Palestine- Israel conflict: Jenin then and now, a new generation of militants who cannot be controlled

livemint.com:

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the Jenin operation was targeting a major Palestinian militant command centre, with Israel carrying out an airstrike on Monday afternoon near a mosque in the camp that the army said was being used by Palestinian gunmen. When the smoke had cleared in what became known as the Battle of Jenin in 2002, more than 50 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were dead, 13 of them killed in a single ambush trying to fight through the booby-trapped streets.

It seems nothing has changed since then.  Only this time west-backed Palestinian Authorities have been marginalised so much that it consequentially created militants, who possibly cannot be controlled.  Jenin camp was set up in the 1950s to house refugees fleeing their homes in 1948 after the creation of the state of Israeli. The ghetto-like area, plagued by poverty, has long been a hotbed of what Palestinians consider armed resistance and Israelis call terrorism.

Guardian reports 18,000 Palestinians lived in the crowded camp, but the exact figure is not known. The UN’s Palestinian refugee agency puts the number at 14,000, while official Palestinian data from 2020 says it is home to 12,000 people.

Scenes of death, disaster remains the same even two decades later, but Jenin and the wider West Bank have changed in the past two decades.  Israeli officials have said the present Israeli military operation, being dubbed as the biggest in the West Bank since Israeli troops went into Palestinian cities during the second intifada, with 2,000 troops deployed, could last for days. In 2002, the violent days in the West Bank, meant Israeli tanks on streets noisy with gun battles with angry funerals to follow.