The Israeli army entered Jenin early Thursday morning, occupying several houses, whereof two facing the central camp hospital and one at the top. One of the central houses was only inhabited by a lone woman. She was woken up at about three o'clock in the morning by a soldier pulling her blanket away from her as she lay sleeping and ordering her to be quiet. The soldiers stayed in the house for just more than 24 hours, during which time the terrified woman was not allowed to take her medicine as prescribed, not use the toilet without asking for express permission and leaving the door open, or cook food. The soldiers, numbering about 20 at a time as they took shifts sleeping and venturing out in the camp to search and ransack houses, took up most of the house, ordering the exhausted woman to remain in one of the front rooms as they lounged in the rest of the home. Her only company were snipers pointing their guns through the camouflage netting at unwitting children and adults walking past on the street.
As they left the house before morning prayer on Friday morning, the woman, a former school teacher, woke up to a home littered with plastic bottles, cigarette butts, nut shells, muffin wrappers and cardboard boxes. The stench of soldier – a strange mixture of sweat, cigarettes,…and blood not yet spilt – filled the house and the tiled floors, usually spotless, were now dark with grime, covered with dirty blankets, scattered papers, and rubbish. The soldiers had removed two of the doors, breaking the hinges, and turned everything upside down.

The soldiers in the neighbouring house refused to allow the family members being detained to in any way communicate their well-being to the distraught wife and five children living just next door. Early Friday morning some of the soldiers returned to the house after a raid, bringing with them three Palestinian boys in handcuffs who were later taken away.
On Friday two other houses were occupied in the same area, but this time closer to the city. There was no camouflage netting on the houses this time, making it more difficult for the neighbourhood residents to ascertain whether there actually were soldiers in the houses without having to venture out on the streets under curfew – an extremely dangerous enterprise. Their whereabouts were, however, confirmed when a sniper on the roof of one of them later shot a 12 year-old boy in the stomach and leg and a family living opposite the other one testified having seen soldiers enter it when their father/husband was taken from them early Friday morning.

Israeli soldiers also occupied a house at the utmost top of the camp for about 45 hours, forcing the 16-member family to crowd into a room of 5 x 4 meters, giving them only a few bottles of water to drink and refusing the children milk, even though they were clearly exhausted and sick from trauma. After trashing the top storey of the house, the soldiers left on Friday evening, taking with them 1000 shekel of the family's money but leaving behind a stench of excrement and total disrespect for the human life they claim to serve to protect.

On Thursday, there were continuous street battles between tanks, APCs and hummers, and the fragile bodies of the shebab, vowing to protect their camp and city in the absence of any more powerful force of resistance, unwilling to risk the lives of their co-inhabitants by firing during the day, and fiercely decimated following past mass arrests and massacres. Two young boys were shot in the legs, one with a dumdum bullet that shattered his bone. A wanted man's car was blown up in Jenin city and a D9 bulldozer was digging up a field near the school on the outskirts of the camp. The shebab were duly summoned by its random destruction and after being chased around for a while by both the bulldozer and an accompanying jeep, they followed it to another field on the other side of the school. Suddenly, two soldiers emerged running out of the cloud of dust created by the onslaught of the D9. Most of the boys scattered but one 15 year-old was grabbed by the soldiers and hauled into the waiting jeep.
The shebab panicked a little, sun in eyes and unsure of who and how many had been taken. Attempted negotiations with the jeep were unsuccessful and it eventually drove off toward Salim with the bulldozer in tow. Later, it veered off toward Jalame, where the kidnapped, beaten and frightened boy was let out of the jeep and allowed to go. Of course, due to the lurking dangers of the road during curfew, he was unable to return to Jenin and his family until the next day.

On Friday, there were again clashes throughout the day, injuring the 12 year-old boy mentioned above but also others. Another boy was shot in the teeth but, according to hospital sources, not seriously. A 38 year-old man was shot and injured while standing on the front porch of his house, listening to the army shooting on what is in theory his street.
The house of Shadi Tubassi, who blew himself up in Haifa March 2002 killing 15 people, was demolished at about one o'clock in the morning, rendering his family members homeless. Since August 2002, the army has dealt out collective punishment and aggravated families' grief in this way, destroying more than 250 houses of people who have carried out operations in Israeli territory, on top of the 2000 or so houses destroyed for other excuses, such as being deemed illegal and without planning permission, often so as to allow for the expansion of settlements.

The main operation on Friday was, however, in an area called Hara Sharkiyye, on the outskirts of the Old City. The Apaches circling above marked the spot, as a total of six houses were occupied, five of them surrounding one specifically targeted house, thought by the Israeli army to contain members of Jihad Islami.
As tanks, jeeps and hummers patrolled the streets below the Old City, chasing and firing at young children, including a 4 year-old boy attempting to return to his house, explosions were heard from the surrounded house. Three men, none of them wanted, were finally arrested. One 16 year-old boy was shot through the neck, a piece of shrapnel ripping a large hole in his cheek, for standing on a neighbouring roof and is now at Rafidya hospital in Nablus, wavering between what life there is left here, and death. A five-year old girl living in the same area was shot in the leg.

Four Israeli soldiers were reportedly injured during Friday's operations, and rumour has it that one of them died. One tank was also successfully attacked by shebab, a Molotov having been thrown under the hutch.

Sitting in the aftermath of a two-day incursion into Jenin, the claustrophobia is evident. People either want out of the country, or in from the streets that are rapidly closing in on them. Here passivity is not merely a state-induced condition, but a highly conscious decision to do one's best not to get killed in a conflict that has seen too much blood and bone splintered and spent on its streets.
The devastation dealt by death to those still alive seems right now to overshadow the shine of martyrdom. People long for the freedom to laugh and love in loud voices, to let their children grow unfettered by fear of snipers' bullets and mind-numbing hours of curfew. Jallas, that's enough, seems to be the reigning sentiment among the young men in their twenties who have somehow managed to stay out of prison and live long enough to marry, start a family, perhaps even get a job that feeds them. There are very few men on the streets, only boys with stones fantasising about the M16s of past and future, living the reality of an occasional Molotov bullseye.