ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Thursday called out Israel for “war crimes” in Palestine’s Jenin refugee camp and the international community for being silent over the atrocities, a day after Israeli forces withdrew from the occupied West Bank city leaving at least 12 Palestinians dead.
As the Israeli forces pulled out of Jenin on Wednesday, much of the city’s crowded refugee camp was left in ruins by the incursion which displaced at least 3,000 residents. The invasion involved about 1,000 soldiers from various elite forces as well as military vehicles, attack helicopters, and drones for reconnaissance, surveillance, and targeted strikes.
Lasting about 48 hours, the offensive killed 12 Palestinians, including five children, and wounded 140 others, 30 of them serious. Thousands of Palestinian mourners later joined a funeral procession and called for national unity and urged the international community to intervene and protect defenseless people from continuing Israeli aggression.
“Encouraged by global silence and without any care for the consequences, what Israel is doing in Occupied West Bank constitutes war crimes for all practical purposes,” PM Sharif wrote in on Twitter.
“Let there be no doubt about it. The killing of 12 Palestinians including five children as a result of the Israeli aerial and ground operations in Jenin Refugee Camp may just be a statistic to the world but they are real people of flesh and blood who are being massacred for demanding their fundamental rights.”
Largely made up of camps that were initially set up in the 1950s, Jenin is home to more than 22,000 Palestinians who were expelled from their original homes during the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias to create the State of Israel — in 1948. To Palestinians, the enclave embodies armed resistance against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
“The sight of thousands of refugees being forced to flee the camp owing to Israeli air strikes will continue to haunt the world conscience,” PM Sharif added.
The large-scale raid, which began Monday, was one of the most intense military operations in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades and comes amid a more than a yearlong spike in violence. More than 140 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, and Palestinian attacks targeting Israelis have killed at least 26 people.
The recent raids came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces growing pressure from his ultranationalist political allies for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last month that killed four people.
