welcomed me and the group of journalists for a brief interview to talk about the one-year anniversary of October 7. The young fighter, with his rifle in his lap, told us about why he chose to fight the Israeli army.
Ghaith, only 27 years old, told us about how he joined the ranks of the resistance in Tulkarem refugee camp over the past year. He talked about how, after October 7, his dream of traveling freely throughout Palestine without checkpoints was no longer a faint hope.
“Everyone has the ambition to be free,” he said. “To walk around like in any independent country without finding a PA checkpoint a few meters ahead and an Israeli checkpoint after that, and beyond that, settlers attacking.”
“We are living inside a prison,” he explained.
Not long after we met, on Thursday, October 3, Ghaith was one among 20 Palestinians who were killed by an Israeli airstrike on a residential building in the middle of the camp. In addition to Ghaith, Zahi Oufi, commander of the Hamas-aligned Qassam Brigades in the camp, was also killed.
Along with the fighters, an entire family on the second floor of the building was wiped out, including the mother, father, two children, and two grandparents. Ghaith and his comrades had been sitting in a popular café on the building’s ground floor when an Israeli fighter jet dropped a bomb on top of the building, marking the first time since the Second Intifada that such an aircraft had been deployed in the West Bank.
The stories of Ghaith and many of his comrades have been cut short over the past several months ever since the Israeli army launched a large-scale military operation in the northern West Bank called “Operation Summer Camps,” which lasted several weeks.