On the video, a young man, jogging and sneakers, walks next to a motorcycle. The screen turns blinding white, yellow and red, then shows a rain of rubble. This shot of an alley in the old city of Nablus, on the night of Saturday October 22 to Sunday October 23, shows the last moments of Tamer Al Kilani, 33, co-founder of “Lions Den”. This new Palestinian armed group has become one of the toughest enemies of Tsahal, the Israeli army.
Its members are young, organized in cells sometimes formed in homage to a “martyr” friend. They fill the void left by traditional factions, which seem remote from the streets.
The Children of the Second Intifada
Their daily life resembles that of 22-year-old Udai Al Tamimi. On October 8, this native of Shuafat camp in Jerusalem killed an Israeli soldier at the checkpoint that separates the camp from the rest of the city. He eluded Israeli intelligence for ten days before attacking a settlement guard post, a suicide mission.
His will, written in pen on a school notebook page, encouraged other young people to take up arms. For many Palestinians, Al Tamimi and Al Kilani symbolize an ideal vision of the resistant, ready to sacrifice himself for his land, even if, as he writes, « this is only a drop in the ocean of repression”. During his run, a cult of his personality spread. Some young people even shaved their heads to lose the Israeli forces who were looking for “a young bald man”.
Udai Al Tamimi was less than a year old when Ariel Sharon stepped onto the esplanade of the Mosques, causing the second Intifada. For twenty years, his generation has seen its prospects dwindle and interest in the Palestinian cause recede. “It is the Israelis who bring the weapons, says Issa, a young man from the Jenin camp, born in 2002. They never wanted peace. »
State of siege
More than 110 Palestinians, including a third of minors, have died this year in the West Bank, a record since 2006. Violence linked to the intensification of the activities of the Israeli army in the West Bank since the attacks of March 2022. Tsahal is since then engaged in a large-scale operation, “Brise-lame”, the objectives of which are not clear.
The Israeli authorities reacted vigorously to the Shuafat attack by closing the checkpoint. The 40,000 inhabitants of the camp live in a pressure cooker, 20 hectares of insanitary buildings between two clean Israeli colonies. On the main street, there are no sidewalks, and the ruts look like shell holes. Garbage is everywhere, garbage trucks do not pass often, although this area, annexed by Israel in 1967, is part of the Jerusalem municipality. It took the entire camp to rise up for the authorities to reopen it.
A potentially catastrophic economic cost
Civil disobedience has much less impact in Nablus, the second center of the West Bank. It has been two weeks since the Tsahal closed all accesses to suffocate the “Lions’ Den”, without success. The social, medical and economic cost promises to be catastrophic, in the midst of the olive harvest: the lives of at least 400,000 Palestinians are centered around Nablus.
Yair Lapid’s government initially hoped to “reduce” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to make it forget through economic development. One week before the elections, the bet seems far from won.