NGO Translator: “The Worst Ten Days of My Life in Jenin” | EUROtoday

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“It was the worst ten days of my life. We were stuck in the house. No running water, no food, no electricity. No communication with anyone. In the dark, huddled against the wall every time the rockets fired by drones and the shells of tanks fell so close that plaster fell from the ceiling, the chandelier swayed and the walls seemed to shake.”

His voice nonetheless shaking, Ismail Hossam recounts the key Israeli navy operation that ended Friday morning within the troubled Jenin refugee camp within the northern West Bank. “The soldiers left this morning. Rescue workers arrived immediately, they are clearing away the rubble and connecting the electricity. The Internet is back.” Ismail says he lastly walked the streets of the refugee camp. “They destroyed entire facades of buildings, devastated dozens of shops, and tore up the streets with bulldozers.”

In the eyes of many Palestinians, Jenin is town that symbolizes resistance towards Israel. Among the slender streets of its refugee camp, which at the moment hosts over 25,000 individuals, the presence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad is so sturdy that this cluster of homes perched on a hill has earned the nickname “Little Gaza of the West Bank.” For the Israeli authorities, it has all the time been a terrorist hotbed, the epicenter from which lots of the kamikaze assaults towards Israel have began up to now and from which the perpetrators of the assaults nonetheless come. The Israelis have focused it dozens of instances.

Ismail works as a translator, for non-governmental organizations, and for a number of months for the Palestinian Government. In May he was critically hit within the chest by an Israeli sniper whereas he was going to work. During one of many many Israeli incursions. He was hospitalized in Nablus, the ache of the wound nonetheless provides him no respite. He wears small spherical glasses, has a mild method, a tender tone of voice. Ismail is an aged younger man. His 25 years are too younger to recollect the good siege of Jenin in 2003 and the destruction of the camp. But they’re sufficient to have seen along with his personal eyes so many Israeli operations to motive with a cynicism and resignation unjust for a younger man of his age.

“It all started ten days ago,” he says. “They arrived around 11 p.m. The first few days the firefights were particularly violent. Then the resistance fire subsided. By the third day we no longer had running water or electricity. We were not prepared for an operation like that. We never thought it would be such a long siege. We had not stocked up. The food in the refrigerator quickly went bad.”