The remains follow one another, carried at arm’s length by men who quickly reach the cemetery, crossing the main street which has become a wide alley of mud after the passage of Israeli bulldozers, at the entrance to the Nour refugee camp. Shams, in the northern West Bank. The bodies of the fighters were covered with the flags of Hamas or Islamic Jihad; their passage is greeted by volleys of gunfire from men with masked faces. Alongside the funeral procession, Palestinian civil security teams are working to erase the scars of the Israeli raid, by connecting electrical cables here, pipes there.
Thursday April 18, the Israeli army cut off the water and electricity and invaded, at the end of the day, the narrow alleys of Nour Shams, on the edge of the town of Tulkarem. The raid lasted more than fifty hours; bulldozers and special forces withdrew on Saturday evening.
According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, fourteen people were killed, including two teenagers – one of them, in fact, was shot at in another camp in Tulkarem. Among them, ten were fighters. Israeli army says it killed them “in close combat, [avoir] apprehended fifteen wanted suspects, seized numerous weapons and destroyed dozens of explosive devices “. Nine soldiers and a border police officer were injured. Residents said two other Palestinians died during the raid, including a man who died of a heart attack.
Also read the report: Article reserved for our subscribers Israel-Hamas war: in Nour Shams, the combatants and the dead celebrated after an intervention by the Israeli army
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On Sunday, faces were closed, still in shock. Israeli soldiers make brutal incursions regularly, but this raid was the most violent the camp has seen since 2002 according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA. “Why are we the only ones in the camps resisting? », angrily calls out to a young man. Living spaces were devastated: shops, restaurants ransacked, the camp club and the center for the disabled razed.
“Two days and two nights of horror”
In an alley a little further away, a puddle of blood has not been cleaned up. Several bodies were found here, fighters killed in the neighboring house, where they had taken refuge in the absence of the owners. Walls and ceiling are riddled with bullet holes. In the room where the armed Palestinians were targeted, above the door, a soldier drew a Star of David next to a date: “7.10”, October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack in Israel, which left nearly 1,200 dead. Word neqamahrevenge in Hebrew, was drawn in marker on one of the cabinets.
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