West Bank resistance takes stock after long battle in the camps, with Jon Elmer

I'm going to move to the West Bank and give you just a little update on the West Bank briefly. Um we're going to show Maxwell's maps here. Um maps uh showing the West Bank. The West Bank map is uh it's a very to do a political map of the West Bank probably is necessary to see the way the territory's divided up. Right there looks like it's a full uh contiguous piece of territory, but as we know it's not. It's cut all into little islands. Uh and and so but for the simplicity of just seeing the directions that we're going, we're going to move up to the north. There you can see the north um the triangle of terror the British used to call it because back in the 1930s this was the um the well for all along even World War I going back to World War I the resistance in Jenin uh was the anchor, but uh when the Great Arab Revolt came around in 1936 the year before um Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam was killed uh with his Black Hand fighters in the hills around Jenin and his name is the namesake for the resistance movements. Actually at some point all of the main resistance factions called themselves the Qassam Brigades. They had to uh uh to tidy that up uh during the First Intifada and uh groups changed their names and the Qassam Brigades stuck with with theirs, but the PFLP used Qassam Brigades in operations um at times. He's the uh the leader of the armed struggle the birth of the armed struggle the struggle for liberation uh as an armed struggle for Palestinians. So that's why they use um those names. And just to say about the West Bank, the West Bank's different than Gaza. Gaza is on its own. It's in a ghetto, but it was a it it was able to build up its uh national resistance capabilities because it was autonomous. It had its own space to do that. The West Bank doesn't have that. The West Bank has 365 days a year, 24/7, arrest raids, death squads. They do it from grade three, they'll go into your grade three, grade four classroom and arrest people, and then they'll say, "Who's Who's brother is a fighter? Who's throwing stones?" Um literally, that's what they do. Um and they go in, they get intelligence based on that, based on uh pulling a kid out of class, interrogating him without his family or without a lawyer. Um and it's just a daily grind. And so, the fighters are at constant risk every day, and the ability to build up your force is um really it's curtailed, and that's what Israel attempted. That's what they've wanted, and that's what happened back in the Second Intifada in the year 2002. Um in the heart of the Second Intifada, Israel carried out an operation, Operation Defensive Shield, where they moved into Palestinian Area A, areas that are supposed to be under Palestinian control, which all of these villages that you're looking at here, Tubas, Tulkarm, Nablus, um Jenin and Qalqilya, um they invaded all of those, and they never and they never left. And so, the build the ability for the West Bank factions to build up their military capabilities is curtailed in a very uh strong way, and that's why you see such a difference in the fighting in Gaza versus the fighting in the West Bank. And I think that's probably known to most of our of our audience, but um it's more of a policing, if you can military policing, because they come in at any time, they're just coming to arrest one person, and they don't even really try that hard to arrest them. They'll They'll just kill them. As you know, with Gallant, the defense minister said the other day, he he referred to it as they're mowing the lawn. Um, but he said the terror organizations that call themselves by all kinds of names in Nur Shams and Tulkarm or in the Al-Fara camp in Jenin, these groups will be wiped out. Every single terrorist will be eliminated. So, that's how Israel feels about this. And they carry it out on a day-by- day basis. They have what is in military terms called freedom of movement in the West Bank, um, facilitated by the Palestinian Authority security forces. Um, and so that's what we saw this week, the past 10 days, the 10 days the war the 10-day battle the horror of the camps ended on Friday in Jenin, but as Nora rightly noted, it didn't end in Tulkarm, it didn't end in Tubas. So, um, let's look at number 10. This is a close-quarters battle here by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, uh, in the alleyways, the famous alleyways, uh, of these Palestinian camps. Um, this is Al-Fara camp in Tubas, and you can see they got the red triangle on the bulldozer. Clearly hits the bulldozer. And there's a number of these dozens at the end. I'll tell you the numbers. Um, but there's a second one. There's the the number of these IEDs are high. What isn't high is cameraman able to to film the video in the way that we see in the West Bank. And I think as Nora reported in her story, um, a 14-year-old girl who looked out the window of her house in Jenin was shot in the head for looking out the window. So, you you your cameraman is in a different position, um, than in the Gaza Strip. So, they'll just murder you for looking out the window. And it makes it hard to capture these videos, which is why they they're not the they're not the um, um cinematic excellence that we get out of Gaza, but they're important to show um that they're happening all the time. And these are filmed by locals. Probably more so um and then given to the fighters because they're not telling anyone where these operations are taking place. This is um firing at night. And again, we take the audio out of these videos as as part of the attempt to stay uh online. Let's look at number 10. Uh yeah, 10B. 10B here. There's a couple of uh Mujahideen Brigades operations in um in Jenin that had good viewing of them. You can see the bulldozer rolling right over and getting hit. They keep saying none of these people are injured. They said one uh one bulldozer driver was killed and six wounded in uh in the 10-day battle of the horror of the camps battle. Um so that's that's in Jenin. And Jenin and Tubas Tubas admitted to to losing their commander. Um they lost their battalion commander in Tubas. Um in Tulkarm, we know they lost their brigade commander. Um uh Muhammad Jaber uh Abu Shuja from Nur Shams, he was the brigade commander in Tulkarm. And we know in Jenin um that they lost uh Saraya al-Quds Jenin commander uh battalion commander was lost uh as well as the Qassam Brigade uh battalion commander in Jenin lost. So they targeted um they they were targeted. Um and the fighters fought last stand battles. Um and many of them died. They This operation in this 10-day battle horror of the camps battle um it was costly. It's costly when you lose um um 12 to 15 fighters um in your camp. It's um it's devastating. And so, there's going to be a period of regrouping in the West Bank. Um I think coming from this, um losing senior leadership. We're talking about senior leadership, we're talking about 25-year-olds. The The other two that I mentioned, the the Tubas commander, he's 23. He's 23 years old. You usually have to assume a few years in prison. Um so, you're talking about guys that would be uh if you include their prison terms, they're they're essentially the same as graduating from high school. You don't have bearded 45-year-old commanders who lived through the second intifada um and know how to um carry out these operations with with um institutional knowledge that carries along with them. And that is a devastating part of the constant attack 365 uh a year going on in the West Bank. So, just to understand, we haven't had much time to talk about the West Bank, so I want to just bring in some of these um analysis points to contextualize why what we're seeing and why it is different uh than what we see in Gaza. So, in number 11, this is in Tulkarm. Um this was a Qassam Brigades engineering unit with a great camera shot of a uh D9 bulldozer um destroying the punitively destroying uh Jenin, as we saw basically all the roads. They said 80% of the roads, but it's hard to even know what 80% would mean cuz roads all connect to each other, so uh yeah. It's just it's just punitive. It's just a It's It's to punish people for supporting the resistance. And if people saw uh the immediately when the army left people started came they came out of their house immediately first of all they started cleaning everything up but the second thing they did was they started speaking to the media and when they spoke to the media they said we're with the resistance A to Z the elderly woman comes and says the resistance is everything and then they camera man goes over to two kids sitting on a on a pile of rubble and the kids say we don't care as long as the boys are as long as the boys are safe you know as long as the fighters are safe that's this is our sacrifice and it's you know nobody's in tears screaming about you know they're they're they know the cost and they're willing to pay the cost because this is Jenin and Jenin has the longest history of resistance in the region heroic resistance I spent a lot of time in Jenin so shout out to my people in Jenin cuz it's just a beautiful place when you get to see and communicate I mean we talked about it earlier in the show about Abu Bakr people living under these brutal circumstances it elevates people and people step up and you see people who are performing under very difficult circumstances that are just extraordinary and Abu Bakr is of course one of them and the kids in Jenin and and in all the camps are the same so I'm number 12 here Saraya al-Quds put out a poster because after you got all the human rights stuff about the raid they put out the most significant operations by Saraya al-Quds in the West Bank during the horror of the camps battle in Jenin 51 direct armed clashes three ambushes of infantry forces so those are lured into like in Jenin famously in the 2002 invasion, the Battle of Janine, um they were lured into what was called the bathtub, into an alleyway. A teenage boy lured the soldiers into an alleyway, um and eight of them were killed. And that's what made the Israelis lose their mind and bulldoze the entire camp because they couldn't defeat the fighters. Um so they just dropped the houses on top of them. So 51 direct attacks, um gunfights in Janine, three ambushes, um 36 explosive devices, IEDs, um detonated by vehicles. Um so those are detonated by vehicles versus um sapped. The Israeli military would have sapped an additional number of them and put them out of uh out of service. So those were They're identifying 36 successful IED hits on armored vehicles. Tulkarm, 30 direct firefights, three ambushes, 27 IEDs, two sniping operations in different missions. So that's interesting. A sniping weapon in the West Bank is interesting. It's probably a World War II era sniping weapon. Um as we saw with uh uh the Mujahed, uh the lone the lone Mujahed in the um in the Ramallah area who carried out those sniping attacks with um with World War II weapons, with like the Enfield rifle. And also downing a drone in Tulka in Tulkarm. Nablus, two explosive devices, eight armed confrontations. Um and Tubas, the same. An an IED in Tubas against an enemy vehicle and foot force and eight direct armed struggle clashes. And just for histor- history's sake, just to to note the passage of time and the continuation of the resistance of the Palestinians, Zakaria Zubeidi's son was killed. Zakaria Zubeidi was the commander um of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Jenin, one of the most famous commanders of the Second Intifada. He was then imprisoned and broke out of prison, Gilboa prison, two or three years ago back when the six of them with the spoon broke out of broke out Zakaria Zubeidi and five Islamic Jihad fighters from Jenin broke out of that prison using a spoon. And also that Hamdi Quran son was killed during this. Hamdi Quran was the assassin of Rehavam Ze'evi. He is a far-right Israeli minister who was killed in retaliation for the execute for the assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa who was killed in his Palestinian Legislative Council office in Ramallah by helicopter gunship. So that's the West Bank.