AL-QUDS (Dispatches) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited the occupied West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp Wednesday in the wake of a devastating Zionist offensive last week, marking his first visit to the camp since 2005.
The Palestinian leader’s visit to the Jenin refugee camp came a week after the Zionist regime launched a massive two-day military operation there, the largest in the West Bank in nearly two decades, that killed at least 12 Palestinians, forced thousands to flee their homes and left large swaths of the camp in ruins.
Abbas arrived in Jenin aboard a Jordanian helicopter on Wednesday afternoon. Thousands clustered around his heavy security detail, and children chased his motorcade as it moved along the streets. He visited a freshly-dug cemetery, where he laid a wreath at the graves of those killed in last week’s operation, before speaking to a tightly-packed crowd.
Over the last year, the Zionist regime has conducted stepped-up raids into Palestinian areas.
More than 150 Palestinians have been killed by the Zionist troops’ fire since the start of the year.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) says some 900 Palestinian houses have been damaged and many of them have become uninhabitable in the wake of the Israeli military’s two-day raid on the Jenin refugee camp.
Adnan Abu Hasna, the spokesman for the UN agency, said on Tuesday that his fellow colleagues are still documenting the damage caused inside the camp during the Israeli onslaught.
The UNRWA’s priority is to help restore some sense of normality by resuming its services like education, healthcare and sanitation, he added.
“The other urgent priority is to provide cash assistance to families who were displaced from their homes, and help them pay for rent and rehabilitate their residences,” Abu Hasna noted.
“Israeli forces’ operations in the occupied West Bank, killing and seriously injuring the occupied population, destroying their homes and infrastructure, and arbitrarily displacing thousands, amount to egregious violations of international law and standards on the use of force and may constitute a war crime,” the experts said in a statement.
UN chief Antonio Guterres also said that “there was an excessive force used by Israeli forces” during the Jenin raid.
Guterres also said Israeli forces had prevented the injured from receiving medical care and stopped humanitarian workers from reaching those in need.