West Bank -

Inside his shop in the city of Jenin, Abd al-Rahman al-Zubaidi continues his work in changing car windows. It is the same shop that his brother Jibril al-Zubaidi left last Sunday, returning to his home to take a short break. There, in the Jabriyat neighborhood near Jenin camp, he was arrested by the occupation forces.

This came when special forces stormed the neighborhood and surrounded Jibril Al-Zubaidi's house. An Israeli intelligence officer called his wife and informed her of the need for Jibril to surrender himself. "Jibril told them that he would surrender himself, on the condition that they not enter the house in which there are only children," says the elder brother Abd al-Rahman.

And Jibril, the brother of the prisoner Zakaria Al-Zubaidi, is one of the heroes of the "Freedom Tunnel", who managed with 5 Palestinian detainees to escape from Gilboa prison after digging a tunnel inside the prison in September 2021, before Israel re-arrested him 6 days after his escape.

Jibril lives in one of the 3 apartments belonging to him and his brothers Zakaria and Dawood Al-Zubaidi, and after his arrest, the three apartments have emptied any breadwinner for them.

"They killed Daoud last May, and Zakaria was captured, as you know, so there are only the children of my three brothers and their mothers in the house," this is how Abdel Rahman describes the current situation of the Zubaidi family.

Speaking to Al-Jazeera Net, he added, "I was left alone to take care of my siblings' children, in addition to the responsibility of my six children."

An Israeli military force had arrested Abd al-Rahman's other brother, Yahya, on his return from work in the city of Jericho. By arresting him, and after him Jibril, Abd al-Rahman would be the only one of his brothers remaining in the camp.

Abdul Rahman cleans the edge of a pane of glass before installing it on a car parked in front of his shop with great caution, as he fears that the pane will crack, just as Israel cracked the cohesion of the Zubaidi family, according to him.

Al-Zubaidi auto glass repair shop in Jenin (Al-Jazeera)

Old targeting

Abd al-Rahman is about to finish installing the car windows, which he used to clean carefully, saying, "This is our situation since the seventies. Israel began pursuing the first member of the al-Zubaidi family, consisting of two brothers: Muhammad and Jamal al-Zubaidi and their children only, and that was the share of my father, Muhammad, who was arrested at that time on charges of belonging to the Fatah movement.

In the invasion of the camp in 2002, or what is known as the "battle of the camp," an Israeli sniper killed Abdul Rahman's mother, who was standing at the window of her house at the time, and his brother Taha was martyred in the same year.

Zakaria is considered one of the fighters in the battle of the camp and one of the most prominent leaders of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank, to become one of those wanted for liquidation or arrest, before his name was included in the list of those exempted under an agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel in 2008.

Muhammad Al-Zubaidi (19 years old), the eldest son of Zakaria, stands next to his uncle Abdul Rahman, helping him carry the glass panels and install them on the cars, and says that if he wants to calculate the period of time he lived with his father, it does not exceed 5 years, so he says that his dream is for his father to be liberated and live with him.

And Abd al-Rahman patted his nephew on the shoulder, saying, "I raised this young man. I know him better than his father, Zakaria."

Muhammad says, "My father is a very great person in my opinion. I have been deprived of him in my life, but I am proud that he is my father, and I know that the fate of my brothers and cousins ​​is like the fate of my father and uncles. Pursuit and arrest. This is what Israel wants."

Abd al-Rahman sits down to answer a phone call, it is the lawyer of his two brothers, Jibril and Yahya, laughing happily at the call: “Yahya will be transferred next Thursday to court, and it is clear that the indictment does not contain any indictment against him. God willing, he will be released soon. They ask him about a speech he gave during his reception at the His release from prison in 2018.

He added, "She also told me that Jibril is in Al-Jalama interrogation camp, north of Jenin, for interrogation."

Abdul Rahman during the conversation with the lawyer of his two brothers, Yahya and Jibril Al-Zubaidi (Al-Jazeera)

Cover failure

Abd al-Rahman al-Zubaidi confirms that the arrest of Yahya and Jibril came to absorb the anger of the Israeli street at the current government, especially with the continuation of the resistance operations in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

It is considered that the name of the Zubaidi family is a trump card in the hands of the Israeli government in front of its people.

And he continues, "After every operation of the resistance fighters in Jerusalem and the Palestinian interior, the occupation forces storm the Jenin camp under the pretext of thwarting a planned operation, kill a number of the camp's youth and arrest a person, who is usually released after a short time, all to cover the government's failure to prevent the operations."

He points out, "The Israelis demonstrated against the Netanyahu government, fearing for the democracy of their state, as they say, and to occupy the angry street in Israel. They put the Zubaidi family as an anesthetic for the street, as if they were telling the people there: Here we are working, believe me, this is the reason for the arrest of my brother Jibril."

He says, "Jibril was arrested for 12 years, then he was arrested for 10 months, and on the day of his release, he was surprised that he was transferred to administrative rule for 6 months, during which he went on hunger strike, rejecting administrative detention. Today, if he comes out with any media statement talking about Israel killing his brother and rejecting what the family and the camp as a whole are going through, they arrest him, they want to kill us." They are waiting for us to shut up."

During the occupation forces stormed the Jenin camp last Sunday evening, with the aim of arresting Jibril Al-Zubaidi, the 14-year-old Qusai Waked was killed, and two other young men were seriously injured.

Abdel-Rahman recalls the same events at the time of the death of his brother Daoud, when a special force stormed the camp and surrounded a house in which a young man was barricaded.

Targeting wanted families

The occupation follows the approach of pursuing and targeting the families of the wanted resistance fighters. Last January, the occupation forces stormed the house of Muhammad and Nour Ghoneim in the town of Burqin with the aim of arresting them. Because they were not in the house, they arrested their father, Sami Ghoneim, to pressure his two sons to surrender.

After about 10 days, a special force surrounded the two young men, Muhammad and Nour Ghoneim, in a house in the Jenin refugee camp, and called their mother to pressure her to persuade them to surrender, but the force blew up the house and killed Muhammad and Nour Ghoneim inside.

The occupation forces also stormed more than once the house of Abu Raad Khazem, the leader in the Jenin camp and the father of the martyr Raad Hazem, who carried out the shooting attack in Tel Aviv last April, and demolished an apartment owned by Hazem in Jenin in September of last year.

The occupation forces attempted to assassinate Abu Raad Hazim's wife and two sons while they were in their car in Jenin market last April.