West Bank Residents Survey Destruction as Israeli Forces Withdraw

Israeli military forces appeared to withdraw on Friday from the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian news media and residents, 10 days into a major raid that has killed dozens of people, including children, and caused widespread destruction.

Hours after the Israeli military pulled back from Jenin, Palestinian civil defense teams along with public works employees and volunteers fanned out to assess the damaged homes, businesses, roads and water lines, and began the effort to restore essential services, according to Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, an American woman who was protesting against an Israeli settler outpost was fatally shot. A 13-year-old Palestinian girl who was watching a clash between Israelis and Palestinians was also killed in a separate incident. People who were present blamed both shootings on Israeli troops. The Israeli military said it was investigating.

It wasn’t immediately clear on Friday whether all Israeli soldiers had left Jenin, in the northern part of the West Bank, or whether they would return. As Israeli forces have conducted one of their most extensive and deadly raids in the West Bank in years, they have pulled back from Palestinian cities and towns several times before returning.

In a statement on Friday, the Israeli military did not comment on a withdrawal but said its forces “are continuing to act in order to achieve the objectives of the counterterrorism operation.” It has described the recent raids — a marked escalation after the near-nightly operations that had already become the norm — as an effort to crack down on Palestinian armed groups and combat rising attacks against Israelis.

The military said that its forces had killed 14 members of armed Palestinian groups in Jenin over the past week and a half and had detained more than 30 people suspected of being members of the groups planning the attacks. The military said it had also found weapons and explosives. Israel has carried out airstrikes as part of the raids, a type of attack that was rare in the West Bank before the Hamas-led assault on Israel last Oct. 7.

The raids have killed at least 39 people, 21 of them in Jenin, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and noncombatants. Seven children were among those killed, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, which said that the past week was the deadliest for Palestinian civilians in the West Bank since November.

Palestinian residents who had been trapped in their homes for days as Israeli troops roamed Jenin ventured into the streets Friday, and some who had fled the raid returned.

They found their neighborhoods unrecognizable.

“God, I just collapsed,” said Kareeman Abu Naise, 30, when she saw video of her home taken by her father-in-law, who had returned to the neighborhood known as Jenin camp.

As residents inspected the damage, fallout from the wider war reverberated across the region and beyond. In the Gaza Strip, an urgent polio vaccination program proceeded in the south during a daily pause in fighting agreed to by Israel and Hamas.

In other parts of Gaza, the relentless bombardment continued. The Israeli military reported Friday that it had struck 40 sites across Gaza over the past week and claimed to have killed more than 100 militants. The military also said it had conducted 50 airstrikes against the militant group Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon, over the same time period.

The release by Hamas of a video showing a slain Israeli American hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, recorded before he was killed, galvanized the movement of Israelis calling for a cease-fire that would provide for the release of the remaining hostages.

The U.S. State Department said Friday it was “urgently gathering” more information about the shooting death of the American woman, near the town of Beita.

Fellow protesters said the woman, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, a citizen of both the United States and Turkey, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier firing from a rooftop.

The Israeli raids of the past 10 days in the West Bank, which were focused in and around the cities of Jenin and Tulkarm, were among the deadliest in the territory in years.

Ms. Abu Naise, who fled Jenin after the raid began, heard from neighbors on Sunday that Israeli soldiers had fired a missile at her family’s home, which had already been damaged by an Israeli bulldozer. That night, she said, she couldn’t sleep and cried for hours.

Seeing the damage on video — including the destroyed ground-floor living room where her family had received guests — was even more difficult.

“Literally, everything we had was in that house. Our belongings, all our memories, the good and the bad,” said Ms. Abu Naise, a mother of two. Her husband, Muhammad, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in 2022 as he walked home from work.

“Two of the most precious things to me were my husband and my house,” she said, “and now I’ve lost them both.”

Nearly three million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, with far fewer civil rights and economic prospects than their Israeli neighbors.

U.S., Israeli and Iranian officials have said that Tehran is trying to boost militant groups and foment unrest in the Israeli-occupied territory by flooding it with weapons through clandestine smuggling routes. And Jenin has long been a hotbed of resistance against the occupation.

Some Jenin residents who had made dangerous escapes from their neighborhoods over the past 10 days returned Friday morning to survey the aftermath of the Israeli attacks. They were also able to check on loved ones whom they couldn’t reach because phone lines were down, residents said.

“Some are burying a martyr or visiting someone who has been wounded or checking on their home or shop,” said Nidal Naghnaghia, a resident who had fled Jenin with his family shortly after the raid began.

Many found homes so badly damaged that they were no longer habitable and streets so ravaged by bulldozers that cars were unable to pass, residents said.

Khulood Jabr, a 39-year-old mother of three, said it was as if people had been freed from their homes as they poured into the streets. What they saw was as if nothing had been spared, she said.

“There is so much destruction, you can’t describe it. They didn’t leave any shop undamaged,” she said.

“What crime did the owners of these shops commit?” she asked. “What do the electrical poles have to do with anything? What does the water have to do with anything?”

Ms. Jabr added that she was heartened to see people banding together to rebuild, even as they feared Israeli forces would soon return.

Some residents were less hopeful, worrying that any attempt to rebuild would again be crushed in the next Israeli offensive.

“All of this will repeat itself, sooner or later,” said Ismail Bani Gharra, 25, who returned to Jenin on Friday. Of the Israeli forces, he said: “They will come again. There will be more raids and more people killed.”

Reporting was contributed by Anushka Patil, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Aaron Boxerman, Ephrat Livni and Thomas Fuller.