Al Jazeera correspondents
Jerusalem- After an 18-hour raid, which included storming a number of homes, the Israeli occupation forces withdrew from the Qalandiya camp and the town of Al-Ram, north of the occupied city of Jerusalem, leaving property devastated and threatening messages to residents, amid an official Palestinian warning of the occupation’s plans and intentions.
According to sources from inside the camp, the occupation forces arrested more than 80 Palestinians of various ages, before releasing most of them. They also converted a number of homes into military barracks and closed vital streets north of Jerusalem.
Video clips and pictures circulated showed scenes of mass arrests and young men being taken blindfolded and handcuffed to a field investigation center created by the Israeli army.
Difficult hours
Palestinian citizen Muhammad Abu Ghosh tells Al Jazeera Net the details of eight difficult hours he lived in detention after his home in the Qalandia Palestinian refugee camp was stormed.
He added: “The Israeli occupation army stormed my house at four o’clock in the morning (Monday). They arrested me and took me, along with a number of young men, while we were blindfolded and handcuffed, to a housing complex in the camp, the residents of which were forced to evacuate.”
Abu Ghosh, the father of a martyr and another prisoner, continued, “We were about 25 people inside the living room of a house, where they began taking us one by one for interrogation. After eight hours of detention, the (Israeli) district officer met me for a few minutes and threatened to arrest my family members before releasing me.”
For his part, journalist Saif Al-Qawasmi, a resident of the town of Al-Ram, told Al Jazeera Net, “The occupation forces storm the town of Al-Ram on a daily basis, but the town has never witnessed a complete closure and siege that lasted for long hours.”
Al-Qawasmi points out that the occupation army used a drone to drop tear gas bombs on the people who were trying to cross the dirt barriers, and they also besieged a number of the homes of the liberated prisoners.
Population evacuation
For his part, Muhammad Bazia recounts – to Al Jazeera Net – the moments when the occupation forces stormed his sister’s house in the Qalandiya camp and forced her, her four children, and her husband to leave it, as “the occupation forces turned it into a military barracks.”
He adds, “Forcing people to leave their homes creates a state of fear and terror, and the occupation may aspire to control more of them, whether during incursions or as part of attempts to displace camp residents.”
He pointed out that the occupation forces stormed the majority of the homes in Qalandiya camp, “and smashed and broke the doors and used a number of them as military barracks, observation points, and detention centers, while the residents spotted a drone flying in the skies of the camp during the storming operation.”
The Palestinian citizen places the Israeli incursion as part of “the practices of the Israeli occupation that aim to displace the people of Qalandia camp and evacuate the camp by creating a repellent environment, using the repeated incursions as a pretext to achieve this.”
He considered that the targeting of refugees in Qalandia camp “did not begin at the moment of the storming and forcing the people to forcibly evacuate their homes and prevent them from returning to them. Rather, its roots go back to their displacement from their lands during the Nakba in 1948 and the setback of June 1967, and this was later consolidated by encircling these areas with the apartheid wall and Qalandia military checkpoint, which isolated the West Bank from occupied Jerusalem.”
Intimidation and siege
For his part, the media advisor for the Jerusalem Governorate, Marouf Al-Rifai, told Al Jazeera Net that the occupation forces imposed a strict siege on the Qalandiya camp and the town of Al-Ram, since Monday dawn, and closed vital entrances with dirt and cement barriers and prevented entry or exit to them, coinciding with the closure of the entrances to the Qalandiya camp north of occupied Jerusalem, amid intense military reinforcements in the two areas.
He added that the mass arrest campaign carried out by the occupation army over an 18-hour period “targeted freed prisoners and the families of the martyrs, and affected about 30 young men from Qalandiya camp and 50 from the town of Al-Ram, who were later released,” noting that most of the detainees were subjected to assault and abuse before their arrest, and their homes were raided and their contents vandalized.
The media advisor pointed out that the occupation army “deliberately intimidated the people during the storming of the town of Al-Ram, using loudspeakers and dropping military leaflets carrying threatening messages and contents.”
In turn, the Jerusalem Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization said – in a statement – that what the towns of Al-Ram, Kafr Aqab and Qalandiya Camp witnessed “reflects a dangerous field escalation that falls within the framework of a systematic policy aimed at dismantling the Palestinian societal fabric and imposing a coercive security reality in the vicinity of the Holy City.”
She added that targeting basic service facilities, most notably storming an UNRWA clinic in Qalandia camp and destroying its entrance, “represents a qualitative escalation that affects the humanitarian and service infrastructure for refugees, and comes in parallel with arrest campaigns that targeted dozens of citizens.”
