Occupied Jerusalem
- In December 2015, 1200 Israeli soldiers and dozens of military vehicles stormed the Shuafat camp, northeast of occupied Jerusalem, to demolish the house of Ibrahim Al-Akari, the perpetrator of a run-over operation in occupied Jerusalem.
After the demolition, an Israeli journalist from the Israeli television gave an interview with the children of Al-Akari, part of which was the following dialogue:
Reporter: Has anyone criticized your father's operation?
Hamza (he was 12 years old at the time): No, and he won't.. I assure you of that.
Reporter: But he ran over people in the street?
Hamza: They are occupiers, so what were they doing in Palestine, they came to Palestine and occupied our land.. Demolition is a petty policy that will not affect us.
Here Anas (11 years old) intervened, directing his speech to the Israeli journalist: Either we or you are in the country, and the Palestinian people will not accept unless you leave our country.
Reporter: We can only live (Can't we live together)?
Anas: No.
What the children of Al-Akari, who were born and grew up in the camp, said, summed up the relationship of Shuafat camp and its residents with the occupation, with a history of resistance extending from the camp’s establishment until October 8, when one of the camp’s youths shot the soldiers at the nearby checkpoint and killed a female soldier .
Camp.. the beginning
Going back to the beginnings, only the establishment of Shuafat camp was 17 years behind the Nakba, during which its residents left their original cities and villages, according to an agreement between the Jordanian government - which ruled the West Bank and the eastern part of Jerusalem - and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to solve the problem of overcrowding Refugees in Al-Shurafa neighborhood in the old city.
In 1966, the camp opened with 800 housing units attached to shared services, on an area of no more than 203 dunums.
But few refugee families have moved in.
With Israel's control of what remained of Jerusalem after the 1967 defeat, the occupation forced most of the remaining refugees to move to the camp by force, which doubled the number of its residents.
Mahmoud al-Sheikh, head of the Shuafat refugee camp's popular committee, says that "most of the camp's residents were counted during that period in the city of Jerusalem and held the Jerusalem card."
The families mention the martyr Abdullah Hawass, who was martyred during his participation in a demonstration near the nearby Qalandia camp, on Land Day 1976, as one of the oldest names immortalized in their memory about the camp’s resistance.
Hawass may not be the first martyr in the camp, but since his martyrdom in 1976 until this year, the number of camp martyrs has exceeded 70, as the sheikh tells Al Jazeera Net, and those who carried out qualitative operations that hurt the occupation left this place.
The moment the Shuafat operation was carried out yesterday from zero distance, which led to the death of a female soldier and the serious injury of a soldier.
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— Hisham Abu Shaqrah (@HShaqrah) October 9, 2022
The first intifada and organized resistance
The beginning of the crystallization of the militancy situation in the camp was the first intifada, as the community activist in the camp Nasri Ghanem told Al Jazeera Net, and it was part of the general militancy in Jerusalem and its neighborhoods and surroundings, and was represented by organizing daily marches from inside the camp to the settlement of "Psgat Ze'ev", which soon turned To confrontations that lasted for hours.
Ghanaim mentions the formation of organizational committees that were working to organize the daily life of the camp’s residents, in terms of enforcing the general commercial strike and preventing street lighting at night to facilitate the movement of the “strike groups” who were writing on walls, throwing stones and issuing public statements.
During the first intifada, the organized struggle was limited to the factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, specifically the Fatah movement, until the beginning of the nineties, when the organization of military cells affiliated with Islamic organizations began.
The most prominent of these cells is the "Anata cell," whose members were arrested in 1993. It was formed by Mahmoud Issa from the town of Anata adjacent to the camp, and Majed Abu Qutaish and Musa Akari from the camp.
It was described as the first military cell of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in Jerusalem.
Quality operations were carried out.
In 1992, she kidnapped an Israeli army officer near the city of Lod and demanded to exchange him for the movement's founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was detained at the time, but the occupation refused, so she killed the officer.
Against this background, the occupation expelled 400 cadres of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements to Lebanon.
The cell continued its operations in 1993 and carried out a run-down operation targeting a soldier in Hadera, the killing of two Israeli policemen in Lod and the seizure of their pistols, and a shooting operation and the wounding of an officer in Ramle.
In the same period, a cell led by two camp residents, Jum`a Ismail al-Kayali and Mahmoud Daajneh, carried out the killing of a soldier near the Ras Shehadeh checkpoint near the camp, and of a settlement near Tel Aviv, before they were arrested in the same year and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The second intifada
The turning point in the organized resistance action was in the second intifada, which coincided with the clarification of the features of the Israeli plans to separate the Jerusalem neighborhoods from the city of Jerusalem, including the camp.
The most prominent scene was the creation of the barrier, which turned into a permanent point of confrontation, and the start of construction of the separation wall.
During the first period of the intifada, the confrontation took the form of gifts and reactions to what was happening in the cities of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and inside Jerusalem.
Later, resistance fighters from the camp carried out a number of operations, most notably the "Samer al-Atrash" operation, which took part in the bombing of an Israeli bus on the French Hill in occupied Jerusalem, during which 6 settlers were killed and 20 others were wounded.
In 2008, the operations carried out by Muhammad Khalil Abu Sneina, which Israel described as the most daring in the city of Jerusalem, where Abu Sneina shot a soldier from zero distance at the Shuafat checkpoint, before withdrawing and carrying out a new operation two days later at the Lions Gate, which led to the death of a soldier. and injuring others.
Abu Sneina and another young man from the camp were arrested as a result of these operations, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment twice and 40 years.
Martyr Ibrahim Al-Akari (communication sites)
Abu Khdeir and the gift of Jerusalem
In July 2014, the kidnapping of the child Muhammad Abu Khdeir by settlers and burning him to death was a point of renewed resistance and operations in the camp.
Over the course of days, the checkpoint erupted with confrontations, firebombs were hit, gunfire was fired, and the light rail passing near the camp was disrupted.
In November 2014, Ibrahim al-Akari, a resident of the camp, carried out a double stabbing and ramming attack near the light rail station in Jerusalem, during which a soldier and a settler were killed and 18 others were injured.
The martyrdom of Al-Akari and the attempts to storm the camp to demolish his house created a state of collective resistance, and for months, the occupation was unable to demolish the house due to the strength of the confrontation.
With the launch of the Al-Quds Gift in September 2015, a series of operations began, carried out by the camp’s residents, the first of which was the armed clash that the martyr Ahmed Salah fought at the checkpoint, which led to the injury of an Israeli soldier.
In the same month, the most famous stabbing operation during this uprising was carried out by the martyr Muhammad Saeed Ali at Bab al-Amud, during which two Israeli soldiers were wounded.
This operation had an impact, not only in the camp, but throughout Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The martyr was known among the Palestinians as the "Knife Commando".
Then there was the stabbing operation carried out by the boy, Subhi Abu Khalifa, near the French Hill in occupied Jerusalem, during which a settler was wounded, after which Abu Khalifa was arrested and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
The continuous confrontation with the occupation during that period, prompted children in the camp to carry out operations as well. The most prominent event was the execution of the two children, Muawiyah (14 years) and Ali Alqam (11 years), a settler stabbing attack inside the light rail in Jerusalem in November 2015.
The will of the martyr Sheikh Fadi Abu Shkhaydam, may God have mercy on him.
The goal is to win heaven.
“Life is short, and whoever made it for God succeeded, and was able to sacrifice himself for God.”
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- Sari Arabi (@sariorabi) November 22, 2021
Suffering generates a resilient consciousness
In November 2021, the name of the camp came back to the fore after Fadi Abu Shkheidam carried out his qualitative operation. Abu Shkheidam, 42, disguised himself in the clothes of religious Jews and arrived in the Bab al-Silsila area, where he fired for more than half a minute with a "Carlo" weapon. A settler was killed and 3 others were wounded.
Abu Shkhaydam was a student of science and holder of a master’s degree in Islamic Dawah and Fundamentals of Religion. In his will published by his family days after his martyrdom, he said, “The previous years of my life were nothing but a religious and military preparation and preparation for this blessed moment.”
The researcher in Jerusalem affairs, Muhammad Jadallah, says that the renewal of the resistance in the camp, with every confrontation witnessed by the occupied territories at all times, made it a focus of the Israeli occupation, which tried to circumvent its resistance through systematic operations aimed at “staining the national consciousness” (distorting it) of the new generation. Of the camp's residents, and distracting him from engaging in national issues.
He continued to Al Jazeera Net, "We witnessed continuous attempts to distort the camp by facilitating the spread of drugs and striking society from within, but the camp proves every time that Israel has failed in its endeavor, and the patriotic sense and unlimited ability to sacrifice is entrenched among its children."
Jadallah considered that all that the occupation is doing is revenge against the camp as it is part of the Palestinian national resistance movement, but it is this revenge and the suffering that the camp’s residents feel that “has generated a struggle awareness that can only stop with the defeat of the occupation.”