Jamal Zubeidi stands in front of a poster showing a picture of his son Hamudi and his friend Hussam Hanun, both of whom were killed last week.Credit : Alex Levac

Hamudi is dead.

A shoe found amid the rubble of the house, which was destroyed by a missile, bears witness that he was indeed liquidated, as the Israel Defense Forces announced. It’s a black Nike Air, with a black hole and stained with blood, exactly like what Hamudi wore. Mohammed (Hamudi) Zubeidi, 27 at the time of his death last week, was the No. 1 wanted individual in the Jenin refugee camp [1] since being released from an Israeli prison two years ago.

The last time we were in the camp, a few months ago, it was Hamudi himself who drove us through the alleyways in his car, his rifle slung over his shoulder. Together we drove to the new cemetery of the camp’s fallen, on its outskirts. That cemetery, the second one built since the beginning of the second intifada, has also already filled up with graves. And after the war broke out in the Gaza Strip two months ago, a third cemetery was inaugurated, alongside the other two. Scores of fresh graves have already been dug there, and this week relatives and friends gathered in hushed tones to commune with their loved ones. But Hamudi, who I’ve known since he was 5, and who spent five years of his life in Israeli prisons, isn’t buried here : The IDF snatched his body and departed.

The way into the camp is worse than ever. To get to Jenin from Tul Karm these days, you have to pass through many villages on narrow, twisting roads, like in the worst days of the intifada. Palestinians are banned from using the main highway in the area. In the camp an appalling experience awaits. First, there is the pervasive stench. In its latest incursions the IDF tore up the camp’s roads and seriously damaged its sewage system. The rancid water now flows in the muddied alleys, and a nauseating smell wafts from the streets. The streets themselves are almost impassible with their mud and rocks strewn all over ; vehicles bounce from side to side as they pass the rubble of homes. The word in the camp is that in recent days the army trashed some 80 apartments, leaving them unfit for habitation. The camp’s Ansar mosque also lies in ruins.

In early May 2002 I arrived here to witness the total destruction the IDF sowed during Operation Defensive Shield. The sights I saw this week reminded me of what I saw then. After that operation, the United Arab Emirates helped to rehabilitate the camp – but now that it’s been destroyed again, who is going to rehabilitate it ? Residents say the army issued orders not to start rebuilding, because it intends to return soon. Thus it was on Tuesday, the day after our visit : Army bulldozers rumbled back in and wrought even more destruction. The Jenin camp is now Little Gaza. No one in Israel takes any interest in the fate of either place.

In the Faluja neighborhood, named for the lost village of the parents of Jenin’s current residents, Jamal Zubeidi, the man with the aristocratic demeanor, awaits us as usual. Hamudi is the second son Jamal has lost, in addition to a son-in-law, sister-in-law and nephew. All told, nine members of this fighting family have been killed over the years by the army. Most of its remaining male members are in Israeli prisons, among them Jamal’s famous nephew Zakaria, whom he raised from childhood.

Hamudi, Jamal’s youngest son, joined Islamic Jihad less than a decade ago ; his father did not oppose his sons’ decisions to become fighters. Islamic Jihad has become the leading organization in Jenin in recent years, more because of its militancy, less for its religious piety. All the fighting forces in the camp have been united under the umbrella of one command center, the Katiba (Battalion).

Along with Mohammed Zubeidi, his friend Hussam Hanun was also killed last week. Aged 28, with a law degree from the American University in Jenin, Hussam was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular organization. His only brother was killed by the army 29 days earlier. Mohammed and Hussam fought together despite their affiliation with two very different organizations – and together they lost. Two children were also shot to death during the liquidation action, but we’ll get to them later.

In its latest incursions the IDF tore up the Jenin refugee camp’s roads and seriously damaged its sewage system. The stench is pervasive.Credit : Alex Levac

About one-third of the camp’s inhabitants haven’t slept at home since the war in Gaza started. The army’s incursions have become more frequent since then, and above all more violent, so people spend the night with relatives in the nearby city of Jenin. Jamal and his wife, Sanaa, have adopted this habit as well : The IDF often arrests the parents of wanted individuals, and the health of 67-year-old Jamal – who worked in Israel as a young man and was a fan of the Maccabi Haifa soccer team – won’t allow him to undergo yet another arrest after all the ordeals he’s been through.

About a month ago he got a phone call from « Captain Iyad » from Israel’s Shin Bet security service, who asked him how Mohammed was feeling. « We’ve stopped playing around, » the agent said. « Tell Mohammed to come to the Salem checkpoint tomorrow morning. » Jamal indeed delivered the message to his son, but Mohammed ignored it, of course.

In the guest room in the parents’ home – which long ago became a shrine for all the relatives who have been killed or are in jail – Hamudi’s memorial poster has been added to the portrait gallery. In four days of mourning Jamal received thousands of people from all across the West Bank who came to pay their respects. But this past Monday, he was alone and worried about our safety. The camp has banned the entry of Israeli journalists, apart from two ; its residents are sorely disappointed by the reporting of what they see as the « mobilized » media in Israel.

On Tuesday, November 28, Sanaa and Jamal spent the night in their daughter’s home in the city. It was then that the special-ops force carried out a massive invasion of the camp – with 1,500 soldiers, according to the locals – accompanied by heavy bulldozers and other machinery of destruction, and with drones and helicopters hovering in the sky. As far as is known, this massive force arrived in order to liquidate Mohammed Zubeidi. Although most of the alleys in the camp are covered with tarpaulins to prevent the aircraft from spying, that didn’t help, of course. The soldiers were able to track down Mohammed and Hussam and two other armed men, even though they tried to evade them by moving from house to house.

According to testimonies collected by Jamal and by Abdulkarim Sadi, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, the four men ran to take cover in a house in the Damaj neighborhood in which an army unit was concealed. Mohammed and Hussam fired at the soldiers and ran on to the next house. Three missiles launched from the sky struck it ; it was also targeted by ground fire and an IDF bulldozer completed the work. The two men were killed ; the army unearthed their bodies from among the rubble and took them away. When local residents found part of an M16 rifle in the ruins, they took it as a definitive sign that Hamudi was dead.

Jamal, who didn’t yet know that his son had been killed, tried to enter the camp later that night, but all the entrances were blocked. The District Coordination and Liaison Office then informed the residents that two bodies had been taken and that two others – of the other wanted individuals who had been with Mohammed and Hussam – might also be lying beneath the ruins. Later, however, the two men turned up in the camp, alive and unharmed, after somehow escaping the inferno.

Mohammed’s father saw him around midday on the day he was killed. As usual, he came home then to shower, change his clothes and eat. There was no water in the house, but he connected a hose to the neighbors’ home.

« That was the last thing he did, » says Jamal.

Jamal Zubeidi, Hamudi’s father, holding the sneaker that confirmed his son Mohammed’s death.Credit : Alex Levac

The wife of Mohammed’s older brother, 37-year-old Anton, prepared a meal for him that would be his last. The brown wooden chairs in the living room came from the café that Mohammed had once opened in the camp. Before that he ran a juice stand, between one period of incarceration and the next. He was released for the last time in 2021, from Damon Prison in northern Israel, but was subsequently declared a wanted individual by the Israeli security forces.

Five months after his release, Mohammed’s cousin Daoud, who was also his brother-in-law, was killed by the army. Half a year later, in early 2022, Na’im, Mohammed’s brother, was killed. He was 34, the father of two daughters ; the first was born while Na’im was in prison, the second after he was killed.

On October 26, a month before Mohammed’s death, he was badly wounded in an Israeli missile attack. He suffered a ruptured spleen and for a time walked about with a stoma bag for collection of bodily fluids. Sometimes, Jamal recalls, his son held the bag with one hand and his rifle with the other. Aysar Amar, who rescued Mohammed after that missile strike, was killed two days later, while Mohammed was in intensive care, unconscious. Aysar’s brother, Ayham, was killed less than two weeks later, at the age of 23, two months after he was married.

Mohammed and Hussam never married. It’s no simple matter for a woman to marry a wanted person whose fate is sealed – a dead man walking.

Jamal’s eldest son, Anton, was also wounded this year, by a drone-launched missile, and lost part of his lung. Jamal’s daughter Safad was widowed when her husband was killed by the army. Mohammed Zaidan, 32, the husband of Jamal’s second daughter, Rafah, is now the No. 1 wanted individual in the Jenin camp. The Zaidans have six children, including a set of triplets. Mohammed Zaidan’s brother, Ahmed, was killed in 2004. Jamal’s third daughter is married to Zakaria’s brother, Jibril Zubeidi, who spent 14 years in prison and who for the past year has been in administrative detention – incarceration without trial.

On one of the walls in Jamal’s home there are three photographs of wanted persons, around whose faces Israeli soldiers drew a circle and marked with an X : Daoud, Ahmed Zaidan and Na’im. None of them is alive. And while we’re on the subject of people in the family who have been killed, Zakaria Zubeidi’s mother Samira was killed on the balcony of her home during the second intifada.

« Everyone who became close to this family has ended up in the cemetery or in prison, » says Jamal, a refined person who doesn’t like to show emotions. He has already seen everything and endured everything ; words fail now in the face of the spiral of death in his family. Hamudi was his youngest child, and everyone pampered him.

Jamal : « Maybe outside he was a big-deal commander, like the Shin Bet says, but at home he was Hamudi, the baby. He was 27, but for us he was a child. I used to send him to buy cigarettes for me, and his mother sent him to get things in the grocery store. »

Hanging on a wall in the Jenin refugee camp, which has lost more than 200 of its sons since the early days of the intifada, are photographs of the latest victims.Credit : Alex Levac

After Mohammed’s release from prison, his father wanted to start building a house for him. « Wait, » his son told him. He apparently knew he would not have a long life. « We thought he would die before Na’im and Daoud, the army always looked for him first, but he surprised us, » his father says.

Hanging on a wall in the camp, which has lost more than 200 of its sons since the early days of the intifada, are photographs of the latest victims. The wall is perforated with bullet holes. Soldiers have smashed all the memorials in Jenin, including the sculpture of a horse created by a German artist from parts of wrecked Palestinian ambulances, which stood at the entrance to the hospital at the outskirts of the camp. Last week the IDF also shattered the camp’s gate with its famous bronze « keys of return. » A woman in black passes through the alley. Her son was killed three months ago, we are told.

A forward emergency room is due to be built in an open field opposite Jamal’s house, as the army prevents those wounded in its incursions from getting to the hospital outside the camp.

We ride through alleys where Zakaria once drove me, careening wildly, on an all-terrain vehicle. Never had I been so frightened. In the Ansar mosque, where Jamal prayed, a wanted individual was liquidated with a missile that destroyed the building completely in late October. Prayer rugs are still lying outside. As we pass the decimated structure in which Hamudi and Hussam were killed, Jamal falls silent. The whole alley is in ruins here, its homes ripped open.

As the long convoy of armored IDF vehicles pulled out of the camp on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 29, after the efficient liquidation operation the night before, children threw stones at them, as usual. One jeep stopped ; from inside a soldier fired off a few rounds. Two children were killed on the spot : Basel Abu Alufa, 15, and Adam al-Rol, an 8-year-old boy in the third grade. Afterward the driver got out of the vehicle and photographed Basel’s body, sprawled on its back in the street, perhaps as a memento.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit this week provided the following response to Haaretz : « During activity by the IDF in the Jenin refugee camp, in the [sector of] the Menashe Brigade, a number of suspects threw explosive devices at the forces. The fighters responded with fire at the suspects ; hits were observed. Claims of the death of Palestinians are known to us. The circumstances of the case are under clarification. »

In the home of the dead 8-year-old, Adam, his father, Samar, is grieving. The 49-year-old owner of a store in Jenin that sells pet birds has two other sons and a daughter.

« Those children will never forgive the soldiers, » he says bitterly. « The children in Gaza and here, too, will not forget. Now these children want Israeli children to be killed. »

Gideon Levy, Alex Levac

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